Climate Change proponents emails and files hacked

[Linda Minor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher..._Brenchley

In 1979 Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings.[2] Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups.[3] He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street.[2] Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982, where he worked until 1986 as a special advisor on economic matters....

Monckton is a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.

Monckton is critical of the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change and the stated scope of it, which he regards as a controversy catalyzed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round" following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.[8] He has expressed doubt about the reality of global warming in a number of newspaper articles and papers. He has been described in some quarters as a "former science adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a world-renowned scholar."[9] However, his credentials as a commentator on climate change have been questioned by some commentators. James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore note in their book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that Monckton has "no training whatsoever in science", and criticize his asserted credentials as "unfounded self-promotion."[10] The Daily Telegraph has described him as "a former economic adviser".[4]

In two Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton disputed whether global warming is man-made, suggested that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticized the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, he has criticized the IPCC's interpretation of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the science in the IPCC reports has misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming. In an apparent reference to claims made by Gavin Menzies, he further stated "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."[11]

The British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has criticized Monckton's arguments, labelling them "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish."[12] In response, Monckton argued that he "got the science right", claiming that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics".[13]

In response to the U.K. government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he has argued that the review's recommendation to invest 1% of global GDP in climate change mitigation would be ineffective, as would the introduction of carbon taxes and emissions trading as a means of curbing carbon emissions. He has proposed instead that the best solution should be to "go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation."[14]

In February 2007, he published a critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change.[15] His calculations of climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been published in the Quarterly Economic Bulletin.[16]

Monckton played a key role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense" and had played a direct role in the litigation against the British government.[17] He was also reported to have funded the distribution to schools of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film.[18]

In March 2007, Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President did not respond.[8][19] The Science and Public Policy Institute provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, titled Apocalypse?, No!, described as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science."[18] The film includes footage of Monckton giving a Gore-style presentation given on 8 October 2007 at the Cambridge Union in which he asserted that Gore and the IPCC had systematically falsified and exaggerated the evidence for global warming.[18][20]

During the autumn of 2009, Monckton embarked on a tour of North America to campaign against the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. His warning that US President Barack Obama intended to sign a treaty at the conference which would "impose a communist world government on the world" was picked up by numerous commentators on the American right and "rocketed around the fringe" of right-wing websites, prompting Glenn Beck to invite him on his radio show again. Writing in Salon, Alex Koppelman criticized Monckton's assertions about the conference's framework for negotiation as being "woefully inaccurate. And that's a nice way of putting it." [21][22] The St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact.com described his assertions as "not only unsupported but preposterous" and awarded him a special rating of "britches on fire".[23] Ethan Baron of the Canadian newspaper The Province criticized Monckton's assertions as the product of a "whacked-out, far-right ideology, combined with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet."[24]

[Linda Minor]

In my opinion the climate debate is one being waged by bankers--one side promoting coal, fossil fuels and other methods of infrastructure which have been linked to a distribution of utilities network that they financed over a period of decades beginning in the 1930's. The other side attempting to create a new infrastructure that could finance "green" industrial distribution--such as solar and wind power. In order to build such a system, there must be adequate demand and a means of paying for the research necessary to build the international distribution network. That takes money. In many ways, scientists are just sophists, who argue for the side which signs their paychecks.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images...candal.pdf

The gallant whistleblower now faces a police investigation at the instigation of the University authorities desperate to look after their own and to divert allegations of criminality elsewhere. His crime? He had revealed what many had long suspected:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
  

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities....
  

[David Guyatt]

In my opinion the climate debate is one being waged by bankers--one side promoting coal, fossil fuels and other methods of infrastructure which have been linked to a distribution of utilities network that they financed over a period of decades beginning in the 1930's. The other side attempting to create a new infrastructure that could finance "green" industrial distribution--such as solar and wind power. In order to build such a system, there must be adequate demand and a means of paying for the research necessary to build the international distribution network. That takes money. In many ways, scientists are just sophists, who argue for the side which signs their paychecks.

Always follow the money eh, Linda. I think you're on the right track. Green issues have come to the fore as a result of intense media coverage and it, therefore, stands to reason (knowing what we do know of the MSM) that it is serving someone's purpose.

And that someone ain't us plebs or Gaiea.

[Helen Reyes]

In my opinion the climate debate is one being waged by bankers--one side promoting coal, fossil fuels and other methods of infrastructure which have been linked to a distribution of utilities network that they financed over a period of decades beginning in the 1930's. The other side attempting to create a new infrastructure that could finance "green" industrial distribution--such as solar and wind power. In order to build such a system, there must be adequate demand and a means of paying for the research necessary to build the international distribution network. That takes money. In many ways, scientists are just sophists, who argue for the side which signs their paychecks.

