Are Scientists who Contest the Climate Emergency “Publicity-seeking Contrarians?” – Watts Up With That?

Climate denial ‘a path to disaster’

Tom Hardy | 19th May 2025 |  Creative Commons 4.0

Few places better exemplify partisanship and conflict of interest than the Global Warming Policy Foundation. 

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” a group of leading climate scientists warns. “We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”  

This cautionary statement underscores the urgency: the climate crisis is no longer a distant threat — it is here, now, destroying lives, economies, and ecosystems across the globe. The science is unequivocal.

A widely cited study by John Cook and colleagues in 2013 found that 97 per cent of climate scientists who published peer-reviewed research on the topic agreed that human activity is the most significant driver of climate change.

Incumbent

How much of the remaining three per cent can be attributed to publicity-seeking contrarians? 

And to what extent has the illusion of a legitimate debate been deliberately propagated by those funded by the fossil fuel industry, amplified by billionaire-owned media and the loud voices of the libertarian spokespeople for polluting industries?

Speaking of which…

Few places better exemplify partisanship and conflict of interest than the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – a group where the scientifically unqualified stand alongside some academics who have lowered professional standards at the same time as receiving support from fossil fuel sponsors.

Read our extensive coverage of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The charity’s website claims it “aim[s] to create an educational platform on which common ground can be established, helping to overcome polarisation and partisanship.” 

Manifesto

For the purpose of this essay, let us set aside, for now, the incumbent economists – Ross McKitrick, Ian Byatt, Joe Oliver, Tony Abbott, Gwythian Prins, Robert Mendelsohn, and others.

Their priorities lie in championing the free market and resisting climate science for fear it might pave the way for what they perceive as “eco-socialist control” – following very much in the footsteps of the GWPF founder and mentor, the late Nigel Lawson.

The GWPF promotes a host of characters without relevant qualifications or expertise in the climate field. These include Allison Pearson and Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, Christian Gerondeau as well as Harry Wilkinson, its head of policy, and Graham Stringer MP, a trustee.

The right-wing press and social media currently have the loudest megaphones when it comes to attacking net zero aspirations. 

Benny Peiser has directed the GWPF since it was founded. His qualification in sport and exercise sciences would seem to provide him with few insights into climate science. It is telling that he is a visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham, which is ostensibly the education wing of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which in turn is funded by BP and, historically, tobacco companies. 

John Constable, the GWPF’s former energy editor, is also embedded at Buckingham. His 2011 report which recommended that the government should “encourage fuel switching to gas” was funded by the ScottishPower Energy People Trust, and his 2012 report was commissioned by Calor Gas. His work was dismissed by the then Department for Energy and Climate Change as a “manifesto for imported gas.”

Peer

Professor Terence Kealey, a former vice-chancellor at Buckingham University, is also on the GWPF’s so-called ‘academic advisory council’. His latest book, entitled Sex, Science and Profits, is hardly at the cutting edge of climate research.

Professor Michael Kelly has seemingly impressive academic credentials yet his papers often avoid blind peer review and are published in open-access journals. This ducking of external scrutiny through open peer review is common practice among GWPF authors.

Professor Julia Steinberger wrote in a letter to Kelly: “I have a particular objection as a scientist to the GWPF claims that their papers are ‘peer-reviewed’. You will also be aware that papers referenced by GWPF commissioned authors are not blind-reviewed, but rubber-stamped by other GWPF members and as such have no standing in the broader scientific world. 

“Another characteristic of the GWPF is their tendency to cherry-pick from both their own work and from other papers of greater academic standing. This has been much criticized in the press, and yet the GWPF persists in this approach.”

David Whitehouse, GWPF science editor, has never written for any peer-reviewed journals on the subject of climate change, according to Skeptical Science. It seems Lawson’s approval was the only peer review ever undertaken within the GWPF’s halls of academe.

Testimony

Neither do Michael Alder, nor Professor Anthony Barrett of the Academic Advisory Council have relevant qualifications to hold forth on climate science. 

According to Barrett’s Wikipedia page: “Barrett […] has contributed extensively to the synthesis of β-lactams using alkenyl anions, ynolates, novel isocyanates, iron vinylidines, heteroatom functionalized nitroalkenes, and ring-closing alkene and enyne metathesis reactions.” All very impressive, but nothing that would indicate he is to be taken seriously on climate.

