Twice over the last month we have received emails from people who say they just happened to be surfing the web searching their name and found something that we had written that they disagree with.

 Now I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon where there are millions of people at work and home happily “googling” their name to see what happens. If this is true I hope your name is not something like “John Smith”, otherwise you are going to get repetitive strain injury. 

Anyway one of the emails was from Richard D North who, in an “idle egocentric moment,” had been trawling on line and found a letter I had written to the Evening Standard concerning one of his articles. 

Now for those of you who do not know Richard, he has become something of a bete noir of the British environmental movement, a bit like the Canadian corporate lackey, Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore still labels himself a founder of Greenpeace, as he sells his services to various polluting industries, over twenty years after he left the organisation.

North may not be able to claim such kudos on his CV, but does rake up being an ex-environmental correspondent for the Independent to beef up his credentials. But that was a long time ago too and he is now a fellow at two right-wing think tanks the Social Affairs Unit, and Institute of Economic Affairs.

I had written a letter responding to an article by North in the Evening Standard in June last year in which North had argued against pursuing targets on reducing carbon emissions. “May I ask you not to directly misreport my views?” North wrote to me last month, “I have never been a [climate] denier and nor have I ever disputed the value of much of the work corralled by IPCC. I have become more sceptical rather than less over the years. So you couldn't really have got it more wrong.”

In my defence, I hadn’t said that North had got more sceptical over the years, rather that generally “as the weight of scientific evidence has accumulated, the sceptics have had to modify their position as their previous one became untenable. Some now admit that the Earth is warming slightly, but argue it is too expensive to take action. Others claim it is too late to do anything or there is no point unless China acts, too.”

So let’s pick up on two points North makes. Firstly he says he has never been a climate denier. He may not be, but I had called him a “contrarian” and climate sceptic. He certainly continues to take a sceptical view:

On a website that North runs he asks: Is Global Warming really happening? “Almost everyone accepts that the globally averaged world temperature has risen in the past century. But almost everything which flows from that “fact” is disputed” he argues, without mentioning that the majority of the leading climate sceptics who continue to dispute the science are funded by Exxon or linked to right wing think tanks that are industry funded, and ideologically opposed to environmentalists.

North does go on to mention the World Climate Report as “a very good site trawling information which challenges the consensus,” but conveniently forgets to say it is edited by Patrick Michaels. One of the worlds most renowned climate sceptics, Michaels is fossil industry funded and linked to right-wing think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, and the Cooler Heads Coalition, (itself a coalition of right wing think tanks, and coordinated by the Competitive Enterprise Institute).

Elsewhere on the site he says about climate that “we may be watching the beginning of a long-running or pronounced change (or we may not).”  This is certainly not the view of the leading climate scientists who argue that rapid change is occurring now.

Secondly North argues that “nor have I ever disputed the value of much of the work corralled by IPCC.” The slight problem with this one is that North’s website does attack the IPCC, which he says “has produced what looks like a consensus that global warming is real, big, bad, mankind’s fault and merits concerted action. But the “consensus” is not as strong as you might suppose ....There is also a good deal of argument about whether the IPCC process is as open-minded as it ought to be. In particular, there is a widespread belief that the summaries of the IPCC process don't capture the uncertainties of the bulk of the work.” If this is not disputing the work of the IPCC I don’t know what is.

At the top of the Living Issues website is a flashing warning declaring: “This site has a bias against bullshit. We unravel spin.”

I am afraid North has got that one wrong as well.