Global Warming Policy Foundation

Global Warming Policy Foundation
Formation	November 2009
Headquarters	Carlton House Terrace
Location	London, United Kingdom
Chairman Director	Nigel Lawson Benny Peiser

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a think tank in the United Kingdom, whose stated aims are to challenge "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.

History

Established in November 2009 , shortly after the start of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, and chaired by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, GWPF states that it is "deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated" to address climate change and that it aims to "bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant".

The GWPF website carries an array of articles skeptical of environmental science, including demonstrably false statements made by Lawson about climate change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Call for an independent inquiry into Climate Research Unit e-mails

The GWPF's first act was to call for a high-level, independent inquiry into the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. A spokesman for the Met Office, a government agency which works with the Climate Research Unit in providing global temperature information, said there was no need for an inquiry. "The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be."

Lawson suggested that the e-mails from the University of East Anglia "called into question" the integrity of the scientific evidence. GWPF Director Benny Peiser said that the organisation did not doubt the science and wasn’t going to discuss it, but want an open, frank debate about what policies should be adopted.

However, the foundation itself has rejected FoI requests to disclose its source of funding on at least four different occasions, leading Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics to comment,

“	These [FoI] documents expose once again the double standards promoted by...the GWPF, who demand absolute transparency from everybody except themselves...The GWPF was the most strident critic during the 'Climategate' row of the standards of transparency practised by the University of East Anglia, yet it simply refuses to disclose basic information about its own secretive operations, including the identity of its funders.	”
—Bob Ward 2011

Temperature graph

When the GWPF's website was launched in November 2009, a graph used in the logo graphic on each page of the website of '21st Century global mean temperatures' showed a slow decline over the selected period from 2001–2008. Hannah Devlin of The Times found an error for 2003 and noted that if the period from 2000–2009 had been chosen, then a rise in temperature would have been shown rather than a fall. Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment said that the graph was contrary to the true measurements, and that by leaving out the temperature trend during the 20th century, the graph obscured the fact that 8 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred this century. The GWPF blamed a "small error by our graphic designer" for the mistake which would now be changed, but said that starting the graph earlier would be equally arbitrary.

Personnel

In November 2009, the GWPF listed Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist, as the director, and a board of trustees consisting of Lord Lawson (Chairman), Lord Barnett, Peter R. Forster (the Bishop of Chester), Lord Donoughue, Lord Fellowes, Martin Jacomb, Henri Lepage, Baroness Nicholson, and Lord Turnbull. The academic advisory council included Samuel Brittan, Ian Byatt, Freeman Dyson, Christian Gerondeau, David Henderson, Terence Kealey, Anthony Kelly, Richard Lindzen, Alan Peacock, Ian Plimer, Gwyn Prins, Paul Reiter, Philip Stott, Richard Tol, and David Whitehouse.

Andrew William Montford has been appointed to run an inquiry into the three British Climategate-inquiries for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. His report The Climategate Inquiries was published in September 2010, and is sharply critical of the previous inquiries.

Funding

Citing privacy concerns, Director Benny Peiser declined to reveal the sources of funding for the GWPF. Peiser said GWPF does not receive funding "from people with links to energy companies or from the companies themselves."

In accounts filed at the beginning of 2011 with the Charities Commission and at Companies House, it was revealed that only £8,168 of the £503,302 the Foundation received as income up to the end of July 2010 came from membership fees. In response to the accounts the policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change Bob Ward commented ""We can now see that the campaign conducted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which includes lobbying newspaper editors and MPs, is well-funded by money from secret donors. Its income suggests that it only has about 80 members, which means that it is a fringe group promoting the interests of a very small number of politically motivated campaigners."

Media Reception

David Aaronovitch noted the GWPF's launch in The Times, writing "Lord Lawson’s acceptance of the science turns out, on close scrutiny, to be considerably less than half-hearted. Thus he speaks of 'the (present) majority scientific view', hinting rather slyly at the near possibility of a future, entirely different scientific view. (...) 'Sceptic' (...) is simply a misnomer. People such as Lord Lawson are not sceptical, for if one major peer-reviewed piece of scientific research were ever to be published casting doubt on climate change theory, you just know they’d have it up in neon at Piccadilly Circus. They are only sceptical about what they don’t want to be true."

The Daily Mail stated that "(Lord Lawson) said the integrity of the evidence on which 'far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions' are based has been called into question and the reputation of British science was 'seriously tarnished'. (He) was launching The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change."

The Guardian quoted Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute, as saying "some of those names are straight from the Who's Who of current climate change sceptics...It's just going to be a way of pumping material into the debate that hasn't been through scrutiny". The article cast doubt on the idea that an upsurge in scepticism was underway, noting that "in (the US) Congress, even the most determined opponents of climate change legislation now frame their arguments in economic terms rather than on the science".

Fred Pearce wrote in The Guardian that the three inquiries GWPF looked into were all badly flawed, and that The Climategate Inquiries report ably dissects their failures. He writes that the report, "for all its sharp—and in many cases justified—rejoinders to the official inquiries ... is likely to be ignored in some quarters for its brazen hypocrisy." Pearce argues that one of the criticisms of the three inquiries was that no climate sceptics were on the inquiry teams, and now the critics themselves have produced a review of the reviews that included no one not already supportive of the sceptical position. But, Pearce wrote, Montford "has landed some good blows here."

External links

• The Global Warming Policy Foundation official website