Former prime minister Tony Abbott, who once compared taking action on climate change with killing goats “to appease volcano gods”, has joined the board of a UK climate-sceptic think tank founded by a politician dubbed “the climate denier-in-chief”.
Abbott said he was pleased to join the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which “consistently injected a note of realism into the climate debate”, despite the charity spearheading the backlash against the UK government’s net-zero goal.
“All of us want to save the only planet we have, but this should not be by means which impoverish poorer people in richer countries and hold poorer countries back,” Abbott said of his appointment.
“Right now, in countries like Australia, the impact of climate policy is to make electricity less affordable and less reliable rather than perceptibly to cool the planet.
“We need more genuine science and less groupthink in this debate. That’s where the GWPF has been a commendably consistent if lonely voice.”
The GWPF was founded in 2009 by Thatcher-era chancellor Nigel Lawson, who reportedly resigned from the House of Lords last month. Described by UK Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay as the “climate denier-in-chief”, Lawson claimed that “global warming is not a problem” in a 2021 article written for The Spectator during the COP26 in Glasgow.
The foundation’s director, Benny Peiser, also made headlines for spurious statements, including that he found it “extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis” and that climate “alarmism” was driven by “scientists’ computer modelling rather than observational evidence”.
Despite Lawson’s apparent departure from politics, his foundation continues to cause a headache for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. There has been outrage after a UK register of interests disclosure revealed Conservative MP Steve Baker accepted a £10,000 (A$17,464) donation from the chair of GWPF’s Net Zero Watch.
The campaign arm has urged the UK government to recommit to fossil fuels, commission a fleet of coal-fired power plants, and wind down wind and solar completely, while its alleged breaches of charity law were the subject of a complaint from three British MPs in October.
This isn’t Abbott’s first brush with the foundation. In 2017 he delivered an eyebrow-raising annual lecture that suggested climate change was “probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm”.
Abbott also claimed that photos from his electorate showed the sea level hadn’t risen. (The Bureau of Meteorology found last year that the rates of sea level rise to the north and south-east of Australia have been “significantly higher” than the global average for the past 30 years.)
“Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event, in Australia the floods are not bigger, the bushfires are not worse, the droughts are not deeper or longer, and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s,” Abbott said at the time.
In an echo of Lawson’s claim that rising temperatures are “no bad thing: many more people die each year from cold-related illnesses than from heat-related ones”, Abbott suggested in 2017 that sweltering heatwaves are good, actually.
“There’s the evidence that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (which is a plant food after all) are actually greening the planet and helping to lift agricultural yields,” he said. “In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial.”
Heat is the biggest natural killer in Australia (and in the US) and has been for the past 200 years, with fatalities outstripping all other natural killers including bushfires, cyclones and floods. Research has found there were 36,000 deaths associated with heat in Australia between 2006 and 2017.
It is long overdue to find a better description than ‘think tank’ for a body such as GWPF, which is hostile to any respectable or informed thinking and works to promote stupidity. Some suggestions:
Fossil fuel fundamentalists.
Which I guess would shorten to F’ers.
Fossil fool fundamentalists.
Apologies, Gabrielle – I didn’t read yours until hitting ‘post’.
Make it fossil fool fundies.
Stink tank?
Stink tank
misinformation manufacturers
propaganda pushers
lying liars who lie
Non-thinkers stink tank?
Septic ‘think’ tank
All brilliant- well done!!! Clever Crikey Creatives!!
Wank tank
The GWPF and Abbott claim that their ‘observation’ disproves scientific modelling. This is where blind ignorance of the bleeding effing obvious is characterised as ‘observation’.
Abbott’s Rhodes Scholarship must be a source of mortifying embarrassment for every other Rhodes Scholar, excepting Dodgy Angus Taylor. Seriously, what did these dolts study at Oxford? The flatness of the Earth?
Don’t underestimate the enemy, they are smart – in ways to undermine legitimate research with fear mongering and the reiteration of lies – and they’re organised. Very organised. See also, the No campaign, the ascendency of the right and the increasing number of idiots who are completely sucked in by them.
if they’re so smart, why did hire a total tool like Tony
i agree these muppets are dangerous, but it’s the money behind them, not their supposed intelligence that’s the issue – stupid people with power are far more dangerous than most of us would like to admit
It’s not the original meaning, but the phrase ‘useful idiot’ might apply to the GWPF’s intentions for Abbott.
he’s not an idiot, that’s my whole point
But idiots believe him. Even they are selectively stupid.
you keep reverting to insults that they thrive on
I think they thrive rather more on the huge wads of cash thrown at them by various billionaires and multi-national corporations with deeply sinister ambitions for the rest of us.
They needed a head tool.
In Australia Abbott being prime minister felt like the latest saga in Forrest Gump’s life.
I suppose he’s not that well known in the UK, and so they can spruik him as an ex prime minister and Rhoads scholar, which technically he is. He is also only operating in an echo chamber, so his views are welcomed.
I don’t feel like there’s too much critical thinking going on at the GWPF.
Rhodes scholarships have often been tainted by who you know, rather than true merit. plus there is the sporting element that excludes many!
It’s a bit disappointing that Abbott’s chosen to throw his lot in with the group, when there are any number of more deserving entities out there that could benefit from his forensic mind and merit-free profile. For a start there’s Birds are a Myth Club, the George Pell Society for the Protection of Choirboys, the Falling Upward Association (Anti-gravity division), Fully Woke Republicans for Soros…
It’s really not with arguing with this clown’s claims, but this one stood out for me:
Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event,
Nobody, breathless or not, has ever claimed this.