In the April/May 2009 Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, Paul Maynard and I published an article entitled Let Cool Heads Prevail, expressing grave scientific doubt about the supposed magnitude of the anthropogenic effect on global temperature, and providing substantial evidence from the published data and from the peer-reviewed literature.

Our article caught the insurance industry by surprise. Lloyds of London had publicly issued blood-curdling warnings of the climatic terrors allegedly to come. The Prince of Wales had established Climate Wise, a group of leading figures in the insurance market committed, in effect, to peddling and promulgating the scare, and to silencing all dissent. The market was sewn up. How, then, could no less an organ of academic opinion than the Journal have allowed two heretics – one of them a very senior and widely-respected in the insurance world – to publish a substantial and well-referenced paper demonstrating that the scare was scientifically baseless?

20th-century warming: less than had been thought SPPI's authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for September 2009 reproduces a research paper by Dr. Joe D'Aleo showing that global temperatures over the past century, corrected for urban bias and other errors in the current datasets, have changed by far less than official sources suggest.