Tom Harris, the Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition and a former PR executive with the High Park Group, was one of the organisers of the Copenhagen Climate Challenge as an alternative to COP15 conference. The conference was co-sponsored by the U.S.-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Danish group, Climate Sense. Speakers, dubbed in promotional material as "climate realists", featured high-profile skeptics including S. Fred Singer, Professor Ian Plimer and Christopher Monckton. John Vidal reports in The Guardian that the only clue he could find to the location of the conference was a sticker depicting "a happy-looking Eskimo standing on a clearly melting ice flow with a cheerful sun beaming down on him and his ice-cream under the words 'Hurra global warming'". One journalist noted that the conference was attended by only 60 people, comprising 15 journalists, 18 speakers and 27 audience members. One journalist estimated that the audience had "an average age well above 60" while another noted that attendees were "exclusively male".

Fred Singer is one of the veteran climate change skeptics appearing at the Have Humans Changed the Climate? conference in Brussels hosted by Roger Helmer, a British Conservative Party representative in the European Parliament. Billed as speaking on the topic of "Why can’t we trust IPCC?" [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], Singer staked out a position that even other sceptics disagree with. "We are certainly putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However there is no evidence that this high CO2 is making a detectable difference," he claimed. Singer, who has been a consultant to oil companies and the now defunct Global Climate Coalition, has also been a critic of regulatory restrictions on secondhand tobacco smoke. Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said that "conferences like this are designed to create confusion and play into the very understandable psychology of denial that most humans have ... This is what these people are relying on. Some are funded by fossil fuel companies so it is a very simple motivation, others have more complex reasons, but it does not change the fact they are wrong."

The Australian government's peak scientific research body, the CSIRO, has suppressed a research paper by one of its own environmental economists because it is critical of the design of the proposed 'cap and trade' greenhouse gas emissions reduction scheme. A paper by Dr. Clive Spash had been accepted for publication by the journal, New Political Economy. However, CSIRO managers wrote to the editor insisting that it not be published. In his paper, Dr. Spash warned that the design of emission trading schemes were skewed to favour vested interests rendering them economically inefficient. Nicola Berkovic reports that Dr. Spash's argues that in Australia "large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction" and that "carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes "crowded out" voluntary action by individuals." The chief executive of the CSIRO, Dr Megan Clark, is currently considering whether publication of the paper can proceed or not. Clark previously worked as a senior executive with two major mining companies, BHP-Billiton and Western Mining Corporation.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a California-based power utility, has resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over what the utility's chairman and CEO, Peter Darbee, describes as "fundamental differences" over climate change policy. PG&E's resignation was sparked by moves by the Chamber of Commerce to challenge a determination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases from motor vehicle emissions endanger public health and welfare. In a letter to the chamber, Darbee wrote, "We find it dismaying that the Chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored. In our opinion, an intellectually honest argument over the best policy response to the challenges of climate change is one thing; disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of these challenges are quite another." PG&E supplies power from gas, nuclear, renewable energy and some coal-fired sources.

Pharmaceutical companies can't market unapproved or "off-label" uses for their prescription drugs, under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules. But the same companies' medical science liaisons (MSLs), "who are considered medical rather than sales staff, have greater freedom than salespeople as they visit doctors offices to discuss the science behind a medicine, including unapproved uses," reports the Wall Street Journal. Moreover, the number of industry MSLs is increasing. Dr. Jane Chin, a former MSL for Aventis and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, quit after being "pressured to do more for the sales team. ... Some pharma companies have the impression if you just hire somebody [with a professional degree] and you call them an MSL, it doesn't matter what they say." She now heads the MSL Institute, which provides ethical training. Novartis, "which has one of the largest MSL staffs in the industry," says it buffers its MSLs from marketing pressures by not giving MSLs "incentives for sales in their territories." The FDA allows "drug companies to respond to unsolicited requests for information from doctors, including off-label data, if they provide truthful, nonpromotional material."

According to ExxonMobil's 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report and Worldwide Giving Report, the oil giant is still funding global warming skeptics. Following an unprecedented rebuke from Britain's Royal Society in 2006, Exxon said it would stop funding -- in the Society's words -- groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change." However, Exxon funding is still flowing to the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, the home of skeptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Baliunas "built her denial career downplaying the significance of the destruction of the ozone layer," at the George C. Marshall Institute, an Exxon-funded think tank. Soon has "become one of the go-to skeptics, appearing as a key speaker" at the Heartland Institute's conferences questioning climate change. Though the "Observatory is the research arm of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics," writes Greenpeace's Kert Davies, it "has little to do with either the Smithsonian or Harvard," while "Smithsonian has distanced itself from Baliunas, who discredits their name."

In September 2001, the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, appointed Matthew B. Crawford as its Executive Director. At the time, the think tank boasted that Crawford had "won numerous academic fellowships, including the Bradley Fellowship, The H.B. Earhart Fellowship, and the University of Chicago Century Fellowship; he was the John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought." The think tank, which has long promoted the work of prominent climate change skeptics, claims that it provides "unbiased technical analyses on a range of public policy issues." However, Crawford recently wrote that "certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn't fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style -- that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning."