By Paul Homewood
Engineering & Technology has published a long, rambling attack piece on the GWPF in general, and Prof Michael Kelly in particular:
An E&T investigation reveals that a prominent British climate change sceptics group is taking advantage of a favourable political environment while strengthening its ties to international supporters and surviving an examination by the Charities Commission. Keen to engage in online climate change debate, the GWPF growing its influence in the engineering and technology sector too.
Full story here.
The article is far too long to be worth reading in full, but it relies almost entirely on quotes from Bob Ward, the PR man for the Grantham Institute. Indeed it is clear that most of the article has actually been dictated by him, as it matches his own rambling prose.
It is evident from it that Ward is worried about how much progress the GWPF is making in countering the hysterical claims of climate crisis, especially amongst people in authority and in the media.
To quote Ward:
The group’s strategy is now fully invested in online publications. And it seems to work. Ward says he believes [GWPF’s] newsletter goes out widely, including in Whitehall, because he is often asked by senior civil servants, who have received it and raised it with their colleagues, to verify or disprove statements. He says “they then say ‘one of my colleagues has seen this piece by Matt Ridley in the Telegraph, what do you say?’, and then I have to rebut it. I think [GWPF]’s model for disseminating propaganda in Whitehall works”.
Most of Ward’s story consists of a long winded ad hom attack on Professor Michael Kelly, who happens to be a trustee of the GWPF board of trustees. He was also Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge from 2002-2016, had a spell as chief scientific advisor to the Department of Communities and Local Government and his awards include the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal in 2006.
Kelly has made several serious criticisms of government climate policies, not based on climate denial, but instead on practical concerns about the engineering realities, costs and global political realities.
Instead of addressing these very real issues, Ward has chosen to attack Kelly’s qualifications, and invoked one of Kelly’s erstwhile colleagues at Cambridge, Julian Allwood, to launch a very personal and unworthy attack on Kelly’s credibility.
As we shall see, this is the usual modus operandi for Bob Ward. When you cannot argue with facts, resort to ad hom!
Ward then goes on to complain that some of the GWPF funding comes from the US. Yet he does not seem to mind the same American funding for numerous climate alarmist outfits, such as Richard Black’s Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). This was set up to disseminate global warming propaganda, and relies heavily on funding from European Climate Foundation, which itself is funded largely by US progressive foundations.
A good example of Ward’s misdirection in the article is this statement:
One such example on GWPF.org is a post from 2019 where the Foundation calls on the withdrawal of a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed scientific journal, on the decline of insect populations in the rainforest in Puerto Rico. None of the four GWPF members who authored a letter to the editor of PNAS – including Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Ridley, Paul Homewood and Andrew Montford – had ever published any research relating to this issue.
His comment is irrelevant, as our complaint had nothing to do with insect studies. It was instead based on the fact that the whole PNAS study was centred around a corrupted temperature record, purportedly showing a steady rise in temperatures. However this supposed warming was an artifact of splicing two separate sets of temperature records from two different thermometers
The El Verde Field Station, responsible for the meteorological data, clearly warned against combining these two sets of temperature data, because the first one up to 1992 was artificially lower due to faulty equipment.
Although the PNAS refused to withdraw a fatally flawed paper, it did publish a reply by nine insect experts, Willig et al, which not only discredited the original claims about insect populations, but also made exactly the same objection about the flawed temperature record as we did.
Ward refers to a formal complaint he submitted to the Charity Commission last October, claiming that the GWPF was in breach of Charity Commission rules.
In the E&T article, Ward makes two specific criticisms about scientific research papers which I have written for GWPF. Both criticisms were included in that formal complaint:
1) Paul Homewood’s pamphlet from last year on ‘Tropical Hurricanes in the Age of Global Warming’ would also fall short. Homewood is a retired accountant and has no qualifications or training in climate-related science, Ward says. Homewood claims the increase in the frequency of strong hurricanes in the North Atlantic since 1970 is due to a natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and “not linked to climate change”. In seeking to defend his claim Homewood would have “ignored much of the scientific literature on the issue and misrepresented the findings of those he did cite”. Ward said Homewood would have misrepresented both papers “through selective quotation that gave the false impression that they had ruled out the influence of climate change on the increase in the frequency of strong hurricanes in the North Atlantic”.
This complaint was firmly rebutted by GWPF Chairman. Lord Donoghue, in his reply to the Bob Ward, and copied to the Charity Commission:
Turning to Paul Homewood’s paper, entitled Tropical Hurricanes in the Age of Global Warming, your view is not one I see represented in his paper. He does not even attempt to argue that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is wholly
responsible for an increase in hurricane activity in the North Atlantic as you suggest. Instead, he states in the report that:
… IPCC AR5 reported that there has been an increase in the frequency of very intense tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic since the 1970s. Whether this can be wholly explained by the AMO cannot be known at this stage. It would require several cycles of the AMO, with comprehensive availability of hurricane data, to be able to draw any conclusions with confidence.
Nonetheless, many scientists have found that the AMO plays a significant role in hurricane formation in the North Atlantic. Mr Homewood is right to draw attention to these findings. You also neglect to mention that the Walsh et al paper that you cite in your letter states in its abstract that “…no significant trends have been identified in the Atlantic since the late 19th century”.
Ward’s second complaint stated:
2) Another of Homewood posts claimed: “using the recently published UK Met Office’s State of the UK Climate 2018, along with other Met Office data, this paper examines UK climatic trends and assesses the truth of climate emergency claims”. Homewood concludes: “there is no evidence that weather has become more extreme”. According to Ward, Homewood had misrepresented the Met Office’s data and its work. At a different passage of Homewood’s text, Ward finds another issue. By stating evidence from a report by the National Climate Information Centre at the Met Office, Ward refutes Homewood’s assertion that there is no basis for the claim that “climate change causes more extreme rainfall, at least as far as the UK is concerned”.
Again this was easily rebutted by Lord Donoghue:
Turning to Mr Homewood’s claim that climate change was not causing more extreme rainfall, you say that this is untrue. However, you merely refer to an increase in rainfall between the most recent decade and the period between 1961 and 1990. On its own, this fact cannot tell us anything about what might be causing that increase. You also neglect to mention that by this index, the rainfall totals from extremely wet days have slightly declined since the mid-2000s. More importantly, the period from the early 1960s to late 1990s is recognised as a “flood dry period”, nor does it represent typical pre-industrial conditions; so it cannot be taken as the reference period from which to search for an anthropogenic influence.
Ward’s complaint to the Charity Commission about the GWPF was roundly rejected, making clear that the GWPF had every right to publish its own research, as long as it was based on “evidence and analysis”. The Commission was satisfied that this was indeed the case.
Ward’s job, of course, is to shut down debate on climate change where it challenges the mainstream view. Hence his numerous and failed attempts to censor the press.
After this latest failure, he is clearly worried that GWPF is having more influence than he would like.
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February 5, 2020 at 10:06AM
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