Of the many e-mails that clogged my computer last week, pegged to the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, one kept evading the “delete” button. It came from the Scientific Alliance (SA), an organisation located in the St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge. I assumed that it was connected with Cambridge University (it is not).

The e-mail, sent by its director Martin Livermore, alerted me to the “Frazer Institute Independent Summary for Policymakers (sic)”. This, Livermore stated, was “an alternative, unbiased view of the state of climate change science, for comparison with the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers”.

He was referring to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market think-tank that has received money from ExxonMobil (the SA has not). This institute, like so many others that have pocketed the ExxonMobil shilling, disputes the scientific consensus that mankind is warming the planet. Which led me to ponder who Martin Livermore is, and what his organisation stands for.

According to its website (www.scientific-alliance.org ), it “provides a forum for addressing environmental problems based on sound science”. Note the word “sound”. Here is its policy on climate change: “We believe that a balanced debate based on reason and sound scientific evidence is called for, before putting drastic . . . policies into effect.” Here, “sound” seems to mean “certain”, an impossibility in science.

The SA’s letters page contains a lively spat with the Royal Society. Livermore suggests the RS wants to “close down debate” through questioning the motives of climate-change sceptics, and contends that the IPCC report represents a “political synthesis”. The RS responds that the “work of the IPCC is supported by the world’s scientific academies and other leading scientific organisations”.

Which invites this revealing response from Dr Jack Barrett at the SA: “The Royal Society pours scorn on organisations which derive funding from oil companies, but the scientists of the IPCC enjoy funding from the greatest gravy train ever invented — put the frighteners on funding bodies and they cough up gladly.”

According to www.sourcewatch.org , Ascham Associates was founded by one Martin Livermore, who boasts a 25-year record of working for such companies as DuPont and Unilever. Can a person previously involved in “managing major food ingredients R&D programmes” really claim a lofty neutrality on such environmental topics as GM foods?

As luck would have it, we can glean Livermore’s views on just this topic in letters of his published in The Guardian (“Genetic modification is a valuable tool which can be used to produce more desirable environmental outcomes”) and the Ascham Associates website, which dismisses the precautionary principle as “of no help in rational decision-making”.

Reader, I hit “delete”.