The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a global warming skeptic organization that focuses its efforts on research and education surrounding advancement of public policies for energy and the environment.

The SPPI was formerly known as the Center for Science and Public Policy for the Frontiers of Freedom, which was founded by former Republican senator and directing member of the El Paso Natural Gas Company Malcolm Wallop in February of 1995 (Axelrod, 2004).

As of 2008, the organization's executive director was Robert Ferguson, former chief of staff to several Republican members of Congress. The SPPI's membership includes prominent climate change skeptics. Its chief policy advisor is Christopher Monckton, a former advisor to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Its chief scientific advisor is Willie Soon, who is an astrophysicist and geoscientist by training and a proponent of the theory that climate change is caused by solar variation and not by human activities (Botterill, 2003). The activities of the SPPI are supported by money from tobacco and oil companies, including Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, and ExxonMobil. Since 1998, the SPPI has received $467,000 from ExxonMobil.

The SPPI funded a film titled Apocalypse? No! (2008), created to refute the theories highlighted in the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) The SPPI's other projects and publications also center on environmentalist skeptism. In July, 2008, SPPI policy advisor Monckton published in the journal Physics and Society an article arguing that computer models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were preprogrammed with erroneous values. These values, according to Monckton, effectively resulted in a 500 to 2000 percent overestimate of carbon-dioxide-induced effects on temperature that was reported in the 2007 U.N. climate assessment report. The SPPI is closely affiliated with other notable global warming skeptic organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

The SPPI has programs to continually monitor and review publications and projects centered on climate change. For example, SPPI's ScareWatch program provides annotated bibliographies of publications that cover the negative implications of global warming and attempts to rebut and discredit organizations and individuals affiliated with such publications.

References

1. Axelrod, Regina S., David Leonard Downie, and Norman J. Vig, eds. The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004.

2. Botterill, Linda C., and Melanie Fisher, eds. Beyond Drought: People, Policy, and Perspectives. Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO, 2003.

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