Securing a former prime minister to speak at your organisation is no doubt a coup for many groups.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy recently got Kevin Rudd. Australia’s Nelson Mandela Day committee has snaffled Julia Gillard for their next annual lecture.

What about our most recent former PM, Tony Abbott?

Next month, Abbott will deliver the “2018 Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture” to the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), where the ticketing site says he’ll talk about “Climate Change and Restraining Greenhouse Gas Emissions”.

The AEF is an “environment charity” that promotes views that wind turbines make you sick, that human-caused climate change isn’t really a thing, and that environmentalists (the other sort) are killing farmers, fisheries and the economy.

Abbott’s lecture will no doubt pick up from his speech in London in December, where he delivered a suite of climate science denial talking points to the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

So who, or what, is the AEF? To look into its history, and the people involved with it, is to take a deep dive into Australia’s climate science denial network.

But first let’s look at the AEF right now because, as an “environmental charity”, Abbott’s next port of call doesn’t seem to do very much.

Latest figures available from the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission show that in 2016, the charity declared an annual income of just $1,175.

The AEF’s YouTube channel has just 11 subscribers and has posted only one video, from December 2016.

In May 2017, the AEF lent its logo to a letter to US President Donald Trump to offer “enthusiastic support” for his commitments to withdraw from the UN Paris climate agreement. But between July 2017 and February 2018, there was virtually nothing posted on its website.

Much of that website, including the “Climate News” section, is content from former Institute of Public Affairs fellow Alan Moran and postings that variously dismiss human-caused climate change and renewable energy, in particular wind power.

The charity has two other trading names listed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – the Australian Climate Science Coalition (ACSC) and ListenToUs – but both of these seem to be defunct.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Australian Climate Science Coalition hosted Australian talks by UK climate sceptic Christopher Monckton. Photograph: Alan Porritt/EPA

The ACSC at one time was receiving cash from a US affiliate, the American Climate Science Coalition, itself an offshoot of the International Climate Science Coalition. The ACSC received $107,000 from its American donors in 2009 and 2010, after which the donations stopped.

The ACSC didn’t do any actual climate science, but did host talks from folks like climate science denier and self-titled “high priest of climate scepticism” Christopher Monckton, who once compared then Australian government climate policy advisor Professor Ross Garnaut to a Nazi.

The AEF’s ListenToUs website was an attempt to generate an online social media campaign against carbon pricing. But now, either the AEF has a new line in promoting “Male Strippers Melbourne” and “Home Cleaning Melbourne” or some sort of hackery or lapsing of domain names has eventuated.

When Abbott delivers his lecture, he’ll be introduced by Dr Peter Ridd, the controversial marine scientist sacked from James Cook University for alleged multiple breaches of its code of conduct.

A brief history

Ridd has been a director at the AEF since 2005. That’s a neat segue into the AEF’s history.

In late 2004, the Institute of Public Affairs – by then already pushing out climate science misinformation – held its “Eureka forum” to work out how to push back against “environmental fundamentalism” that, it claimed, was “denying farmers, foresters, fishermen, prospectors, miners, beekeepers, 4WD enthusiasts and others access rights, property rights, water rights”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TV gardener Don Burke gave the AEF a boost by serving as its chairman for several years. Photograph: New Holland/PR IMAGE

As part of this push back, the AEF was formed in early 2005 with the Institute of Public Affairs as its business address. Then IPA boss Mike Nahan and IPA staffer Jennifer Marohasy were both founding directors. These days the IPA says it has nothing to do with the AEF.

Over the years, the AEF has consistently promoted climate science denialism. The group has campaigned against marine parks, carbon taxes, climate science and wind farms, which it says make people sick.

For several years, the AEF gained a little notoriety thanks to TV celebrity Don Burke serving as its chairman.

The AEF’s current chair, lawyer Tom Bostock, was also a board member of the Lavoisier Group – another collection of conservative white males that came together in 2000 to fight Australia’s engagement in United Nations climate agreements and to attack the science of human-caused climate change.

Another AEF director is Tom Quirk, a former director at the IPA and a member of the ACSC advisory panel when that project was a thing. Quirk is involved with another effort to convince right wingers that human-caused climate change science is a massive con.

The unincorporated “Climate Study Group”, of which Quirk is a member, has been running a series of odd adverts in the Australian.

The half-page ads have evoked the philosopher Socrates and some cod-psychology to claim sea levels are not rising, global warming isn’t caused by rising levels of greenhouse gas, and we should all be preparing for a coming ice age.

Fake quotes and conspiracies

So what of Abbott’s lecture? The AEF says it “established the lecture series to commemorate the life and work of Bob Carter”, who was an AEF director at the time of his death in 2016 (Carter was affiliated with 10 or more climate science denial groups around the world).

Abbott’s lecture will be the second in the “series” – the first was delivered in November 2016 by Canadian denialist Tim Ball (that’s the one YouTube video on AEF’s channel).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Canadian Dr Tim Ball delivered the first “Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture” in 2016.

At the time, Ball was in Australia with former One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.

Ball’s speech was a classic of the climate denial genre, mixing conspiracy theories, hatred of “leftists” and disregard for any evidence contradicting a view that climate change is the “biggest deception in history”.

Ball claimed the United Nations, led by a favourite enemy of climate science denialists, Maurice Strong, was attempting to exert global control over people’s lives to push a socialist agenda. Ball even used a slide of a quote from Strong, supposedly uttered at the 1992 Rio Earth summit, which read: “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialised civilisation collapses? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

This quote is widely used among climate science deniers as evidence of the nefarious motives of the UN. The quote was actually from two years earlier, when Strong was talking to a journalist about the plot of a novel he hoped to write (incidentally another Maurice, Tony Abbott’s former lead business advisor Maurice Newman, has also used the fake quote in a 2015 opinion column in the Australian. Until recently, One Nation also ran the quote on its website).

I emailed three of the listed AEF directors – Ridd, Bostock, and Alan Oxley, the former Hawke-era diplomat and now chairman of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University.

I asked about the charity’s activities, how they secured Abbott’s appearance and the charity’s apparently defunct projects (including the Melbourne strippers) but I didn’t get a response.