John Brignell

John Brignell, Ph.D., wasa retired Professor of Industrial Instrumentation at University of Southampton.

He studied at Stationers’ Company’s School and his career started with a position of an apprentice at STC. Later he studied at Northampton Engineering College (now The City University, London) and got the degrees of BSc(Eng) and PhD of London University.

After getting PhD he became a member ofthe staff at Northampton and was a Research Assistant, a Research Fellow and a Lecturer.

Brignell lectures atLloyds of London, mainly on the topics of the abuse of statistics.

Brignell retired in the late 1990s from his academic career and now devotes part of his time to his interest in debunking what he asserts to be the use of poor science and false statistics common in much of today's media. In this context, he has expressed controversial opinions on many subjects. In particular, he has disputed the theory of anthropogenic global warming, questioned the relationship between second-hand smoke and lung cancer, and suggested that the hole in the ozone layer existed before the rise in the use of chlorofluorocarbons.

He has published two popular science books, Sorry Wrong Number and The Epidemiologists: Have They Got Scares for You!, which have been reviewed in the British press (for example,).

In mid-2005, Brignell prepared a list of over 600 links to news reports linking various contradictory phenomena to global warming. In November 2007, this list appeared on the spiked website, then the Rush Limbaugh show, and has since been quoted in other places, e.g.

Bob Carroll (author of the Skeptic's Dictionary) initially accepted Brignell's argument against the EPA. However, he changed his mind on the basis that the "scientific principle" (relative risk less than 2) that Brignell used to reject the finding was not recognized by epidemiologists.

• John Brignell and Godfrey M Rhodes, Laboratory on-line computing: an introduction for engineers and physicists, Intertext, 1975. ISBN 978-0-7002-0258-4.
• John Brignell and Neil White, Intelligent sensor systems, Institute of Physics (Great Britain), 1994. ISBN 978-0-7503-0297-5.
• John Brignell, Sorry, wrong number!, Brignell Associates, September 2000. ISBN 978-0-9539108-0-9
• John Brignell, The epidemiologists: Have they got scares for you!, Brignell Associates, July 2004. ISBN 978-0-9539108-2-3.