Articles Tagged "Lord Monckton"

SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Reports have been providing hard, real-world data about changes in CO2 concentration, temperature, sea ice, hurricane activity, and many other climate indicators for two years. These regular reports, now widely cited on television, in universities, and in Congress, have proven highly embarrassing to climate extremists.

Our graphs show that the climate is responding normally, and that neither CO2 concentration nor temperature is rising anything like as fast as the UN’s climate panel had predicted.

Now the extremists are seeking to dismiss our CO2 concentration and temperature graphs as incorrect in various respects. This short note answers some of the inappropriate criticisms currently circulating on the extremist blogs.

Click source to download PDF file from SPPI

At www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org I publish a widely-circulated and vigorously-debated Monthly CO2 Report, including graphs showing changes in CO2 concentration and in global mean surface temperature since 1980, when the satellites went on weather watch and the NOAA first published its global CO2 concentration series. Since some commenters here at Wattsup have queried some of our findings, I have asked Anthony to allow me to contribute this short discussion.

We were among the first to show that CO2 concentration is not rising at the fast, exponential rate that current anthropogenic emissions would lead the IPCC to expect, and that global temperature has scarcely changed since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001.

CO2 concentration: On emissions reduction, the international community has talked the talk, but – not least because China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa are growing so quickly – it has not walked the walk. Accordingly, carbon emissions are at the high end of the IPCC’s projections, close to the A2 (“business as usual”) emissions scenario, which projects that atmospheric CO2 will grow at an exponential rate between now and 2100 in the absence of global cuts in emissions:

Click source to read FULL report from Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

In a "Highlights" report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's State of the Climate in 2009 document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the document describes as the work of "more than 300 scientists from 48 countries." Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report's first paragraph, is that "global warming is undeniable," and the Report goes on from there to describe "how we know the world has warmed." But this, and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter.

The Report next states, for example, that "recent studies show the world's oceans are heating up," which is fine; but then -- as if hoping no one will question them -- the Report says the oceans are warming, "as they absorb most of the extra heat being added to the climate system from the build-up of heat-trapping gases," which contention is far from a proven fact, and is -- in fact -- merely an hypothesis ... and a bad one at that, as we shall soon see.

On Friday, you sent me a list of questions from the Select Committee. Here are the answers. I have taken the liberty of conflating questions 8 and 12. I shall do my best to supply any additional information on request.

1. In an open letter from you to two members of the United States Senate, you described yourself as “a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature.” How do you reconcile this representation to elected members of the Senate with your more recent statement to the Select Committee that “I have never sat or voted in The House of Lords, nor have I pretended otherwise”?

The House of Lords Act 1999 debarred all but 92 of the 650 Hereditary Peers, including my father, from sitting or voting, and purported to – but did not – remove membership of the Upper House. Letters Patent granting peerages, and consequently membership, are the personal gift of the Monarch. Only a specific law can annul a grant. The 1999 Act was a general law. The then Government, realizing this defect, took three maladroit steps: it wrote asking expelled Peers to return their Letters Patent (though that does not annul them); in 2009 it withdrew the passes admitting expelled Peers to the House (and implying they were members); and it told the enquiry clerks to deny they were members: but a written Parliamentary Answer by the Lord President of the Council admits that general legislation cannot annul Letters Patent, so I am The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (as my passport shows), a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote, and I have never pretended otherwise.

The following is a reply to Lord Monckton's article Response to John Abraham, whilst ClimateRealists.com wish to promote the use of science there would seem to be other parties who wish to promote non-science..........enjoy!

Monckton fails to provide a convincing refutation of Abraham's criticisms but does throw a great deal of dust into the air

Say what you like about Viscount Monckton, he never fails to entertain. His response to the devastating critique of his claims about climate change by the physicist John Abraham is magnificently bonkers.

To give you a flavour of Monckton's reasoning, here are some examples of what he cites as evidence of Abraham acting out of malice:

• Abraham pointed out that Monckton "has not written a single peer-reviewed science paper on any topic";

• Abraham stated that Lord Monckton "presented a lot of data with no citations or no explanation";

• He pointed out that "if you don't tell us where it's from we can't assess the data";

• He explained that a graph displayed by Lord Monckton was "almost off by 100%".

