John Howard: let the climate science debate flourish

Former prime minister and self-professed "climate change agnostic" John Howard has lent his support to a damning new report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Howard has written the foreword to a new report by Cananadian academic Ross McKitrick that accuses the IPCC of entrenched bias, conflicts of interest and poor oversight.

"I am an agnostic when it comes to climate change," Howard writes. "The global financial plunge has highlighted the folly of any nation taking action which harms its own comparative economic advantage."

He warns that attempts to close down the climate change debate are "disgraceful, and must be resisted".

"The intellectual bullying which has been a feature of the behaviour of some global warming zealots, makes this report necessary reading if there is to be an objective assessment of all the arguments."

"What is wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for a radical reform",

McKitrick's report, "What is wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for a radical reform", calls for a radical overhaul of the panel's operating procedures, or for governments to abandon it altogether.

"The IPCC review process ought to be reformed so that it is no less rigorous than that of a standard academic journal," writes McKitrick, a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

He says Australia is one of the few countries to take the process seriously when it comes to appraising the IPCC's work.

The release of the report coincides with the start of the IPCC's annual conference, due to start in Durban, in South Africa, on Monday.