James Delingpole

James Mark Court Delingpole (born 6 August 1965) is an English writer, journalist, and columnist who has written for a number of publications, including the '' Daily Mail'', the '' Daily Express'', ''The Times'', ''The Daily Telegraph'', and ''The Spectator''. He is a former executive editor for Breitbart London, and has published several novels and four political books. He describes himself as a libertarian conservative. He has frequently published articles promoting climate change denial and expressing opposition to wind power.

Education and early life

Delingpole grew up near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, the son of a factory owner. He attended Malvern College from 1978 to 1983, an independent school for boys, followed by Christ Church, Oxford (1983–1986), where he studied English language and literature.

Career

In addition to writing articles and commentary for the '' Daily Mail'', the '' Daily Express'', ''The Times'', ''The Daily Telegraph'', and ''The Spectator'', Delingpole has published four political books including: ''How to be Right: The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History'', ''Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work'', and ''365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy''. His writing for the book ''Welcome to Obamaland'' has been called an "engaging, witty writing style" and "at least original and amusing" by otherwise critical author John Wright.

Delingpole is the author of several novels including ''Fin'' and ''Thinly Disguised Autobiography''. In August 2007, Bloomsbury published his first novel of the "''Coward''" series, ''Coward on the Beach'', which tells the story of a man's reluctant quest for military glory and is set on the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day landings. In June 2009 the second novel of the series, ''Coward at the Bridge'' (set during Operation Market Garden in September 1944), was published.

In 2005, Delingpole presented the Channel 4 documentary ''The British Upper Class'', which was part of a series of three documentaries on the class system in Britain. Writing in ''The Guardian'', the television reviewer Charlie Brooker concludes that "Delingpole succeeds in improving the image of the upper classes. Whenever he opens his mouth to defend them, they magically become 50 times less irritating. Than him."

On environmental issues, Delingpole has written with scepticism regarding the impact and consequences of man's activities on climate change, and has been highly critical of wind farms. He has called wind turbines "environmentally damaging" and suggested that they deface the countryside.

In 2012, Delingpole began ''Bogpaper'', a satirical blog, with Jan Skoyles. In 2013, Delingpole apologised after describing an article by a fellow journalist, which attacked the views of columnist Suzanne Moore, as giving her "such a seeing-to, she'll be walking bow-legged for weeks."

In 2015, Delingpole was named as a source for Lord Ashcroft's unauthorised biography of David Cameron (co-authored with journalist Isabel Oakeshott), ''Call Me Dave'', about Cameron's time at university, in which Delingpole claims to have smoked cannabis with the future PM.

Anthropogenic global warming

Delingpole has repeatedly promoted climate change denial. In September 2009 he used his ''Daily Telegraph'' blog to join other denial bloggers in spreading and amplifying allegations made by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit blog, falsely accusing the Climatic Research Unit tree-ring climatologist Keith Briffa of wrongly selecting a particular tree-ring data series. Delingpole blogged "How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie", arguing that this discredited the 1998 hockey stick graph, though in fact that study did not use any of the data in question. He also alleged that this discredited the scene in ''An Inconvenient Truth'' where Al Gore walks beside a graph relating past temperatures to , then has to use a platform lift to reach the projected future curve, but that graph was based on Lonnie Thompson's ice core data, not tree rings, and the projected curve was for levels, not temperature.

In a November 2009 ''Telegraph'' blog post titled "Climategate: The Final Nail in the Coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?", Delingpole popularised the term "Climategate" referring to the Climatic Research Unit email controversy. He also said that he does not have a science degree, but is "a believer in empiricism and not spending taxpayers' money on a problem that may well not exist." In May 2010 he gave a 15-minute talk to The Heartland Institute's conference, and said that it reused a term he had seen in a follow-up comment to the Watts Up With That? blog. He quipped that "Climategate" was "the story that would change my life and, quite possibly, save Western civilisation from the greatest threat it has ever known".

Subsequent investigations have cleared the scientists involved of any wrongdoing.

At various times, Delingpole has said he does not dispute that global warming has occurred, but doubts the extent to which it is man-made ("anthropogenic") or catastrophic.

In the BBC
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