Lord Lawson's campaign group for climate change sceptics, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has been executing a carefully co-ordinated campaign with its media and political allies to discredit and misrepresent the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On 27 September, the IPCC published the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers from working group I's contribution on the physical science basis of climate change for its Fifth Assessment Report.

The official launch of the IPCC document was held in Stockholm, but London became the centre of the universe for climate change sceptics as they sought to exploit the UK's influential media market.

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based lobby group for free market fundamentalists, teamed up with a like-minded UK organisation, Civitas, to stage a press conference in London on the same day in an attempt to steal some of the limelight from the IPCC report.

As leaked internal documents revealed last year, Heartland has been paying retired scientists to produce a campaign document for sceptics under the title of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Two of its authors, Fred Singer and Robert Carter, were invited to London for the Civitas press conference and to exploit the practice by some editors to create a "false balance" by putting up a sceptic to counter the view of climate researchers.

The BBC jumped at the chance and Carter and Singer were soon touring the studios at Broadcasting House giving back-to-back interviews. Radio 4's The World At One even gave Carter more airtime than the IPCC.

BBC editors appeared to be unaware that Carter and Singer are paid by the Heartland Institute, which gained worldwide notoriety last year for a billboard campaign that associated the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson with a belief in global warming.

They were no doubt also unaware that Carter is a member of the "Academic Advisory Council" of Lord Lawson's GWPF, and frequently contributes to its campaign website and pamphlets.

But the BBC's editors were not the only ones sucked in by the sceptic media strategy. ITV News At Ten included a package the evening before the publication of the IPCC report with three mainstream researchers filmed on top of the Thames Barrier alongside Benny Peiser, the director of the GWPF.

While ITV News attempted not to create a false equivalence between the sceptic and the researchers, it was meanwhile making a deal, unknown to the interviewees, to sell the raw footage to the Daily Telegraph.

The newspaper soon produced its own version of the debate and posted it on its website to help illustrate an article that provided a glowing account of the press conference for Carter and Singer.

The Telegraph's video edit gave much greater prominence to Peiser's views, and the film was cut to make it falsely seem as if one of the researchers, Professor Jo Haigh, attributed global warming to natural variability.

Meanwhile, Lord Lawson and the GWPF were planning its next wave of attacks through a series of op-eds in friendly newspapers. The day after the launch of the IPCC report, the Times carried an article by Lord Ridley, the former chairman of Northern Rock and hereditary Conservative peer who also sits on the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council.

Among many false assertions by Lord Ridley was that the IPCC had "lowered their estimate of 'transient' climate sensitivity, which tells you roughly how much the temperature will rise towards the end of this century, to 1-2.5C, up to a half of which has already happened".

This was wrong because the transient climate response refers only to a doubling of carbon dioxide levels over 70 years, but as the IPCC report points out, concentrations could be much higher by 2100, leading to much greater levels of warming.

But Lord Ridley's brother-in-law, Owen Paterson, the UK environment secretary, was clearly oblivious to the glaring error in the article and incorporated it into his speech at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, declaring: "I think the relief of this latest report is that it shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees."

Lord Lawson, on the other hand, was preparing a full-blown attack on the IPCC in an op-ed for the Sunday Telegraph, including a false claim that the new report concludes "the global warming we can expect by the end of this century is probably rather less than the IPCC had previously predicted: perhaps some 2.7F (1.5C)".

Lord Lawson's son, Dominic, also incorporated the GWPF "lines to take" into his column for the Sunday Times, and Peter Lilley, a regular contributor to the work of the GWPF who supplements his pay as an MP through his post as vice-chairman of Tethys Petroleum, completed the media blitz on the following day with an article in City AM, the London freesheet aimed at the financial sector.

The past seven days have shown clearly how Lord Lawson and a small clique of other climate change sceptics are able to use their political and media networks, as well as family ties, to distort so effectively the UK public debate.

• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.

• The standfirst on this article was amended on 11 October 2013