More overtly compromised by fossil fuel ties are advisory council chairman Professor Gautam Kalghatgi and council member Professor Peter Dobson. Kalghatgi worked for 31 years at Shell Research in the UK, followed by eight years at Saudi Aramco. Dobson conducted research into energy and decarbonisation technologies at the Oxford Centre for Petrochemical Research while founding the BP-funded Oxford Energy Society.

The list of those with apparent conflicts of interest continues.

Notorious

In 2018, Professor William Happer was revealed by an undercover Greenpeace UK investigation to have been paid $8,000 by Peabody Energy for testimony promoting the benefits of rising CO₂ levels.

Vincent Courtillot, of the University of Paris Diderot, is at the centre of a controversy over his paper, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, in which he argues that it is the Earth’s magnetic field that is driving climate change. He denies that his research is influenced by his ties to oil companies Total and Schlumberger.

Paul Reiter, Emeritus Professor of Medical Entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, admits that he is “not a climatologist, nor an expert on sea level or polar ice.” However, he sits on the Scientific and Economic Advisory Council of the Annapolis Centre for Science-Based Public Policy, a US think tank that has received $763,500 in funding from ExxonMobil.

Dr Samuel Furfari, a professor of energy geopolitics, has spent his career in fossil fuels, including a long tenure at the European Commission’s Energy Directorate-General. His PhD focused on coal gasification. 

Although, as a zoologist, Dr Matt Ridley cannot claim to have expertise in the Earth sciences – his doctorate examined the mating system of the common pheasant! – he is among the most prolific contributors of misleading op-eds to the right-wing press. He is notorious for selectively using data to undermine climate science, and his former ownership of a coalmine surely undermines his credibility as an objective commentator. 

Deceit

Some GWPF associates might simply be judged by the friends that they keep.

As well as serving as a director of several mining and resource companies, Ian Plimer, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, has been closely associated with the mothership of oil-funded propagandists, the Heartland Institute which likensenvironmentalists to Osama Bin Laden and Charles Manson. He does admit that “not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants”.

Astrophysicists Nir Shaviv, Henrik Svensmark, Christopher Essex and physicist Laurence Gould, have also aligned themselves with Heartland, the latter as a panelist at Heartland’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change.

This week The Ecologist reached out to the academics named in this article and offered a right of reply. Professor Dobson responded. “I am a bit astonished by this rather pathetic bit of propaganda,” he said. “I should add that going to Net Zero for carbon is ridiculous because CO2 is not the main greenhouse gas, water vapour is, by a long way.” 

However, NASA states: “Some people mistakenly believe water vapor is the main driver of Earth’s current warming. But increased water vapor doesn’t cause global warming. Instead, it’s a consequence of it.”

Though some within the GWPF may not personally be funded by or have interests in the fossil fuel industry, they are still tainted by association as the GWPF itself receives support from entities like Koch Industries and the oil-funded Sarah Scaife Foundation.

The GWPF has claimed that the scientific consensus on climate change is overstated and that the issue is not settled. According to former environmental reporter Roger Harrabin even the BBC has fallen for this deceit. 

Disaster

He has spoken of climate stories being spiked if a denier couldn’t be found to provide spurious ‘balance’ — a practice condemned in the 2011 Jones Report which criticised the broadcaster for suggesting that Nigel Lawson’s views held equal weight to those of the science community.

The right-wing press and social media currently have the loudest megaphones when it comes to attacking net zero aspirations. Their continued platforming of deniers and delayers – whether from the GWPF or the wider Tufton Street cabal – demands that we remain vigilant about the provenance and motives of commentators.

The And Then There’s Physics  blog sums up the frustration: “This is the problem with providing the GWPF this platform as it allows them to claim credibility, but it takes an exhaustive amount of effort to put their arguments in context. This is made much harder by the fact that very few of the arguments or figures have come from reputable sources.”

David Suzuki, the influential environmentalist, puts it plainly: “Healthy skepticism is good. Criticism of the ocean study led to greater understanding and strengthening of the methodology and analysis. 

“But denying the massive amounts of evidence and even the legitimacy of science leaves us with what? Personal beliefs? Ignoring what’s in front of us to maintain the status quo? Practising ‘business as usual’?

“Those would all put us on a path to disaster.”

This Author

Tom Hardy FRSA has over 40 years of experience in education, serving as literary editor for the International Journal of Art and Design Education, as columnist for the Times Educational Supplement, and author/editor of several academic works on educational practice. He has worked as an education consultant for the Prince’s Teaching Institute and subject lead for the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency reporting to the Department for Education. He now works with Media Revolution.

Source: https://theecologist.org/2025/may/19/climate-denial-path-disaster