Donna Laframboise

Background

Laframboise has worked as a freelance photographer and journalist. She describes herself as a libertarian feminist, and earned a degree in women's studies. Laframboise has written articles and editorials for Canada's National Post, Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and others. In 1992, she asked for reconsideration of the guilty verdict for Guy Paul Morin, who had been wrongly convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1992. Renewed DNA testing led to overturning of this verdict in 1995. From 1993 to 2001, Laframbroise served on the board of directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

In 1997, Laframbroise published The Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality, a book critical of many aspects of contemporary feminism. Gender studies scholar Joan Sangster went so far to call Laframboise an "anti-feminist", and dismissed her "frontal attack" on abuse accusations against Grandview Training School for Girls staff in the 1990s.

Publications on the global warming controversy

Laframboise is an outspoken critic of the scientific assessment of global warming published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2010 she commented on the outcome of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy enquiries, echoing the complaints of contrarians such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

In 2010, Laframboise organized a "citizen audit" of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, to determine how many of the report's sources were peer-reviewed. The audit claims that 21 of the report's 44 chapters used fewer than 60% peer-reviewed sources, with the other sources being non-peer-reviewed material, commonly called "grey literature". The IPCC has clear guidelines allowing the use of non peer-reviewed grey literature where appropriate, subject to evaluation by the IPCC authors. An IPCC spokesman has stated that such sources include government statistics or reports from industry associations, and said "We do not believe that it is appropriate to keep out such material from the process."

In 2011 she published a book about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert. She promotes her perspective on Global warming on her noconsensus.org blog. Laframboise claims that the IPCC's appeal to authority doesn't live up to its own promises. and this book has received some critical attention. Her 2011 book has been translated in Norwegian and German. The German translation was by de:Helmut Jäger (among others), a retired Geography professor affiliated with the German climate skeptical think tank de:Eike. The Norwegian translation was provided by Jan-Erik Solheim, an astrophysicist at the University of Oslo, and Knut Bakke, a retired engineer. In September 2013, she published a new book, repeating her criticisms of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri which she had originally published as blog posts. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she wrote that Pachauri had repeatedly claimed the IPCC based its conclusions solely on peer-reviewed literature.

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

In 2013, Laframboise received leaked drafts of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report WG II section on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and commented on them on her blog. She wrote that NGOs like the World Wide Fund for Nature, Conservation International and Germanwatch had provided comments based on grey literature, to push a political agenda. IPCC Spokesman Jonathan Lynn commented that the data leak broke a confidentiality agreement which did not have legal force. Authors of the report also included industry representatives such as the insurer Munich Re and the oil company ExxonMobil.