Monckton on the IPCC

Tom Minchin

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley [1]

The IPCC Is "Corrupt from top to bottom"

I met Lord Monckton at a luncheon in Melbourne during his recent tour of Australia. I was surprised journalists here had not thought to ask him how his views on climate science had evolved. Why had he become so interested in climate science fraud and its political implications? The Q and A that follows is the result of an interview conducted with him after his return to Scotland on February 15.

I began by asking him what had started him on the road to his YouTube-covered speech exposing the draft Copenhagen treaty:

Minchin: What first made you suspect the "climate change" research of recent decades was skewed?

Monckton: The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at "global warming" because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC's 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC's methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.

Minchin: What do you predict will be the outcome of the current wave of revelations about the quality of IPCC research?

Monckton: Governments, banks, businesses, environmental groups, academics, scientists, schoolteachers, and journalists have all nailed their colors so firmly to the mast of the IPCC's sinking ship that they will do their level best to keep it afloat for as long as they can get away with it. The reaction of "Ed" Miliband, the Climate Change Minister in the UK, is typical. As soon as he learned of the IPCC's defalcations, he announced a war on climate skeptics. Gradually, the opinion polls will continue to move against the IPCC as its absurdly exaggerated predictions continue to fail. Eventually, nations already hard-pressed as the second, deeper and longer trough of the double-dip recession sets in will decide that stopping the massive leakage of taxpayers' cash represented by the climate nonsense would be a good idea. How long this process will take, I cannot say.

Minchin: How did science go so wrong on this issue? What caused the corruption of the scientific establishment?

Monckton: An ancient economic principle holds that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Climate science, like almost all science, is a monopsony—the only paying customer is the state. Bureaucrats and politicians find the notion of saving us from ourselves at our expense mesmerically attractive. So, as soon as the environmental pressure groups had got the scare going, the classe politique joined in with gusto because they found it socially convenient, politically expedient, and financially profitable. Scientists who dared to step out of line were menaced with loss of tenure and of funding. When Garth Paltridge first spoke out against the nonsense, the Australian funding authority for all scientific research telephoned him within 24 hours and threatened that if he ever went public again he would be cut off without a penny. That's how the "consensus" was built—by brute force.

Minchin: Should the IPCC be reformed or disbanded?

Monckton: I have long agreed with my noble friend Lord Lawson of Blaby that the IPCC should be disbanded. It is corrupt from top to bottom, its pseudo-science has been exposed for the scam it is, and multiple lines of evidence now suggest that climate sensitivity to anthropogenic CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere is perhaps one-seventh of the IPCC's central estimate, if that.

Minchin: What is the purpose of your forthcoming visit to America?

Monckton: I have three major speaking engagements: the convocation of the Liberty University, at which all 10,000 staff and students will be present; a debate in Utah with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., sponsored by the governor; and a Tea Party rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Minchin: Your exposure of the draft treaty before Copenhagen was one of the most powerful blows against the political agenda of the warmists. How did you find such a deeply buried document?

Monckton: It was my distinguished colleague Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics who found the draft Copenhagen Treaty, hidden on the UNFCCC website under the title "Note by the Secretariat of the States Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change." He was suspicious of the file-length, and, on opening the file, found a 2-page note followed by the 186-page treaty draft. As soon as he saw the draft, he sent it to me, and I announced its existence that day at the Petroleum Club of Calgary, Canada, where I was speaking. A journalist there challenged me afterwards and asked why I was such a world-government conspiracy theorist. I told him I had just three words in answer to that: "Read. The. Treaty." So he did and, an hour later, rang to say that he was horrified by what he had read. He said he would put the draft all over the front page of the National Post, which is exactly what he did. A week later, he was working for the office of Canada's Prime Minister. I then made a speech mentioning the draft Treaty at St. Paul, Minnesota, which has now been seen by some 5 million people on YouTube.

Minchin: Will it be enough to scupper the various forms of cap-and-trade?

Monckton: The EU already has a cap-and-trade system, which has proven economically disastrous, and wholly ineffective at preventing carbon dioxide emissions. Since we are no longer a democracy [TM: much of the EU is governed by decree from Brussels], the likelihood is that that scheme will remain in place. But it will now be difficult for the US and Australia to introduce cap-and-trade schemes. Without the US, no one will want to maintain cap-and-trade for any length of time.

This interview first appeared in the February 17 edition of TIA (The Intellectual Activist) Daily - www.TIADaily.com.

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Note:

[1] A viscount (pronounced /ˈvaɪkaʊnt/ vye-count) is a member of the European nobility whose comital title ranks usually, as in the British peerage, above a baron, below an earl (in Britain) or a count (the earl's continental equivalent).
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Source: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/02/monckton-on-the-ipcc