Dominic Lawson's father
Nigel was a climate change sceptic and served as chairman of the
Global Warming Policy Foundation. Dominic Lawson has written numerous articles in various UK media outlets disputing the scientific consensus on the harms of
climate change and criticising environmental protests. In March 2006, Lawson wrote an article for
The Independent in which he stated that, because the UK accounted for only 2% of global CO2 emissions, a reduction of those emissions to zero would create 'no statistically significant effect on the future of the world's climate'. Questioning 'the assumption that global warming is indeed the looming Armageddon', Lawson stated that 'there is a significant minority of genuine experts in the field who believe that the Armageddon scenario is grossly oversold, especially by climatologists in pursuit of government funding and research grants'. He added that the 'anti-global warming campaign' resembles an 'established religion', which 'like many primitive religions [...] is based around sun-worship, and the fear of natural catastrophe, such as a flood that will drown us all'. In response to the article, Dr Douglas Parr, Chief Scientific Advisor at
Greenpeace UK, wrote that Lawson 'uses classic, erroneous apologist arguments for doing nothing about climate change'. In March 2008, in an article for
The Independent, Lawson drew attention to the use of private jets by
Arnold Schwarzenegger and of ministerial cars by government ministers such as
Ed Balls and
Shaun Woodward, asking 'if ministers truly believe what they say about the dire threat of irreversible and murderous climate change through man-made carbon emissions, how could they simultaneously behave in such a casually wasteful manner?' He suggested that 'the ministers, deep down, don't really believe the conventional wisdom' on climate change, and that this was reflected in their policy proposals. In October 2009, in an article for
The Independent, Lawson cited the work of
Ken Caldeira to argue that 'increases in carbon dioxide can be a positive benefit' to biodiversity, and the work of
Nathan Myhrvold to argue that increases in CO2 follow increases in global temperature, rather than vice versa. He wrote that 'this might help to explain why the recorded temperature of the planet has not increased at all over the past 11 years' (a reference to a
global warming hiatus). He argued that if 'our political leaders are not mistaken in taking the view that the threat to mankind does come from the greenhouse effect and its consequences', a possible solution lay in
geoengineering, through the release of
sulphur dioxide to simulate the effects of volcanoes. In an article in
The Sunday Times in September 2013, Lawson said that the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had played down the recent
global warming hiatus, a 'standstill in the global average temperature' from 1998 to 2013, 'a total of 15 years in which no increased warming trend in global land average temperatures has been detected'. In November 2016, in an article in
The Sunday Times, Lawson called the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 'a plan by western governments to penalise their own industrial base, to the benefit of the economies of China and the rest of the developing world', and described the 2008
Climate Change Act as an 'act of virtue-signalling' and a 'unilateral and monstrous act of self-harm'. Lawson criticised
Extinction Rebellion (XR), stating that the aims of the group were 'to reduce us to a state of mere subsistence, last seen in the pre-industrial age when life was (for the great majority) nasty, brutish and short'. He said that the protests lacked a scientific foundation, writing that 'the Extinction Rebellion panic seems more reliant on skunk than science for its inspiration'. In August 2021 he wrote that the 'XR faithful', in promoting
degrowth, had failed to recognise the role of western consumerism and developing world industrialisation, in alleviating global poverty. In April 2024, Lawson wrote an article for
The Sunday Times criticising a recent speech by
Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which he reportedly said that 'We have two years to save the world'. Lawson stated that 'experts' never make 'claims of imminent planetary doom', 'since none of the scientific reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned of human or planetary extinction as a result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions'. In August 2025, Lawson wrote an article for
The Sunday Times entitled 'We'd rather gush pieties than benefit from oil and gas', in which he argued that the Prime Minister of the UK,
Sir Keir Starmer, and the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero,
Ed Miliband, would look like 'naive exceptions' at the forthcoming
COP30 climate conference in
Belem, since their government had banned new oil and gas exploration, 'something no other producing nation is doing'. ==References==