Background thumb|alt=see caption|Portrait of the author, Bjørn Lomborg The book was written by Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who worked at Aarhus University. The ideas and writing for the book began in the 1990s. He was inspired by an interview with Julian Lincoln Simon which was published in the magazine Wired, in which Simon claimed that calculations he had conducted with publicly available data led him to conclude that standard doomsday conceptions of the state of the world were incorrect. He assumed Simon's views were the product of his American conservative thinking, but in 1997, Lomborg undertook a similar assessment with some of his students and came to similar conclusions as Simon.
Background thumb|alt=see caption|Portrait of the author, Bjørn Lomborg The book was written by Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who worked at Aarhus University. The ideas and writing for the book began in the 1990s. He was inspired by an interv?iew with Julian Lincoln Simon which was published in the magazine Wired, in which Simon claimed that calculations he had conducted with publicly available data led him to conclude that standard doomsday conceptions of the state of the world were incorrect. He assumed Simon's views were the product of his American conservative thinking, but in 1997, Lomborg undertook a similar assessment with some of his students and came, to similar conclusions as Simon.