What’s up with Conservative peer Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, which opposes efforts to mitigate climate change? It has had to put off the creation of a new lobbying arm in response to pressure from the Charity Commission about its campaign tactics.

It’s the latest twist in a rumbling row over its status. The foundation was registered in early 2009 as an educational charity and company, but its official launch was delayed until November that year, when it was able to the release onto the web of e-mails that had been hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. These were used by climate change sceptics to try to undermine researchers.

What will the partial loss of charitable status mean for Lawson’s group? For starters, it has allowed the foundation’s funders to collect tax relief on donations. However, it’s unlikely to change its intention to keep the identity of its funders , although UK newspaper The Guardian that they include the billionaire Michael Hintze, a former donor to the Conservative party.

As a result of all this, the foundation earlier this year that it was planning to establish the Global Warming Policy Forum in July, which will not be covered by charity regulations and so will be able to continue the campaign against UK and European Union policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This has now been delayed until September.

Under scrutiny

The move to create a lobbying arm is a response to scrutiny by the Charity Commission, which regulates UK charities, of the foundation’s compliance with its . These state that “political activity can only be in the context of supporting the delivery of its charitable purposes” and that use of emotive “material must be factually accurate and have a legitimate evidence base”.

In June 2013, I raised with the commission about whether the foundation was complying, because it was giving out information about climate change that was inaccurate and misleading.

The response from the commission has been painfully slow, consisting primarily of an extended “dialogue” with the trustees of the foundation. However, during this period, none of its activities that breach the guidelines has been curtailed. For instance, in February, Lawson was interviewed on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, during which he made a number of about the science of climate change. The BBC later that the interview breached editorial guidelines on accuracy in news programmes.

In disguise

Although I have attempted to remain in contact with the commission since, I have received very little information, and I did not learn about the foundation’s plan to launch a lobbying arm until it issued a press release in May. The commission later told me that this means the foundation will have to distinguish on its website between material produced by the charitable arm, which will be covered by the requirement for accuracy, and its political lobbying, which will not.

I remain sceptical that this is enough to safeguard the public from inaccurate and misleading information being put out under the guise of charitable activities.

I have appealed to the commission about the slow and ineffective action it has taken. The backdrop to this is a December 2013 from the National Audit Office that was highly critical of it, concluding that it is “not regulating charities effectively”.

As long as the commission continues to dither, there remains a serious risk that journalists, politicians and the public will continue to be misled about the veracity of the foundation’s claims about climate change.

A damning verdict on the BBC’s coverage of climate change has just been delivered, and rightly so.

As the UK’s most trusted media outlet, the BBC is vital to the public debate, which is why the criticisms, published this week by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in its report, are so important.

The BBC has some of the best science and environment correspondents in the world, but its coverage of climate issues is being hampered by extremely woolly thinking among editors and senior managers.

In his to the committee last year, David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, revealed that the corporation’s management had decided to disregard a warning about the dangers of giving too much airtime and space to climate change sceptics, which was contained in a for the BBC Trust by the geneticist Steve Jones.

Extraordinarily, Jordan also , both known for their scepticism. He made no mention of any meetings with scientists.

The lobbying campaign by sceptics has clearly had an impact. The result has been a continued betrayal of the public interest. The BBC has frequently sacrificed accuracy in favour of a by broadcasting inaccurate and misleading statements from sceptics.

However, the corporation should not be seeking to be impartial between scientific facts and sceptic fictions, but should instead be objectively striving for the truth.

Live interviews with sceptics present the BBC with one of its biggest challenges – presenters lack detailed knowledge of the issues and are usually poorly briefed.

If the BBC wants to air the views of sceptics purely because they disagree with mainstream scientists, they should keep a record of those who persistently make inaccurate and misleading statements.

Then this register can be taken into account when making decisions about potential interviewees, and alert editors to the need to be extra vigilant.

At a , an additional potential solution was put forward by Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat MP who is now associate director of Hacked Off, which campaigns for the implementation of the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry, which examined media practices and ethics.

