Copenhagen climate change conference 2009: climate contrarians

A vocal band of climate change sceptics - with powerful supporters in politics and business - question the science behind the calls for urgent and drastic international action on carbon emissions.

In March 2001, the Bush administration announced that it would not implement the Kyoto Protocol that would require nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, claiming that ratifying the treaty would create economic setbacks in the US and did not put enough pressure to limit emissions from developing nations.


The recent publishing of thousands of emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) claiming to show that researchers massaged figures to mask the fact that world temperatures have been declining in recent years, provided the perfect launch pad for the latest heavy-hitting climate change critic, Lord Lawson.
Lord Lawson, who served as chancellor for six years under Margaret Thatcher, plans to establish a think tank to challenge the consensus that drastic action is needed to combat global warming.
Bjørn Lomborg is the poster boy of the contrarian trend.
The Danish academic became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose main thesis is that many of the most-publicised claims and predictions on environmental issues are wrong.
Lomborg campaigns for an unconventional position on climate change: he opposes the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argues that we should instead adapt to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and spend money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition.
After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, complaints of deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. against Lomborg were made to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD).
The ruling was a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question.
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, academic and businessman. He is a critic of the scientific consensus that global warming is driven by anthropogenic CO2 .
He has published approximately 60 academic papers and six books, including his book on the global warming debate, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science.
He is critical of greenhouse gas politics and argues that extreme environmental changes are inevitable.
Via his long-running column in the Sunday Telegraph , Christopher Booker has claimed that man-made global warming was "disproved" in 2008.
In his article Facts melted by 'global warming' he claimed that "Without explanation, a half million square kilometres of ice vanished overnight."
Siegfried Frederick Singer is an American atmospheric physicist.
In March 2007, Singer appeared in the controversial documentary film The Great Global Warming Swindle which asserted that the mainstream view on global warming was "a lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times".
Singer has been a consultant to various major corporations, including GE, Ford, GM, Exxon, Shell, Sun Oil, Lockheed Martin and IBM.
Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute is an outspoken opponent of global warming constituting a problem, and of government action that would require limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
It favours free-market environmentalism, stating that market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than governments.
In recent years some sceptics have contradicted their contarianism. Ronald Bailey , author of Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths (published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute), stated in 2005, "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up".