That would seem to be the logical way of looking at it, as old guard "dirty" fuel companies protecting the status quo against innovators with "green" fuel, except that it doesn't seem to be true. I made the same assumption and this is the major talking point of AGW proponents, that critics are being financed by Big Oil. But Shell and BP at least are for international measures against AGW, i.e. carbon trading credit markets, derivatives, etc.

Look at email 0894639050.txt in the leaked documents under FOI2009\mail\ (I'm leaving most of the addresses legible because they matter, but adding *'s where possible to keeop bots from harvesting them):

From: Ged.R.Davis@si.simis.co*
To: alcamo@usf.uni-kassel.de, dennis.anderson@ic.ac.uk, bob.chen@ciesin.o*g, becon@public3.bta.net.cn, ddokken@usgcrp.g*v, Bert.de.Vries@rivm.nl, ja_edmonds@pnl.g*v, j.fenhann@risoe.dk, stuart@edf.*rg, Fewewar@ternet.pl, kennethgregory@msn.c*m, gruebler@iiasa.ac.at, ehaites@netcom.ca, m.hulme@uea.ac.uk, tyjung@his.keei.re.kr, johnson@iiasa.ac.at, kram@ecn.nl, emilio@ppe.ufrj.br, vc@admin.udsm.ac.tz, Nicolette_Manson-Engelbrecht@edf.*rg, roberta@ciesin.o*g, laurie.michaelis@oecd.or*, mori@shun-sea.ia.noda.sut.ac.jp, t-morita@nies.go.jp, rmoss@usgcrp.g*v, hm_pitcher@pnl.*ov, rrichels@msm.epri.c*m, lkprice@lbl.go*, rrichels@epri.c*m, rogner@iiasa.ac.at, A.sankovski@icfkaiser.*om, shukla@iimahd.ernet.in, ssmith@ucar.e*u, leena@teri.res.in, S.Subak@uea.ac.uk, rob.swart@rivm.nl, Lvanwie@usgcrp.go*, rwatson@worldbank.o*g, weyant@Leland.stanford.*du, xing@ciesin.o*g, naki@iiasa.ac.at
Subject: RE: IPCC SRES Scenario Guidelines for Authors
Date: 08 May 1998 10:50:50 +0100

Find below guidelines on how to present the IS99 storylines and scenarios. Could you the nominated authors send me your first drafts as soon as possible.
In writing up your contribution could you cover the following areas, ideally structured as follows:

1. Scenario family narrative to discuss main themes, dynamics and a diagram showing 'grand logic'

2. Key Scenario Family Drivers and their Relationships
Topics you should cover include the following:
* population
* technology developments
* governance and geopolitics
* economic development
* equity
* communication and settlement patterns
* environmental concerns/ecological resilience

3. Scenarios, include reasons for branches: this section should state clearly the reasons behind selection of scenarios and review the key highlights of the scenario quantification
* energy resources/technology, include resource availability
* land use and agriculture
* scenario quantification, include snowflake
* CO2 emissions

There may be other factors you wish to add to the paper.

Regards,
Ged Davis SI-PXG Tel: 0171-934 3226 Fax: 0171-934 7406
Shell International Limited, London
Scenario Processes and Applications

I don't remember the exact ownership of Royal Dutch Shell, but I believe Beatrix and QE2 own major portions (I could be quite wrong). Both monarchs appear to be in favor of a treaty coming out of COP13 or whatever they're calling Copenhagen IPCC officially.

The other point is that the innovators aren't offering any energy products. There is no replacement for oil in their plans, just vague talk of new green technologies. Denmark has made some money off freon-free refrigerators in the past and is doing work with marine wind mills, but first, windmills to generate electricty are never cost-effective, they always take more energy to produce than they ever give back over their working lives, and second, this is a drop in the bucket at best. The thing is I agree with Linda Major that they are trying to sell something, I just don't think it's tangible, it's carbon-based derivatives and debt swaps, so to speak.

