A Conservative MP has shared a paper that says the climate emergency is not happening. Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe and a leading member of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, shared the report, produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), on his Twitter feed. He and the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, comprising about 20 Tory MPs, have previously said they do not deny the science around climate change but merely disagree with the costs involved in some of the methods proposed to reach net zero. When asked if he agreed with the report, Baker said: “I am clear that questions of climate science should be handled scientifically. The last thing we need is politicians and activists twisting the science to their particular ends.” Baker is a trustee of the GWPF, and the group of Tories have used its research to make their arguments previously. Joe Tetlow, a senior political adviser for the Green Alliance, a charity and thinktank, said: “The mask has slipped. Promoting climate denial from GWPF is not scrutiny of policies but denying the basis for action. Dangerous and wrong.”
The non-peer-reviewed paper is authored by a retired scientist, Ole Humlum, a former professor at the University of Oslo. He has repeatedly claimed that rather than human impact, it is the sun and moon’s influence on Earth that explains most of the historical and current climate change. In 2013 he predicted that the climate would most likely become colder in the next 10 to 15 years. In the new report he claims that only “gentle warming” has happened and that there is not a climate crisis. Humlum said: “A year ago, I warned that there was great risk in using computer modelling and immature science to make extraordinary claims. The empirical observations I have reviewed show very gentle warming and no evidence of a climate crisis.” The GWPF director, Dr Benny Peiser, said: “It’s extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis. Year after year our annual assessment of climate trends document just how little has been changing in the last 30 years. The habitual climate alarmism is mainly driven by scientists’ computer modelling rather than observational evidence.” By contrast, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that human activity was “unequivocally” the cause of rapid changes to the climate, including sea level rises, melting polar ice and glaciers, heatwaves, floods and droughts. It said some effects of climate breakdown were now inevitable. Hundreds of scientists contributed to the IPCC report, with 234 in the first working group, 270 in the second and 278 in the third. It was signed off by the governments of all 195 member countries. Dr Ken Rice, an astrophysics professor at the University of Edinburgh, said of the GWPF report: “One of the most bizarre things about this is that they still can’t acknowledge that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is entirely anthropogenic. I had thought we’d moved beyond that. Clearly not.”