Robert Merlin "Bob" Carter was an English palaeontologist, stratigrapher and marine geologist. He was professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia from 1981 to 1998, and was prominent in promoting climate change denial.
Early life and education
Carter was born in Reading, England on 9 March 1942 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1956, where he attended Lindisfarne College. He obtained a B.Sc. in geology from the University of Otago in 1963 and returned to England to complete a Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of Cambridge in 1968. His doctoral thesis was titled The Functional Morphology of Bivalved Mollusca.
Carter was critical of the IPCC and believed statements about dangerous human-caused global warming to be unjustified. He was on the research committee of the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian free-market think tank which promotes climate change denial, and connected with its subsidiary think-tanks. In April 2006, he argued against climate change being "man-made" by asserting that the global average temperature "had stopped" for the eight years since 1998, while the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased. Chris Mooney refers to this article as an early example of statistically misleading use of the short period from the exceptionally strong El Niño year of 1998 which had set a temperature record. In 2007, Carter participated in an expert panel discussion after the airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary on ABC. His position on global warming was criticized by other scientists such as David Karoly, James Renwick and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. In 2007, Wendy Frew, an environmental reporter with The Sydney Morning Herald, stated Carter "appears to have little standing in the Australian climate science community." He published several critiques of global warming in economics journals. In 2009, he co-authored a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which argued that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation accounted for most of the global temperature variation of the last fifty years. A rebuttal by nine other scientists was published in the same issue. Carter appeared as a witness before the 2009 select committee on climate policy of the Parliament of Australia, and testified before the United States Senate on the issue of human-caused climate change. He appeared in the media speaking for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a contrarian report backed by The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank opposed to climate change responses. He was a contributor and reviewer of their 2009 report Climate Change Reconsidered, and lead author of the 2011 interim report. In 2012, documents acquired from The Heartland Institute think tank revealed that Carter was paid a monthly fee of US$1,667 "as part of a program to pay 'high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist message'." While Carter did not deny that the payments took place, he declined to discuss the payments. Carter emphatically denied that his scientific opinion on climate change could be bought.