I sense the ultimate goal is something like the Khmer Rouge vision of a return to some idyll of medieval agrarian society, a kind of micromanaged command economy with people on a sort of biospere Indian reservation (although the true believers and activists haven't caught whiff of the naked lunch on the end of the fork yet) being driven by an oligarchy of corporate interests using social and peer pressure, slogans and conformism, imho. "There is no scientific debate," "the science is settled," "no serious scholars dispute" AGW, "save the Earth," "your grandchildren will blame you," etc. It wouldn't be the first time that's worked for a time, anyway.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The advert is very emotive - a father reading his daughter a fairy tale where the Wicked Witch is man made Global Warming - and can be seen at the url (the second, lower, video link on the page):

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/sc...rt/3450237

Government forced to defend climate change advert
Updated on 04 December 2009
By Cathy Newman

The government's chief scientist has been forced to justify controversial claims in the government's latest climate change advertisement, Channel 4 News has learnt.

The "storybook" TV campaign features a father reading his daughter a frightening bedtime story about global warming. This programme understands that Clearcast, the body responsible for vetting TV adverts, has questioned the scientific evidence used in the campaign.

Clearcast's role is to check that adverts touching on issues of public controversy are impartial - in line with broadcasting rules. After learning that questions had been raised, the government's top scientific advisers penned a furious retort to Clearcast.

The letter, seen by Channel 4 News, states: "We are concerned that the basic scientific inferences referred to in the latest...campaign are being brought into question by Clearcast.



"We are both surprised and disturbed that the premise of the television campaign is being questioned, given the incontrovertible nature of the science that underpins the campaign material."

Read the letter from the government to Clearcast in full here.

The government says it hasn't broken the rules because the advert is based on fact. It was eventually cleared for broadcast, but is now being investigating by the advertising watchdog after triggering 785 complaints from members of the public.

The fresh dispute comes after a week of allegations that scientists are manipulating official data. Leaked emails have led to charges the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has distorted the evidence on global warming.

The chief scientist John Beddington and the energy department's main scientific adviser Robert Watson wrote the letter to Clearcast. It's emerged that Professor Watson is director of strategic development at the UEA's Climatic Research Unit.

A 'mendacious' advert

Lord Lawson, the Conservative former chancellor who has just launched a think tank devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change, told Channel 4 News the advert was "mendacious".

He said: "There are two things wrong with this ad. First, I am sure that if a commercial organisation had tried an ad which is as imaginative, as inventive as this one and as mendacious, it would not be permitted. The second thing is the focus of the ad is to scare young children and I think that's positively immoral."

But the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told the programme: "The problem is that the sceptics who want to cast doubt on this are the modern equivalent of the Flat Earth Society because the science is very clear about this. Climate change is real. It's happening. It's man-made.

"Frankly it's irresponsible to suggest that it isn't happening and it isn't man-made and it's trying to suggest that there is an easy way out of climate change. Well I'm afraid there isn't an easy way out. We want to make it as financially possible as possible for people to make the transition but the truth is these are hard decisions that we have to make in order to make this transition. It's necessary and the science is very clear."

Climate change survey

Private research commissioned by the energy department - and seen by Channel 4 News - shows the scale of the challenge facing the government as it attempts to persuade people to combat the threat from global warming. Those surveyed didn't see climate change "having a serious impact in the UK". And they wanted the government to do more about the problem before they individually would do their bit.

Worryingly for the government, the research also found "a lack of understanding...of what climate change actually is, how it is caused, what the impact will be, what that might mean to human life and when the consequences might happen".

Not only do ministers have to convince a sceptical public about the effects of global warming, but they also have to persuade people to pay for measures to fight it.

The government estimates that by 2020 the average household energy bill will increase by £92 a year as energy companies pass on to consumers the cost of tackling climate change.

On top of that, many householders will have to dig into their own pockets for energy saving devices around the home.

The government is to encourage householders to pay for loft lagging, cavity wall insulation and other green initiatives by applying for long-term loans from supermarkets, banks, local authorities and energy companies.

[Magda Hassan]

In my opinion the climate debate is one being waged by bankers--one side promoting coal, fossil fuels and other methods of infrastructure which have been linked to a distribution of utilities network that they financed over a period of decades beginning in the 1930's. The other side attempting to create a new infrastructure that could finance "green" industrial distribution--such as solar and wind power. In order to build such a system, there must be adequate demand and a means of paying for the research necessary to build the international distribution network. That takes money. In many ways, scientists are just sophists, who argue for the side which signs their paychecks.

That would seem to be the logical way of looking at it, as old guard "dirty" fuel companies protecting the status quo against innovators with "green" fuel, except that it doesn't seem to be true. I made the same assumption and this is the major talking point of AGW proponents, that critics are being financed by Big Oil. But Shell and BP at least are for international measures against AGW, i.e. carbon trading credit markets, derivatives, etc.

