In 2001, he won the New Zealand Association of Scientists' science communicator award, now known as the Cranwell Medal.
[3] De Freitas has questioned anthropogenic global warming, and the way information is received and interpreted.
He has written that carbon dioxide emissions themselves may not necessarily be the source of recent increases in global temperature.
In the New Zealand Herald (9 May 2006), he wrote: As an editor for the journal Climate Research[4] he had responsibility for sending papers out for review.
The publisher, Otto Kinne, subsequently conceded that the conclusions of the paper were not supported by the evidence, and appropriate revisions of the manuscript should have been requested prior to publication.