Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (a nice little village in Kent with good pubs, at least when I was growing up nearby) has arrived safely in Australia and embarked on the hectic round of talks and media opportunities that is his birthright and expectation wherever he goes. On Monday morning, my spies tell me he popped up on TV One’s Breakfast show, and managed to get away with an egregious falsehood.
One of his themes for this tour seems to be that the “UN’s climate panel” has exaggerated the warming to be expected from a doubling of CO2 by “six or seven times”. Asked about this on Breakfast, he said (my transcription – starts about 1 minute into the interview):
The scientists have indeed got their sums wrong, because there are only perhaps 40 or 50 scientists involved in calculating that one central quality, which is known as climate sensitivity, how much warming will you get. It’s a very narrow, very specialist field in which I have actually published work in the [slight pause] reviewed literature, and there’s not many people who have done that. Very few people people have actually done work in this field, and unfortunately what they have done is they have preferred at the UN’s climate panel to rely on computer models which are in effect a form of guesswork.
You could describe this whole statement as a big lie, because it contains so many constituent falsehoods. For instance, the assertion that the IPCC has preferred to “rely on computer models” for estimates of climate sensitivity is simply not true, as a quick glance at AR4 WG1 Chapter Nine, section 9.6 Observational Constraints on Climate Sensitivity shows. But the really outrageous falsehood is his claim to have published a paper in the “reviewed literature”. He has done no such thing. He wrote a “paper” which appeared in the July 2008 American Physical Society Physics & Society newsletter (here). Monckton’s employers at the Science and Public Policy Institute (an organisation with close ties to the Scaife funded Frontiers for Freedom Institute) sent out a press release claiming it to be “peer-reviewed”, prompting the APS to add this to the start of the article:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters.
The only peer who reviewed Monckton’s piece appears to have been himself. That may go some way to explain why it contains so many mistakes. Arthur Smith catalogued 125 errors, and Tim Lambert at Deltoid provided a nice (and much shorter) overview of Monckton’s sleight of hand with the numbers here. Bottom line? Monckton is quite wrong.
However, this is old news. Monckton’s “paper” was published in July 2008 (there’s a full time line at Rabett Run), and it was comprehensively debunked within weeks. Monckton appears to be relying on the general media not knowing the deep background to the things he says. He doesn’t expect a breakfast TV presenter to be able to call him out on his embellishments of the truth, and perhaps he thinks that after a year and a half he can say what he likes and get away with it.
In one respect, however, he seems to have misjudged the credulity of the TV One interviewer, and even more so that of Sean Plunket, who had the pleasure of interviewing him for RNZ National’s Morning Report on Wednesday morning. Neither were buying his hyperbole about left wing scams. You can hear Plunket’s incredulous tone, after Monckton talks about the “wall to wall lefties” at the ABC, and how all left wingers are “instinctively totalitarian” (podcast here at 8:27). The TV One host even felt moved to challenge him on the “extremity of your rhetoric”, and got a shirty response. One has to hope the Aussie media are being at least as challenging, but glancing at Miranda Devine’s breathless little hagiography in the Sydney Morning Herald today doesn’t fill me with hope.
Just watched his breakfast interview, what a load of gibberish. It really is quite interesting that someone with no scientific training thinks they know better than one scientist, let alone 40 or 50.
When he talks about the satellite measurement of sensitivity I can only assume he’s talking about the now falsified Lindzen and Choi paper. Guess Monckton hasn’t been keeping up with the literature. I wonder why.
And I agree with the breakfast host, there’s something about those eyes that tells you he’s full of it. Then again maybe his eyes bulge due to an overly tight neck-tie.
Btw: minor typo should be: “pleasure of interviewing himâ€.
[Fixed. Thanks. GR]
I wont defend Moncton, I honestly don’t know enough about him.
But if you are going to attack him, can you do better than;
“interesting that someone with no scientific training thinks they know better than one scientist, let alone 40 or 50” – claiming that he is wrong cause he aint a scientist suggests to me you can’t fault his argument (which you probably could with a little effort)
“there’s something about those eyes that tells you he’s full of it” – again, really?! This is just childish. You can’t really get more ad hominem than attacking the way someone looks.
Monckton says he has Graves Disease and protuberant eyes is one symptom of that condition.
Well if Monckton does have Graves disease, then of course I apologize for that part of my comment.
On the other hand I did fault his argument as it would seem he is basing his argument of climate sensitive/satellite measurements on Lindzen and Choi 09. This paper has now been shown to be wrong. Basing your entire argument on one paper that stands opposed to a vast body of scientific knowledge is risky, when that paper has been shown to be wrong, it’s deceitful.
Thinking he (as a non-scientist) is right while 40 or 50 scientists are wrong doesn’t mean he definitely is wrong (although it suggests it’s very likely), what is does show is incredible arrogance, which was what I was alluding too.
Monckton is so full of gibberish and scientifically incorrect statements though, picking apart every error is pointless and I thought Gareth enough of that just fine.