Steve Baker MP made false and damaging allegations at the Conservative Party conference event about the IPCC, the world’s leading authority on climate science.

He said “The most dramatic and scary IPCC scenarios, the extreme ones that lead to disaster and doom, aren’t going to happen. They are implausible.”

Mr Baker has insinuated here that the IPCC are either incompetent or unscrupulous.

With more than 830 lead authors from 80 countries, and 2000 expert reviewers, the IPCC report is one of the most scientifically robust pieces of work in the world. 

Mr Baker has every right to challenge the strategies used to tackle climate change, but to deny the IPCC report’s validity in the political arena, without commenting on which of the 3949 pages he disagrees with, is unprofessional and not becoming of a Member of Parliament.

Mr Baker has recently admitted he is 'heavily influenced' by the widely discredited author - Bjorn Lomborg. Mr Lomborg has written a book in which he tries to demonstrate that a 7 °C warmer world would only lose 15% of GDP, in stark contrast to the most prestigious medical journals, such as the New England Journal and the British Medical Journal, who wrote a joint editorial along with 200 other health journals calling for urgent action to keep the global average temperature below 1.5°C. This may go some way to explaining why he holds these surprising views.

Mr Baker has been making similar statements recently in the Critic magazine, and has recently become a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Forum, which is a climate skeptics lobby group with undisclosed sources of funding.

MPs are expected, both through the Conservative Party’s Code of Conduct and the Nolan principles of public life duty, to behave in an objective and unbiased manner. Because Mr Baker has repeatedly failed to do so, and because his actions are creating real damage to Net Zero Policy formation, he should have the whip removed immediately and be placed under investigation.