Monckton’s litany
Christopher, Viscount Monkton of Brenchley, is a good scholar and a fine writer. This clever recital pulls no punches but you may feel like responding 'amen' (at least you might…if you were a 'dissenter')- Canute couldn’t stop sea level rising. Officials can’t stop it either.
- Even if global temperature has risen, it has risen in a straight line at a natural 0.5 °C/century for 300 years since the Sun recovered from the Maunder Minimum, long before we could have had any influence (Akasofu, 2008).
- Even if warming had sped up, now temperature is 7C below most of the past 500m yrs; 5C below all 4 recent inter-glacials; and up to 3C below the Bronze Age, Roman & mediaeval optima (Petit et al., 1999; IPCC, 1990).
- Even if today’s warming were unprecedented, the Sun is the probable cause. It was more active in the past 70 years than in the previous 11,400 (Usoskin et al., 2003; Hathaway et al., 2004; IAU, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005).
- Even if the sun were not to blame, the UN’s climate panel has not shown that humanity is to blame. CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 (Keeling & Whorf, 2004).
- Even if CO2 were to blame, no “runaway greenhouse” catastrophe occurred in the Cambrian era, when there was ~20 times today’s concentration in the air. Temperature was just 7 C warmer than today (IPCC, 2001).
- Even if CO2 levels had set a record, there has been no warming since 1998. For 7 years, temperatures have fallen. The Jan 2007-Jan 2008 fall was the steepest since 1880 (GISS; Hadley; NCDC; RSS; UAH: all 2008).
- Even if the planet were not cooling, the rate of warming is far less than the UN imagines. It would be too small to cause harm. There may well be no new warming until 2015, if then (Keenlyside et al., 2008).
- Even if warming were harmful, humankind’s effect is minuscule. “The observed changes may be natural” (IPCC, 2001; cf. Chylek et al., 2008; Lindzen, 2007; Spencer, 2007; Wentz et al., 2007; Zichichi, 2007; etc.).
- Even if our effect were significant, the UN’s projected human fingerprint – tropical mid-troposphere warming at thrice the surface rate – is absent (Douglass et al., 2004, 2007; Lindzen, 2001, 2007; Spencer, 2007).
- Even if the human fingerprint were present, climate models cannot predict the future of the complex, chaotic climate unless we know its initial state to an unattainable precision (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi, 2005; IPCC, 2001).
- Even if computer models could work, they cannot predict future rates of warming. Temperature response to atmospheric greenhouse-gas enrichment is an input to the computers, not an output from them (Akasofu, 2008).
- Even if the UN’s imagined high “climate sensitivity” to CO2 were right, disaster would not be likely to follow. The peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe (Schulte, 2008).
- Even if Al Gore were right that harm might occur, “the Armageddon scenario he depicts is not based on any scientific view”. Sea level may rise 1 ft to 2100, not 20 ft (Burton, J., 2007; IPCC, 2007; Moerner, 2004).
- Even if Armageddon were likely, scientifically-unsound precautions are already starving millions as biofuels, a “crime against humanity”, pre-empt agricultural land, doubling staple cereal prices in a year. (UNFAO, 2008).
- Even if precautions were not killing the poor, they would work no better than the “precautionary” ban on DDT, which killed 40 million children before the UN at last ended it (Dr. Arata Kochi, UN malaria program, 2006).
- Even if precautions might work, the strategic harm done to humanity by killing the world’s poor and destroying the economic prosperity of the West would outweigh any climate benefit (Henderson, 2007; UNFAO, 2008).
- Even if the climatic benefits of mitigation could outweigh the millions of deaths it is causing, adaptation as and if necessary would be far more cost-effective and less harmful (all economists except Stern, 2006).
- Even if mitigation were as cost-effective as adaptation, the public sector – which emits twice as much carbon to do a given thing as the private sector – must cut its own size by half before it preaches to us (Friedman, 1993).
- Therefore, extravagant, futile schemes by the State and its organs to mitigate imagined “global warming” will have no more effect than King Canute’s command to the tide not to come in and wet the Royal feet.
- We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. There is no manmade “climate crisis”. It is a non-problem. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.
Address by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to the Local Government Association, Bournemouth, 3 July 2008. Thanks to Dr Benny Peiser's newsletter where this was first published.
References: Many of the references are spelled out in full in Monkton's recent article in the letters of the American Physical Society.
Posted on 07/18 at 10:58 PM.
Your comments
Dr. Thomas Gough
“At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”
George Orwell
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequencies of the lie.
Goebbels
(The economic consequencies are beginning to be seen. TTG)
I wonder how long it will be before the main stream media finally realises that their interest would be better served by exposing the whole sorry affair.
Thank goodness for Monckton, Christopher Booker and a few others.
Norman Ferguson
I’ve been actively studying glogal warming news for two years now and your last paragraph is possibly the most pertinent item I’ve read.
