Funding does not influence findings

MARIO du Preez and others sometimes seem inclined to misrepresent those who do not see eye to eye with them. In his recent article he suggests that those he terms ‘deniers’ maintain that all climate change is due to natural cycles in nature. This is not so.

What many who are sceptical of the IPCC consensus global warming theory do dispute is that all recent climatic changes are caused by carbon dioxide arising from human activities.

It is accepted that carbon dioxide, like water vapour, is a so-called greenhouse gas; but it defies logic to suggest that somehow natural causes of climate change ceased to have any effect in the last couple of decades of the 20th century.

However, this is essentially the claim that is made by those who say we are in a climate crisis or a climate emergency. Moreover, claims of more frequent and more extreme weather events and of accelerating sea level rises are not borne out by evidence. In some quarters, any studies which do not fit with the IPCC consensus line are dismissed, not on the basis of argument with the results of the studies, but on the basis that they were funded by fossil fuel interests. If this were indeed the case, it would suggest that where the funding comes from always determines the findings of the studies, and that would undermine trust in all research.

Howard Curnow Lifton, Devon