Climate deniers are wearing blinkers

THE use of the word ‘independent’ by Dr Phillip Bratby in his recent letter in connection with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a rather strange one, given it is right-of-centre climate sceptic educational charity based in the United Kingdom that was created by Nigel Lawson and Benny Peisner, and for which Lord Frost is a current trustee.

The director of GWPF, Dr Peisner, who is an expert on the social and economic aspects of physical exercise, will not reveal where the majority of its donations are received from, although there are claims that it receives support from the oil and coal industries in the US.

In 2014, the Charity Commission ruled that the GWPF had breached rules on impartiality in its climate change coverage, blurred fact and comment and demonstrated a clear bias and as a result. In consequence, the GWPF established a noncharitable organisation, called the Global Warming Policy Forum to do the lobbying, which recently has rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch. It should also be noted that many of those on the Academic Advisory Council of the GWPF have no qualifications, research experience or publication history in climate science. Again, Dr Bratby repeats his unpleasant slur that the many thousands of climate scientists working in a wide range of different organisations, in this country and abroad, are somehow not ‘independent’, whereas he refers to Richard Linzen as being so when it has been reported that he is a beneficiary of Peabody Energy, a coal company.

Why should anyone be ‘afraid’ of the work of scientists promoted by the GWPF, when the overwhelming majority of those publishing in peerreviewed scientific journals fully support the idea of recent global warming being caused by human activity and the very important role of increasing carbon dioxide emissions in this process.

The findings of a minuscule number of papers, which have attempted over the years to gainsay the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming among those currently publishing, have been roundly refuted in the scientific literature.

It is also puzzling why the recent papers by Coe et al, and van Wijngaarden and Happer, given their assertions about the role of carbondioxide in warming the atmosphere, weren’t published in something a little more prestigious, such as Nature, Science or PNAS?

It seems to me that Dr Bratby, like so many highly committed ‘climate deniers’, has his blinkers on when it comes to the objective assessment of scientific endeavour.

Professor Bruce Webb

Exeter, Devon