We owe a great deal to all those who valiently fight this idiocy, but I feel we are attacking on the wrong flank. The remainder of your comments point the direction we should be taking. Media has been silenced and we now learn that Wikipedia edits out material that doen’t fit the religion.
For all the huge amount of work that Viscount Monckton has churned out, I rather think that Terry Wogan’s tiny collumn in the Daily Telegraph gets through to more people.
Perhaps a prominent half page from Terry including a graph of ‘79 to July ‘08 might achieve more and quicker
Gore does not control the press as Goebbels did (at least I hope not!), so bringing him down on this issue should really be a piece of cake>
Norman: I think Monkton’s writings are important because they carry weight with people who think about these --- still some what abstract (because nothing much has happened) --- policy issues.
We have to thank goodness (as Thomas says) for his work because his is now a rare species: independent scholars not yoked to grants and received wisdom.
Aqua Fyre
We need Lord Christopher Monckton to come down to Australia and knock some sense into Labor the Liberal party.
Instead of playing catch up politics, they (the Liberals) should be standing on their hind legs and denouncing the so called man made global warming for what is is…
Utter Fraud.
I used to be a long time labor supporter, but no more…
Labors’ embracing of this carbon cult like policy has finnaly turned me away. This idiotic Carbon trading, will end up doing more to harm the average working family in this country than any other sort of workchoice legislation.
There was time that the labor party actually helped the poor and the down trodden, but now, they’re too obsessed with being seen to ‘politically correct’ on the world stage, to worry about pensioners, disabled and workers will survive..
Little wonder Rudd is being dubbed The New Emperor Ming"…
Aqua: That’s a great idea, to compare the impact of an ETS and Workchoices on ordinary families. I’d like to see if I can find some estimates. Do you know of any?
Aqua Fyre
Peter, sadly, I am not an economist. but the comparison is something that the Liberals should use as a stick to beat over the heads of the Kevin (Emperor Ming) Rudd & Co..
In the meantime. I have been in touch with Lord Monckton. who recently shared in the Nobel prize along with the rest of the IPCC.
However, unlike the many flaky sycophants and scientific yes~men that make up that vile ‘corpus delicti’; he has staunchly and bodly attacked them for their adherance to junkscience..
In his reply to me, he added a copy of a letter he wrote to Senator Penny Wong.
In consequence, he has given me permission to pass his letter around the internet...and you are likewise free to pass it on to like minded individuals.
It is reproduced in full below…
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“"Many thanks for your enquiry.
This is a message that, at the invitation of one of your compatriots, I wrote to Senator Wong two days ago.
It is now being widely circulated among the Opposition: do feel free to circulate it still further. - M of B
FROM THE OFFICE OF THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
Dear Senator Wong -
Greetings from Scotland! One of your constituents, has asked me to drop you a short email about emissions trading and “global warming”.
I have recently conducted some detailed research into the mathematics behind the conclusions of the UN climate panel on the single question that matters in the climate debate - by how much will the world warm in response to adding CO2 to the atmosphere? My research, published in Physics and Society, a technical newsletter of the American Physical Society this month, demonstrates that the IPCC’s values for the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are based on only four
papers - not the 2,500 that are often mentioned. Those four papers are unrepresentative of the literature, in which a low and harmless climate sensitivity is now the consensus. Therefore I should recommend extreme caution before any emissions-trading scheme is put in place.
Such schemes will damage Australia’s competitiveness, perhaps fatally; they are prone to corruption in that they incentivize over-claiming by both parties to each trade and by the regulator; they are addressing a non-problem; and, even if the problem were real (as a few largely-politicized scientists persist in maintaining), adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper than emissions trading or any other attempt at mitigating the quantities of carbon dioxide that we are (harmlessly) adding to the atmosphere.
Therefore I strongly urge you to reconsider your support for this or any emissions-trading scheme. I have read the Australian Government’s paper on the proposed scheme, and the science in it is, alas, largely nonsense. Politically, of course, the fatal damage that emissions trading will do to the Australian economy will greatly favour the enemies of the free West, which is why I, as an ally, have locus standi to approach you.
Climatically, your emissions-trading scheme will not make any significant difference.
There are many other environmental problems that are real: I recommend that the Australian Government should tackle those. As for the climate, it is a non-problem, and the correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Similar warnings are being sent to other legislators worldwide by those of us - now probably in the majority among the scientific community, not that one should do science by head-count -
who have studied climate sensitivity and have found the UN’s analysis lamentably wanting.
The UN’s predictions are already being falsified by events: global
temperatures have been falling for seven years, and not one of the climate models relied upon so heavily and so unwisely by the IPCC predicted that turn of events. If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary - and it will, and sooner than you think - you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever.
It is, therefore, in the long-term vested interest of your party to think again.
- Monckton of Brenchley”
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....Somehow or other, I fear it will fall on deaf ears…
free typing games
well...I think Monkton’s writings are important because they carry weight with people who think about these --- still some what abstract (because nothing much has happened) --- policy issues.
http://www.playedonline.com/category/TypingGames/1.html