Christopher Essex

Christopher Essex is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research areas include radiation thermodynamics, anomalous diffusion and chaos, dynamical systems and predictability.

Essex is also a contributing author to publications of the Fraser Institute think tank, including the 2007 "Independent Summary for Policymakers", and the 2002 "Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming," which argues that calculations of average temperatures showing global warming are inaccurate. However, science blogger Tim Lambert showed that their claim was based on miscalculations.

On global warming
Essex is a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank.

Essex's page on the University of Western Ontario's website features a picture of him ice skating, with the caption, "I skate on global warming!"

Essex signed onto a December 2007 open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that called global warming "a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages," called carbon dioxide "a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis," and claimed the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports "quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity." The letter also stated, "Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability."

In a June 2007 column, Essex wrote, "There is no such thing as global temperature. And if there is no global temperature, how can there be global warming?"

In November 2006, Canada's Conservative government appointed Essex to the 21-member Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which oversees hundred of millions of dollars in research grants to Canadian universities. Critics were concerned his appointment would weaken support for climate research. "If you put someone in who doesn't believe in climate change and sees no urgency to fight against human-related climate change, you then skew the entire debate," said New Democratic Party member of Parliament Nathan Cullen. "It's a Republican-style approach where you fund the skeptics."

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Global warming skeptics
 * Heartland Institute
 * International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
 * SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

External articles

 * Christopher Essex, "Climate Change and the Laughter of the Gods", Presentation to the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (2009), March 10, 2009. (PowerPoint)