BP are really big in the solar area http://www.bp.com/genericcountryjump.do?...Id=7038143. All of these companies are just looking to make money - period. Any way they can. There is money in oil. There is money in solar energy distribution and manufacture. There is money in carbon trading. Really big money in fact. It isn't an either/or situation. These guys are playing an altogether different game from the one they expect us to play as good little consumer sheep dutifully buying our compact light globes and water saving shower heads.

The one thing there is no money in (for Them) is self sufficiency. This was well understood by the British colonialists as they imposed a hut tax on the African natives who, since they produced their own textiles, food and shelter, saw no need to leave their families and communities to go mining for Cecil Rhodes or De Beeres or build railroads.

[David Guyatt]

In regard to Jan's post above in which the article stated the following:

Lord Lawson, the Conservative former chancellor who has just launched a think tank devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change, told Channel 4 News the advert was "mendacious".

I would merely note that Lord Lawson's son, Dominic ( who writes the Editorial and Opinion sections for The Independent newspaper), is married to Rosa, the sister of Lord Monckton.

[Jan Klimkowski]

In regard to Jan's post above in which the article stated the following:

Lord Lawson, the Conservative former chancellor who has just launched a think tank devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change, told Channel 4 News the advert was "mendacious".

I would merely note that Lord Lawson's son, Dominic ( who writes the Editorial and Opinion sections for The Independent newspaper), is married to Rosa, the sister of Lord Monckton.

Hohoho... :dancing:

Yes, and Dominic Lawson has denied spooky allegations such as the ones here:

Editor 'provided cover for spies'

Plot thickens: Dominic Lawson denies new accusations that he helped MI6 agents when working for the Spectator

MI6's lawyers lose spy book appeal
Pen mightier than the sword
Russian colonel's defection an intelligence coup for Britain

Ian Traynor in Moscow and Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Friday 26 January 2001 08.41 GMT
Article history

Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, has alleged.

He also claimed he was given cover by the Spectator magazine while on a mission to Macedonia to develop contacts with ethnic Albanian politicians.

In his controversial book being published in Russia, Tomlinson, according to book excerpts leaked to the Moscow press, said that in the early 1990s the editor of the Spectator was on MI6's books and provided cover for an agent named as Spencer who was put on the case of a young Russian diplomat, Platon Obukhov, in Tallin, the capital of Estonia.

Tomlinson writes that Mr Lawson's MI6 identity was "Smallbrow". Mr Lawson was the editor of the Spectator from 1990-95 before moving to its sister publication, the Sunday Telegraph.

Mr Lawson yesterday strongly denied both allegations. "It is complete rubbish that I gave journalistic cover to an MI6 officer who wanted to go to Tallin," he added. The Obukhov case triggered the worst spy row between Britain and Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, with each country expelling four diplomats af ter Obukhov was arrested on charges of spying for Britain in April 1996.

According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the bestselling Moscow tabloid which has obtained a copy of the Tomlinson book and has been publishing excerpts this week, Spencer, who joined MI6 at the same time as Tomlinson, was given the job of handling Obukhov, codenamed Masterwork.

"For the meetings with Obukhov, Spencer chose Tallin, the capital of the newly independent state of Estonia which was cosying up to the west," the newspaper quoted the book as saying.

"For the trip Spencer took one of his favourite MI6 covers - journalist. The editor of the Spectator magazine provided him with the cover on condition that Spencer wrote just one article for him."

The agent turned to the MI6 section, I/OPS (Information Operations), that deals with the British media to arrange the bogus journalistic credentials, according to the leak from the Tomlinson book.

"Flippin' outrageous!" Spencer laughed as he came back from his visit to I/OPS. "They've got the editor of the Spectator magazine on the books. He's called Smallbrow," he chuckled.

"He's agreed to let me go out to Tallin undercover as a freelancer for his magazine. The only condition is that I have to write an article which he'll publish if he likes it.

"The cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer!"

Tomlinson also writes that for his mission to Macedonia he was given a letter of accreditation from the Spectator and told by his superiors that if his Albanian interlocutors phoned the Spectator to check on him, Mr Lawson would vouch that Tomlinson was a Spectator journalist.

Mr Lawson's Spectator has been at the centre of a row over MI6 and journalism before. Tomlinson has previously alleged that MI6 agents were asked to write media articles under pseudonyms while in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war.

The Guardian reported in 1998 that the Spectator ran articles by an MI6 officer under a false name during the Bosnian war. The articles were written from Sarajevo by a Kenneth Roberts, though the Spectator noted that the author's name had been changed at his request without revealing his true employer. The MI6 officer has since been publicly identified as Keith Craig.

