Following the recent hysteria over political party funding, Tory donor Michael Hintze was briefly brought into the public eye via The Guardian, and the Daily Mail.

An Australian-born fund manager with a rags to riches tale, it wasn't so much the fact that Hintze fitted the ‘fat-cat fund manager’ template that condemned him, but more that he funds a UK-based think-tank that challenges much of the sacred wisdom of The Guardian. The think tank in question is Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation.

On the day the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Princeton's leading physics professor questioning the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the incompetence of climate science modelling and the very nature of the threat, Hintze was vilified more for funding anthropogenic global warming-scepticism than the ‘evil Tories’.

Of course this ‘revelation’ was echoed across the global warming/anti-growth community, the implication being that funding anything other than project run by the WWF or Greenpeace is in some way criminal, and indicative of immoral turpitude on the part of the donor.

Now I don't know why Mr. Hintze wishes to fund The Global Warming Policy Foundation's thoroughly justifiable desire to question some of the hysteria around global warming, but then I have no idea why a renowned financial seer like Jeremy Grantham should throw millions at our finest universities to host his foundation to underpin that very hysteria.

Grantham is a Boston-based Brit who is the chairman and co-founder of GMO, a $140 billion global investment management company based in Boston with offices in London, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney and Zurich.

Of course ‘green’ billionaires are not exactly thin on the ground. George Soros is part of what is now, more than ever, becoming an intractable alarmist-funding lobby along with Sir James Goldsmith. Branson, the Google brothers -- they're all in Forbes' slightly nauseating 'green' billionaire list.

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Grantham's first excursion into climate funding in the UK was “The Grantham Institute for Climate Change” set up with £12 million at London's Imperial College in 2007. A similar endowment exists at Saif Gaddafi's poodle university, the Soros-funded London School of Economics. Soros, by the way, advised the LSE to take the money from Gaddafi’s foundation.

The chairman of the LSE Grantham Institute is the gruesome Lord Stern of the infamous and heavily criticised Stern Review, which basically concluded, in sensational fashion, that we should bankrupt ourselves to counter hugely over-stated dangers of climate change. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and others who should know better, swallowed the review completely, and we will be paying the price for some time.

Stern even endorsed the extreme greens and assorted luvvie idiots behind the disgraced 10/10 movement – you remember, they want to kill your kids if they question climate change? – in retrospect his judgment was as dodgy as his dossier.

So, with their cure being seen as many times worse than the disease, sceptics of all hues see Stern/Grantham as destroyers of economies, and the foundation certainly behaves in a suitably sinister fashion through its attack chihuahua, Bob Ward, whose remit seems to be to silence the slightest scintilla of debate around the issue of climate change. On this note we come full circle, as the former Blair/Gaddafi advisor and LSE professor, Lord Anthony Giddens last week told the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, “We must renew an assault upon climate change sceptics.”