Bob Ward has served as policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics since 2008. [1]
He worked at the Royal Society, where he headed the media team, for eight years until 2006. He has an undergraduate degree in Geology . [2] [3] He once worked at HECSU.
Ward's first significant involvement with climate change issues was in August 2005 when, as Royal Society communications director, he called on ExxonMobil to stop misrepresenting the state of the science. [4] Ward's communications with the company included the statement he found it "very difficult to reconcile the misrepresentations of climate change science ... with ExxonMobil's claims to be an industry leader". Ward learned from the company's charitable giving statements that it had continued to provide significant funds to 39 organizations involved in "... denial ... overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty ... or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change." [4]
In 2009 he commented on the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, saying that "The politicians won't be swayed by this. It's basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the sceptics' arguments." [5] He supported calls for an independent investigation into the controversy but believed the emails did not reveal evidence of wrongdoing. [5] He also commented on how climate change denial had, in his opinion, been adopted as a political cause by the far right. [6]
In 2010 he expressed concern over reports that some Fellows of the Royal Society disagreed with the Society's official policy on "Preventing dangerous climate change" as stated in December 2009. In a letter to The Times and in an Op-Ed in The Guardian he urged the Royal Society to clarify its stance on global warming. [7] [8]
In 2019, on the occasion of US President Trump's visit to the UK, Ward coordinated a letter to Prime Minister Theresa May. The letter, which was signed by 250 scientists, urged her to challenge President Trump on his "refusal to accept and address global climate change". Signatories included Chris Rapley, Hugh Montgomery and Joanna Haigh. [9]
The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Tempe, Arizona. It is seen as a front group for the fossil fuel industry, and as promoting climate change denial. The Center produces a weekly online newsletter called CO2Science.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a non-profit libertarian think tank founded by the political writer Fred L. Smith Jr. on March 9, 1984, in Washington, D.C., to advance principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. CEI focuses on a number of regulatory policy issues, including business and finance, labor, technology and telecommunications, transportation, food and drug regulation, and energy and environment in which they have promoted climate change denial. Kent Lassman is the current President and CEO.
The Scientific Alliance is a UK-based organization that claims to promote open-minded debate on scientific matters and science policy, including biotechnology, genetically modified food, energy and climate change. Its stated aim is to "bring together both scientists and non-scientists committed to rational discussion and debate on the challenges facing the environment today." In the scientific literature it is regarded as "a UK-based lobby group which challenges the scientific consensus on climate change".
Myron Ebell is an American climate change denier who served as the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an American libertarian advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. He was also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a politically conservative group formed in 1997 focused on "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis". In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The American Petroleum Institute (API) is the largest U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry. It claims to represent nearly 600 corporations involved in production, refinement, distribution, and many other aspects of the petroleum industry.
The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian 501(c)(3) nonprofit public policy think tank known for denying the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking.
Business action on climate change is a topic which since 2000 includes a range of activities relating to climate change, and to influencing political decisions on climate change-related regulation, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Major multinationals have played and to some extent continue to play a significant role in the politics of climate change, especially in the United States, through lobbying of government and funding of climate change deniers. Business also plays a key role in the mitigation of climate change, through decisions to invest in researching and implementing new energy technologies and energy efficiency measures.
Rex Wayne Tillerson is an American energy executive who served as the 69th United States secretary of state from 2017 to 2018 in the administration of Donald Trump. From 2006 to 2016, he was chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of ExxonMobil.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a 2007 British polemical documentary film directed by Martin Durkin. The film denies the scientific consensus about the reality and causes of climate change, justifying this by suggesting that climatology is influenced by funding and political factors. The program was formally criticised by Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulatory agency, which ruled the film failed to uphold due impartiality and upheld complaints of misrepresentation made by David King, who appeared in the film.
Climate change denial is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.
The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a United States public policy organization which promotes climate change denial.
ExxonMobil Corporation is an American multinational oil and gas corporation and the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The company, which took its present name in 1999 per the merger of Exxon and Mobil, is vertically integrated across the entire oil and gas industry, and within it is also a chemicals division which produces plastic, synthetic rubber, and other chemical products. ExxonMobil is headquartered near the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, though officially incorporated in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The company is the largest oil and gas company based in the US, America's third largest by revenue among all industries, and the eighth largest in the world.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom whose aims are to challenge what it calls "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. The GWPF, and some of its prominent members individually, have been characterised as practising and promoting climate change denial.
The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment is a research institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science founded in May 2008. The centre is a partner of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College and acts as an umbrella body for LSE's overall research contributions to the field of climate change and its impact on the environment. Furthermore, the institute oversees the activities of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), a partnership between LSE and the University of Leeds.
Brian P. Flannery is a physicist who variously worked as an astrophysicist and as a climate modeller for ExxonMobil. He is known for being a co-author of Numerical Recipes, a widely used series of textbooks describing useful algorithms.
As the world's largest majority investor-owned oil and gas corporation, ExxonMobil has received significant amounts of controversy and criticism, mostly due to its activities which increase the speed of climate change and its denial of global warming.
From the 1980s to mid 2000s, ExxonMobil was a leader in climate change denial, opposing regulations to curtail global warming. For example, ExxonMobil was a significant influence in preventing ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by the United States. ExxonMobil funded organizations critical of the Kyoto Protocol and seeking to undermine public opinion about the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Of the major oil corporations, ExxonMobil has been the most active in the debate surrounding climate change. According to a 2007 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the company used many of the same strategies, tactics, organizations, and personnel the tobacco industry used in its denials of the link between lung cancer and smoking.
Darren Wayne Woods is an American businessman who is the chief executive officer (CEO) and chairman of ExxonMobil since January 1, 2017.
The tobacco industry playbook, tobacco strategy or simply disinformation playbook describes a strategy devised by the tobacco industry in the 1950s to protect revenues in the face of mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoke and serious illnesses, primarily cancer. Much of the playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. These documents are now curated by the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents project and are a primary source for much commentary on both the tobacco playbook and its similarities to the tactics used by other industries, notably the fossil fuel industry. It is possible that the playbook may even have originated with the oil industry.