Harris suggested that every interview involving a sceptic should be followed by an objective analysis by one of the BBC’s science or environment correspondents, who would then have an opportunity to correct any false statements. This set-up is already used for political interviews on some news programmes, which are followed by a summary from a BBC political correspondent.

What is clear is that the BBC is harming the public interest by sacrificing accuracy for impartiality in its coverage of climate change. It should use the committee’s report as an opportunity to correct its flawed approach and so improve its service to the public.

The “deniergate” documents, as they have been rapidly dubbed, appear to reveal details of the institute’s past and future planned funding arrangements, including the names of many donors. They also show major activities apparently planned by the institute this year, including efforts to influence public debate about climate change.

The institute describes its mission as “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems”. Heartland has been particularly active in lobbying against environmental regulation of businesses in the US, stating on its website that .

Donors divulged

Its website notes that Heartland “does not reveal to the public the identities of its donors or the amount of their gifts”. However, the names of many of its secret donors have now been made public in the internal memos. One of the documents, a 29-page paper labelled indicates that the institute hopes to raise $7.7 million this year from sources such as the , reputedly a major funder of the Tea Party movement, and companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Microsoft Corporation, Pfizer, Reynolds American (which owns a number of tobacco firms) and Time Warner Cable.

Much of the funding has been earmarked for specific initiatives, according to the document, including the , which is expected to gain support from “investors in drug companies” because “many wealthy individuals have strong personal motivation to see faster access to potentially life-saving new drugs become a reality”.

However, it is the funding for activities related to climate change that have attracted the most interest since the documents were posted on the websites of environmental campaign groups such as .

Planned projects

According to the papers, one “anonymous donor” gave $13.3 million to the institute between 2007 and 2011, including $8.6 million for “global warming projects”.

The fundraising plan also suggests that the same donor will give $1.25 million this year, including $338,000 for three activities related to climate change, such as the development of teaching materials for schools. These materials would, for instance, emphasise “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO₂ is a pollutant is controversial”.

The plan indicates that the schools project will be led by David Wojick, who the institute describes as “a consultant with the Office of Science and Technical Information at the US Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science”.

The institute is also seeking funding for “an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change” to work on the update of a volume which is described as “the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports”.

Flow of funds

A 33-page document headed outlines proposed payments to members of the network, including , , formerly of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, of James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, and of the in Cambridge, Massachusetts – all well-known climate-change sceptics.

However, the budget document does not include any arrangements for a major gathering of climate-change sceptics of the sort that the institute has organised in previous years. A featured speeches from members of the institute’s network, as well as sceptics from other countries, including the controversial right-wing British blogger, .

The institute strikes back

Responding through a , the Heartland Institute has alleged that the documents were stolen by “an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to ‘re-send’ board materials to a new email address”.

The institute’s release claimed that a two-page document posted alongside the other papers on the website of DeSmogBlog and headed “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” is “a total fake”.

The release also attacked those who had been discussing the documents in the mainstream and social media, complaining: “Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behaviour should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.”

However, many commentators have pointed out that the institute was very quick to publicise the emails which were hacked from the University of East Anglia in Norwich and posted on websites in November 2009, creating the “climategate” controversy.

Indeed, in November the institute seized on the publication of a second batch of hacked emails from the university. , , senior fellow for environment policy at the institute, quoted extensively from a number of messages, offering the justification that “[m]ore than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly released emails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientific shortcomings of global warming assertions”.

It is not known who obtained and distributed the documents from the Heartland Institute. They were sent together with an email, a copy of which was received by the science writer , which began:

It remains to be seen whether the “deniergate” documents generate as much sustained controversy as the climategate emails.

Those new graduates who want to go on into research know the way ahead
will not be easy in these days of tiny grants, shortage of places and so
on. But many of the gifted young women among them who succeed in graduating
with good degrees and contemplate a career in scientific research may find
that the odds are positively stacked against them. Women are still less
likely than their male contemporaries to take their place in university
science departments.

