Lord Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Drab, pietistic uniformity is the curse of the collectivist age. Today, with a fearful and unanimously acquiescent docility, the hive mind tediously hums the Party Line, now rebranded “consensus”. Imagination, initiative, inquiry, inspiration, intuition and invention are not merely discouraged but hated. Individuality in any form is not merely loathed but punished.

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It is the solecism of modern government imprudently, expensively and too often cruelly to emphasize the collective at the expense of the individual. Yet, as John Stuart Mill wrote,

“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be mere docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Man is at once an island and a universe, an anchorite and a socialite, a lone wolf and a member of the pack. The strength of the West lies in encouraging what Santayana called the “eccentricities, hobbies and humours” of each, not in hindering or punishing individual achievement in the name of all.

In feudal times, the State was everything. The individual, if noticed at all, was recognized solely by his status in the ordained pecking order.

“God blessed the squire and his relations,
And kept us in our proper stations.”

It was only when free-market contract replaced feudal status that the individual, be he never so humble, acquired the right freely to negotiate with his neighbours and, by so doing, to earn advancement by achievement. Social mobility is a feature not of collectivism but of contract and of the cheerful chaos of the free market that it enables.

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Peter Smith

Lord Monckton addressed a rowdy crowd at the anti-
carbon tax rally in Sydney. (AAP: Lema Samandar)

Saw Lord Monckton in Sydney this month. It was fittingly cold. I remember my first Sydney winter many years’ ago. It was colder than I expected. Memories play tricks but my impression is that this winter is as cold as it was then. However, I am not putting this forward as evidence for the absence of global warming. Sceptics and warmists are at one in acknowledging that the earth has warmed since the end of the little ice age and, I think, most agree with the proximate extent of the warming; even if sceptics are suspicious of data fiddling and many badly-placed land temperature gauges.

Everyone also agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that more of it will warm the planet. Thus far there is agreement. It is therefore annoying (to put it mildly) at this juncture to have people (scientist and non-scientists) say that some ice is melting or that seas levels are rising as though this were additional information to bolster the case of warming. It simply isn’t. Warming is warming and it will have an effect on ice and sea level. For those whose reason has been impaired by mumbo-jumbo climate science, put some cubes of ice in a sieve over a pan of water and warm the pan. Measuring the temperature inside the pan is all that is needed to establish that the pan is warming. You can then observe that the ice cubes have melted and the water level has risen but this gives no added information on the fact of the warming.

If everyone agrees basically with what has happened (though of course not why it has happened from the late 1970’s until about 2000) then disagreement of substance must surely be restricted to what will happen in the future. Back to Lord Monckton. Let us first of all dispense with his credentials. Is he a lord? This seemed to fascinate Adam Spencer on ABC radio. Well no one disputes that he has a hereditary peerage. Does that, as he claims, entitle him to describe himself as a non-sitting member of the House of Lords? I have no idea. His explanation seems okay to me but he may be indulging in a little pedantic vanity. Is this as bad as an imaginary dodging of bullets on an airport tarmac, for example? Would Mr Spencer have quizzed Hillary Clinton about this at the start of an interview on foreign affairs? Spencer also thought it was relevant to get Monckton to concede that he was neither a climate scientist nor an economist. To what point? Surely everyone knows that neither Monckton nor Al Gore, nor anyone on the multi-party climate change committee is a scientist or economist.

Monckton’s credentials are that he has looked thoroughly into the science and drawn conclusions. He has done what we all should do, to some extent at least, rather than to simply fall into line like sheep. His views stand or fall on their merits and have to be challenged on their merits.

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Lord Monckton

One of the numerous Goebbelian propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing.

John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota, has recently issued — and widely disseminated — a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech I delivered about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he’s a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists — the snake-like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them — have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

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Lord Monckton

The Select Committee, in its letter inviting testimony for the present hearing, cites various scientific bodies as having concluded that

The first statement requires heavy qualification and, since the second is wrong, the third and fourth are without foundation and must fall. The Select Committee has requested answers to the following questions:

1. What are the observed changes to the climate system?
2. What evidence provides attribution of these changes to human activities?
3. Assuming ad argumentum that the IPCC’s projections of future warming are correct, what policy measures should be taken?

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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.

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Margaret Wente

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest. But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it.

It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

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Des Moore

Climategate – IPCC’s Flawed Temperature Picture Revealed

Since Copenhagen there have been revelations overseas of important flaws in the science used in reports by the IPCC. Believers in the dangerously rising temperature thesis have brushed these aside as “unfortunate” mistakes but as not affecting the alleged scientific consensus that continually rising temperatures result from the emissions of CO2 and usage of fossil fuels. Hence, it is argued, government action is still needed to prevent dangerous increases in temperatures in the future.

Now, however, we have a major new analysis by two Australian scientists showing that the temperature data published by the IPCC and other organisations has been manipulated to give the appearance of a warming trend - but not one that has actually occurred. In essence this analysis severely, probably fatally, damages the basis on which the IPCC and its supporters rely for their call for government intervention to reduce emissions. Needless to say, this has major international implications in regard to the policies to be adopted by countries on emissions reductions.

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Ninad D. Sheth

It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrarywise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? —Alice in Wonderland

The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.

The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.

The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!

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Lord Monckton

A letter sent from: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

1 January 2010

His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,

Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.

Prime Minister,

Climate change: proposed personal briefing

Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.

Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.

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John Izzard

As the murk surrounding the arcane world of the global warming industry begins to clear, two intriguing questions emerge. Does our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd realise just who he, and his Climate Change minister Penny Wong, are associating with at the IPCC. And is the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, asking the right questions?

Largely ignored in the local Australian media was an extraordinary story published in London’s Daily Telegraph two weeks ago which accused the Chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, ‘of making a fortune from his links with “carbon trading” companies.’ The Daily Telegraph’s revelations are explosive to say the least.

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