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A UK-based climate change denial think-tank has been caught making serious misrepresentations on climate policy which go against the guidelines of the UK's charity regulator.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, set up as a charitable organisation by former UK Conservative finance minister Lord Nigel Lawson, has been gaining traction in some media outlets who are turning to the foundation in an apparent attempt to "balance" their stories on climate change.

But in providing balance, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, shows those media outlets are also helping to spread mistruths.

Writing in The Guardian, Ward looked back on public statements and media interviews given by Lord Lawson since his foundation was launched in November 2009 and found at least five examples where the public had been misled.

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The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) recently published a flashy headline that reads, ’900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism Of “Man-Made” Global Warming (AGW) Alarm’. The article links to a blog post on Populartechnology.net listing more than 900 papers which, according to the GWPF, refute “concern relating to a negative environmental or socio-economic effect of AGW, usually exaggerated as catastrophic.”

The “900+ papers” list is supposed to somehow prove that a score of scientists reject the scientific consensus on climate change. One might be persuaded by the big numbers. We’re not.

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The recent op-ed piece in Canada’s Financial Post by Czech President Václav Klaus is more than a little infuriating.  Klaus, an economist by trade with no background in climate science, has become a favourite skeptic for hire at the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing libertarian think tanks. 

Klaus is a vocal skeptic on the topic of global warming. His 2007 book argues that global warming is akin to a new religion or ideology that threatens to undermine freedom and the world’s economic and social order.  At a 2007 speech at the Cato Institute, he argued that, “Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences” along with other “isms” such as communism, feminism, and liberalism.  He went on to argue that, “environmentalism is a religion” and a “modern counterpart of communism” that seeks to change people’s habits and economic systems.

At his 2009 keynote address at the International Conference of Climate Change (a.k.a. Denial-a-Palooza), he maintained that environmental activists don’t necessarily care about temperature, or carbon dioxide, rather they care about rent seeking and political profit.  In an increasingly familiar trope, he argued that the climate change movement has become popularized because it gives politicians an excuse to exert more control over society.

Klaus delivered a keynote speech at last week’s Global Warming Policy Foundation Inaugural Annual Lecture in London.  According to his address, “Global warming in the last 150 years was modest and future warming and its consequences will not be dangerous or catastrophic.  It doesn’t look like a threat we should respond to,” he said.

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The BBC used Britain’s recent snowy cold snap to trot out the climate skepticism of Dr. Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool’s John Moores University with absolutely zero scientific expertise in climate change. 

In a segment titled “How the big freeze fits theories of global warming,” exploring “how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change,” the BBC oddly shoehorns Peiser’s climate change denialism into an otherwise decent piece explaining the difference between weather and climate and why the existence of snow and cold weather does not in any way negate the realities of climate change.

So what could Dr. Peiser - whose greatest achievement in science is getting an asteroid named after him – have to offer on the subject of climate change?

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“Canada won’t really have a lot of problems. The main problems will be in developing or underdeveloped countries that even today have problems with high cold or high temperatures.”

- Anthropologist and Science Fiction Writer Benny Peiser

The Edmonton Journal was once quite a serious institution - the newspaper of record in the capital city of Alberta, the largest oil producing region in North America and the second largest in the world. Given the 37 years of one-party (Conservative) rule in the province, Journal writers have often considered themselves the Official Opposition, charged with a mission of keeping industry honest and holding the government to account.

Apparently, they have given it up, preferring instead to cozy up to their advertisers by claiming that global warming is a good thing.

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Lawrence Solomon - he of the imaginary legion of top scientists who deny climate change - has launched an attack on the credibility of Wikipedia, complaining especially that Wiki has the temerity to acknowledge climate change and to censor unfounded counter arguments.

Unfortunately, Solomon pegs his own case to the reputation of the notoriously unreliable Benny Peiser, leaving the Wiki editors looking admirably clever.