Women are underrepresented throughout most of Britain’s higher education
system. According to figures published by the Universities’ Statistical
Record (USR), women made up just 22.4 per cent of the 52 152 full-time academic
staff employed in Britain’s ‘old universities’ (that excludes polytechnics
that are now universities) during 1992. They made up 45 per cent of the
87 073 first-degree graduates and 36.7 per cent of the 41 616 higher-degree
graduates from the ‘old’ universities in 1993. This situation is particularly
acute in science where the number of women decreases disproportionately
at each successive step of the academic hierarchy, creating a pyramid of
underrepresentation in universities, with its apex of only 25 women out
of a total of 1394 professors in the biological, mathematical and physical
sciences.

At undergraduate level, where according to the USR 39.8 per cent of
the 1992 entrants to full-time undergraduate courses in the biological,
mathematical and physical sciences were women, underrepresentation is primarily
due to the relatively low numbers of female school-leavers who choose to
pursue degrees in science subjects, and is therefore beyond the direct
control of universities.

Universities do, however, control the transition from undergraduate
to postgraduate study as was duly noted in a government study – The Rising
Tide: a Report on Women in Science, Engineering and Technology – published
in February by the Office of Science and Technology. The report stated:
‘The underrepresentation of women in SET subjects at undergraduate level
is accentuated at postgraduate level.’

Close inspection of figures from the USR reveals the extent of this
‘accentuation’. One of the largest discrepancies is in biology – the number
of women among first-degree graduates (excluding overseas students who left
the Britain following graduation) increased from 692 out of 1538 graduates
(45 per cent) in 1981, to 1012 out of 1761 (57.8 per cent) in 1993, while
the percentage among higher-degree graduates rose during the same period
from 30.1 per cent (123 out of a total of 409 graduates) to 43.8 per cent
(198 out of 452). Even when comparing the number of first degrees with those
for higher degrees from four years later – to allow for any time-lag effect
in the trends – there is an average reduction between graduates and postgraduates
each year of 15.5 per cent. Indeed, women still comprised a smaller percentage
of higher-degree graduates in 1993 than they did of first-degree graduates
in 1981.

Lest there be a temptation towards complacency in other disciplines,
it should be noted that a similar disparity also occurred between first
and higher-degree levels, though less markedly, in chemistry, geology and
physics because of the smaller percentage of women in these disciplines.

Why are women less likely than their male contemporaries to obtain higher
degrees in scientific disciplines? Unfortunately the OST report had no explanation
to offer for this, the second level of the pyramid of underrepresentation
in British academic science. Yet, without identifying the causes for the
existence of the lower levels of the pyramid, it seems unrealistic for the
government’s Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Committee to hope
for a blunting of the pyramid’s apex by reaching a target of women occupying
25 per cent of public appointments and senior positions by the year 2000.
Unless universities and the research councils try to find out what is really
going wrong at postgraduate level specifically, it is hard to see why the
past trends would not persist into the future.

The OST is now considering the recommendations contained in The Rising
Tide. At the same time, it is conducting a consultation exercise on the
future of postgraduate education and training. Curiously, the document which
the OST has issued on postgraduate study, A New Structure for Postgraduate
Research Training Supported by the Research Councils, has nothing to say
about the disproportionately small number of women graduating with a PhD
or MSc.

In the absence of any other research on the subject, I would suggest
four possible factors underpinning the second level of the pyramid of underrepresentation.
Women graduating with first degrees may be less likely to achieve the academic
standards which are prerequisites for postgraduate study, apply for postgraduate
study when they have the right qualifications, secure a postgraduate place,
even when their qualifications are as good as, or better than those of their
male counterparts, and complete a higher degree once they have started it.