Christopher Monckton has issued an extensive and detailed critique and refutation of a widely circulated 83-minute personal attack on him by one J.P. Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Professor Abraham’s 83-minute lecture with 115 slides purported to demolish a talk about climate change that Lord Monckton had given in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 2009. More than 2.5 million people have seen Monckton’s talk on YouTube, making it one of the most popular viewings on the web.

In June 2010, Abraham posted up an attack on the internet via the servers of the University of St. Thomas. Within a week, Monckton’s response letter with its near-500 questions was in Abraham’s hands, to which he has not responded as challenged.

Monckton publicly accuses Abraham of –

# Bad faith in having “furtively” spent eight months preparing his savage personal attack behindMonckton’s back, entirely contrary to accepted academic practice;
# Malice in having made dozens of serious allegations about Monckton when he knew the allegations he had made were false in every material particular, or had no reason to believe theallegations were true;
# Appealing to a false authority on the subject of the climate that, as a lecturer in fluid mechanics, he did not possess (Monckton demonstrates Abraham appears at times incompetent even in arithmetic);
# Academic dishonesty in having repeatedly made up statements that Monckton had not made, having put those statements to other scientists, having obtained hostile responses from those scientists, and having included those hostile responses in his attack as though they were responses to what Monckton had said; and
# Lying repeatedly by misstating what Monckton had said and then attacking those misstatements; by falsely and repeatedly alleging that Monckton had misrepresented scientists’ results when Monckton had either accurately represented the results or not cited the scientists he was alleged to have misrepresented at all; by unjustifiably and repeatedly impugning Monckton’s integrity, qualifications, experience, and competence in a manner that he knew to be inaccurate; and by repeatedly taking Monckton’s words out of their context and making a wilful nonsense of them.

Click source to download PDF and read FULL report from Lord Monkton

Lord Monckton has replied to Was Margaret Thatcher: the first climate sceptic?‎ by Christopher Booker, this article was originally printed in the Sunday Telegraph.

Margaret Thatcher: the world’s first Climate Realist

......Anthony Watts’ splendid wattsupwiththat blog has an interesting posting about Margaret Thatcher’s sceptical approach to the climate question. This prompted some comments asking whether I could add anything to the story, since I gave her advice on science as well as other policy from 1982-1986, two years before the IPCC was founded. So here goes.

First, what on Earth was a layman with a degree in classical languages and architecture doing giving advice on science to the British Prime Minister, who was herself a scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Society?

Truth is, British government is small (though still a lot bigger and more expensive than it need be). The Prime Minister’s policy unit had just six members, and, as a mathematician who was about to make a goodish fortune turning an obscure and hitherto-unnoticed wrinkle in the principles of probabilistic combinatorics into a pair of world best-selling puzzles, I was the only one who knew any science.

So, faute de mieux, it was I who – on the Prime Minister’s behalf – kept a weather eye on the official science advisors to the Government, from the Chief Scientific Advisor downward. On my first day in the job, I tottered into Downing Street dragging with me one of the world’s first portable computers, the 18-lb Osborne 1, with a 5” screen, floppy disks that were still truly floppy, and a Z80 8-bit chip which I had learned to program in machine language as well as BASIC.

The following reply to article is from Lord Monkton to John Abraham's Monckton takes scientist to brink of madness at climate change talk and also George Monbiot's article Viscount Monckton, another fallen idol of climate denial both articles from the UK Guardian, Enjoy!!

A Preliminary Response to John Abraham — the extremists join the climate debate at last! by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, SPPIBlog.

ONE of the numerous 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 by me about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minn.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad-hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

Professor John Abraham's withering scrutiny reveals how the gurus of climate scepticism repeat a pattern of manipulation

Another one bites the dust. Every so often, someone with a strong stomach and time to spare volunteers to devote weeks or months of their life to a grisly task: investigating the claims of a person who dismisses the science or significance of man-made climate change. Dave Rado did it with Martin Durkin's film, the Great Global Warming Swindle. Howard Friel did it with Bjørn Lomborg. Ian Enting did it with Ian Plimer.

It involves slow, painstaking work, following the sources, checking the claims against the science. But the result in all cases has been the same: a devastating debunking of both the claims and the methods of the people investigated.

Now another fallen idol of climate change denial must be added to the list: Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.

Updated below with John Abraham link

For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.