Philip Stott

Philip Stott is professor emeritus of Bio-Geography at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and a former editor (1987–2004) of the Journal of Biogeography. Since retiring from academia he has become a high-profile British climate change denier. Like Bjørn Lomborg - whose work he supports - Stott describes himself as a left of centre environmental "sceptic". "I am a mildly left-wing global warming sceptic."

In a New Statesman article Stott was labelled as "Britain's leading climate-change denier and has built a career on criticising environmentalists. Professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, he has no climate-science qualifications". He is a regular contributor to The Times and is on the Academic Advisory Council of The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK denialist think tank, founded by Nigel Lawson, whose stated aims are to challenge "extremely damaging and harmful policies put forward to deal with global warming", which in reality, is probably less damaging than living through the effects of uncontrolled climate change.

He also appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle and presented himself as "an expert debunker of environmental myths".

Stott calls global warming "a politico-(pseudo)scientific construct". His dominant theme is that environmentalism is a "hegemonic myth" promulgated in the media by reporters who are subconsciously controlled by the dominant language ("words of magic"). He asserts "'Tropical rain forest' does not exist as an object; it is a human construct and is thus subject to myth making on a grand scale," and says, "forests are never 'developed' or simply 'used'; they can only be 'exploited'". How this is supposed to be translated into anything useful, such as governing policy, is unclear.

Quotes
"In Europe, the story of human-made global warming has become almost as unassailable as the Genesis creation story in parts of the American Bible Belt. It has morphed into a hegemonic myth."

"Global warming ‘has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices’" (Global Warming Politics, May 18, 2009)

"In terms of world systems, the rainforests are basically irrelevant. World weather is governed by the oceans - that great system of ocean atmospherics. Most things that happen on land are mere blips to the system, basically insignificant"