Don quits over Lomborg furore

A leading Danish academic has resigned from the board of the country's Institute for Environmental Assessment after it rejected his call for the suspension of director Bjørn Lomborg.

Poul Harremoës, professor of environmental science and engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, resigned when Professor Lomborg told a newspaper that he expected to continue as director of the institute for another year, and not for the remainder of his five-year term.

As a result of the interview, another board member, Karl-Gustaf Löfgren, professor of economics at Sweden's Umeå University, called on the institute to find a new director immediately.

The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty ruled that Professor Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist , breached "norms for good scientific practice".

Before his appointment to the institute last year, Professor Lomborg was an associate professor who taught statistics and methods at Aarhus University's department of political science.