Mr Lawson yesterday repeated what he said two years ago. "I have never been an agent either paid or unpaid of MI6 or any other government agency."

A Foreign Office spokesman speaking for MI6 said that Mr Tomlinson's claim "comes from someone now wearily familiar as a source of sensational inventions".

Kenneth Roberts also appears in the Tomlinson book as the MI6 agent in Sarajevo whom the rogue agent said he replaced in late 1993.

In the case of Obukhov, the Russian newspaper quoted the Tomlinson book as saying that "Spencer" continued to meet the junior Russian diplomat on a bi-monthly basis in Tallin, then later in Moscow until Russian counter-intelligence arrested Obukhov in Moscow in April 1996. A writer of pulp spy novels who has been in psychiatric care and whose relatives and lawyers said he was a schizophrenic, Obukhov is the son of Alexei Obukhov who was deputy Soviet foreign minister to Eduard Shevardnadze in the Gorbachev era.

After Obukhov was arrested, triggering the tit for tat spy row, the Moscow city court found him unfit to stand trial and ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment which he received from 1997 until July last year when he was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment.

Last month an appeal court overruled the 11-year sentence and Obukhov now faces a new hearing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/jan...publishing

So, given the near certain involvement of intelligence agencies in influencing the debate around climate change, quite what are the various spooky players up to?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Gore cancels on Copenhagen lecture – leaves ticket holders in a lurch
3 12 2009

Former U.S. vice president has canceled his event, more than 3,000 Danes have purchased a ticket. Photo: JOSE MENDEZ

Looks like they will get a refund though. Might be worth more as a collectors item in ten years though.

I wonder how many people have shelled out $1200 to shake Al’s hand? Maybe not enough and he couldn’t cover the expenses for his private jet?

From the Washington Post:

“Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference,” notes the Danish tourism commission, which is helping Mr. Gore promote “Our Choice,” his newest book about global warming in all its alarming modalities.

“Tickets are available in different price ranges for the event. If you want it all, you can purchase a VIP ticket, where you get a chance to shake hands with Al Gore, get a copy of Our Choice and have your picture taken with him. The VIP event costs DKK 5,999 and includes drinks and a light snack.”

Wait, what? How much is that in American dollars? The currency conversion says it all, too: 5,999 Danish kroners is equivalent to $1,209.

“If you do not want to spend that much money, but still want to hear Al Gore speak about his latest book about climate challenges, you can purchase general tickets, ranging in price from DKK 199-1,499 depending on where in the room you want to sit,” the practical Danes advise. “There will be large screens, so that everyone will get a good view.”

Yah, such a deal.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/go...n-a-lurch/

[David Guyatt]

Richard Tomlinson is highly credible imo, and given the fact that Dominic Lawson's brother-in-law, Anthony Monckton, certainly is an MI6 officer then it is becoming clearer that there is a spooky agenda involved in all this. I now suspect that all those UEA emails that started this controversy were hacked by MI6 or one of their deniable assets. The question remains why?

On Lord Lawson the following from Wiki:

In the cabinet reshuffle of September 1981, Lawson was promoted to the position of Secretary of State for Energy. In this role his most significant action was to prepare for what he saw as an inevitable full-scale strike in the coal industry (then state-owned since nationalisation by the post-war government of Clement Attlee) over the closure of pits whose operation accounted for the coal industry's business losses and consequent requirement for state subsidy.

Lawson was a key proponent of the Thatcher Government's privatisation policy. During his tenure at the Department of Energy he set the course for the later privatizations of the gas and electricity industries and on his return to the Treasury he worked closely with the Department of Trade and Industry in privatizing British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas.

In 1998 Lord Lawson joined the Board of Innovest Strategic Risk Advisors Inc. In 2009 RiskMetrics Group acquired Innovest. RiskMetrics was in its earlier days a risk division of J P Morgan but was spun out into private ownership in 1996. Today one of its three prime areas of operation is "Climate Risk Managment" (see: http://www.riskmetrics.com/climate_risk_management)

RiskMetrics' recent acquisition of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors brings together two established firms with deep expertise in the newly emerging field of climate governance and carbon finance. Both organizations have played a significant role over the years in providing timely research and analytics to industry leaders such as Ceres and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

With detailed insight into companies’ financial and competitive risk exposure due to climate change, as well as their disclosures and management practices designed to mitigate that risk, our Climate Risk Management tools help you understand carbon-driven risks and value opportunities:

I believe it is here where interested researchers should focus their attention. RiskMetrics is headquartered at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza NYC.