It would be interesting to know whether readers of ��è����Ƶ have
any evidence indicating which of these (or other) reasons are responsible
for the second level of the pyramid of women’s underrepresentation in higher
education science

It is now a year since the White Paper on a strategy for science, engineering
and technology declared: ‘Women are the country’s biggest single most undervalued
and therefore underused human resource.’ Yet the fact remains that less
than 1 in six of the 14 000 full-time staff teaching and researching science
at universities are women. It is time that scientists, both male and female,
examined the reasons for this waste of potential. If the steady stream
of talented women turning their backs on a career in academia can be stemmed,
the effect on science will be nothing less than revolutionary.

Bob Ward is completing a PhD in geology at the University of Manchester
and works part-time as a statistician for the Higher Education Careers Services
Unit.

An increasing number of professors and students alike are expressing
concern about the current value of maintenance grants. Recently, postgraduates
have lost eligibility for housing benefit; been excluded from the student
loans scheme; seen all but a small fraction of the money in Access Funds
withheld from existing students; and been hit by crippling interest payments
on private loans to make up shortfalls in the grants.

The average starting salary for a first-degree graduate in science,
engineering and technology is £11 681 a year, according to the Autumn
1991 Statistical Quarterly Salary Survey by the Careers Service Unit. A
grant from the SERC or Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), meanwhile,
equates to a wage of significantly less than £5000, even when income
tax, poll tax and national insurance allowances are accounted for.

So, just who is responsible for maintaining the postgraduate poverty
trap?

Alan Howarth, minister in charge of science and higher education, wrote
in ��è����Ƶ on 26 January 1991 that: ‘The general postgraduate maintenance
. . . is the highest in real terms for nearly 20 years.’ He added: ‘. .
. the research councils are independent bodies, free, within the terms of
their royal charters and the resources made available to them, to make their
own decisions about expenditure on postgraduate support.’

These comments followed the announcement by the NERC and the SERC, during
the summer of 1990, that maintenance grants were to rise by 10.74 per cent,
to £4123 a year, for the 1990-91 academic year. But by retaining
the extra money until 1 April 1991, the Department of Education and Science
deprived most students of the full increment until the 1991-92 session,
since most postgraduates start their degrees on 1 October. Research students
were angered by this chicanery, and viewed Howarth’s assurance with scepticism.

What are the views of those companies who recruit PhD graduates? If
graduates are discouraged from undertaking postgraduate studies, this will
mean a drop in the overall quality of PhD graduates, to the detriment of
industry’s recruitment prospects. Yet British companies claim this issue
is too political for their involvement.

This short-sightedness is reflected in figures which appear to show
that British companies are less committed than their overseas competitors
to the long-term aims of civil research in science. Last year, Britain invested
just 1.8 per cent of its GDP in civil research and development, compared
with 2.7 per cent for Germany. This includes the 0.28 per cent which was
spent on basic science. Both of these percentages have fallen during the
last five years in Britain, while the proportions in the leading industrial
nations have been growing.

The private sector accounts for more than half of British spending on
civil R&D, and has matched the government in the ability to trail its
international counterparts: for every £1 per employee invested by
a British company last year, more than £2 was spent by American companies
and nearly £3 by German companies. The future of scientific research
looks just as precarious held in the greased palms of industry as it does
clenched between the tight fists of this government.

However, changes may be afoot for Britain’s research students. Last
summer, the NERC appealed for opinions on a proposal to increase its grants
to £5000 a year, although this would reduce by 11 per cent the number
of awards that they could make. Then, the Medical Research Council and the
Agricultural and Food Research Councils decided to increase the value of
their three-year studentships to £5590 and £5000 a year respectively,
from 1 October.

Even if the NERC and SERC fall into line with the other research councils,
probably by cutting the number of studentships on offer, is £5000
really a sufficient level of maintenance? In its strategy for improving
British science, Nature is calling for a doubling of the present grant values.
This should help to raise the consciousness of the political parties towards
the plight of the nation’s young researchers. The message should become
clearer if research students, their colleagues and families, add their voices
through writing to their MPs in the run-up to the forthcoming general election.
While postgraduate maintenance grant values remain so pitiful, it will not
just be research students in geology who find themselves stuck between a
rock and a hard place!

Bob Ward is in the final year of an NERC-funded research studentship
in geology.