I hear it every day.
“If Global warming is real, why don’t you debate (his weirdship “Lord”) Christopher Monckton?”
Well, one problem is, when you debate someone who just makes shit up on the spot, its kind of hard to do any fact checking. Now Monckton may have been lured into a situation where this is no longer possible.
The redoubtable Potholer (aka Peter Hadfield, see video below) seems to have lured Monckton into a public, online debate – where citations can be linked, and facts can be checked for accuracy by all interested onlookers. Given Monckton’s record, this is not terrain that plays to his long-winded, loquacious strengths.
It appears that after a series of Potholer’s videos tore Monckton nonsense to shreds, His Serene Magnificence took to replying on the WattsUpWithThat climate denial blog. This lead to Potholer politely asking to respond, and blogmaster Anthony Watts, ever looking to present himself as fair minded, to open up the forum, and even dub the exchange as a “debate”.
Potholer has a video record of the ongoing exchange here:
Part 1
Part 2 below:
I’ve been thrown for a loop by computer issues that are just now getting righted, so I’ll catch up with this developing story as I can .
The main reason not to debate Monckton is that debating him gives him more credit, more dignity, than he deserves. Would one get into a sh-te-slinging contest with a monkey?
One cannot better expose Monckton than John Abraham has already done in his online power point presentation. The time for debating his pseudo-lordship is over. All that’s left is to disparage him.
One can do so usefully by comparison. For example, remember the two con men in _Adventures of Huckelberry Finn_, the phoney King and the phoney Duke? Recall their performance of THE ROYAL NONESUCH?
“And the next minute the king come aprancing out on all fours, naked: and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow. And — but never mind the rest of his outfit, it was just wild. . . . Well, it would have made a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut.”
The “rest of his outfit,” scholars of the period tell us, might well have consisted of a lighted candle sticking out of the king’s anus . . .
O light of the world!
It’s okay for potholer to ‘debate’ Monckton, because he’s not a climate scientist, so I don’t think it legitimizes Monckton’s nuttery. And the critical aspect is to do this in writing, where sources can be checked. Barry Bickmore challenged Monckton to do the same, and Monckton declined.
Frankly it’s hard to find a Monckton argument that doesn’t grossly misrepresent whatever source he’s citing, or just science and reality in general. At SkS we’re currently working on a comprehensive Monckton debunking as well which will show the same thing. Every argument he makes is a misrepresentation. Even I was surprised at the magnitude of it, when you actually check his sources. He just depends on his audience not fact-checking him, which at WUWT, they of course don’t. It was really amusing to read the WUWT comments on potholer’s Monckton debunking, where several commenters dismissed it as “boring”. Such is the level of intellectual discourse at WUWT. Lies = entertaining, facts = boring.
Honestly I’m kind of surprised Watts continues posting Monckton’s nonsense. I think just about everyone outside of WUWT, deniers included, sees Monckton as a joke. Watts doesn’t seem to have grasped that continuing to publish Monckton’s nonsense just damages what’s left of his own credibility. Then again, his readers do lap up the Moncktonian nonsense.
I’ve seen the same type of comments on a post containing a video of Dr. Ben Santer explaining his work at an open-house style session (Chico State University). Watts videotaped the session, and I thought it was great that he attended (though he seemed more interested in asking a loaded question about CO2 absorption band saturation). Nevertheless, it seems some of his readers refused to watch more than a little bit of it, or not at all.
It is sad, but it seems as if they truly believe that the likes of Dr. Santer have as much credibility as say a Monckton character.
Monckton’s arguments have been debunked repeatedly, they have as much life in them as a Norwegian-Blue, but irrespective of this, Monckton just ignores the facts and continues telling the same bogus stories.
Heaven knows why anyone ever thought he was an expert. But of course his ‘CO2 is plant-food’ myth went down a storm in Congress.
I can imagine how Monckton gets nightmares when he hears the name potholer 🙂
What transformed me from “not interested in climate change” to a firm “believer” were the video’s of potholer54 and greenman3610. The other thing was the lack of any critic approach to the Moncktons and the Easterbrooks in this world from the “skeptics”
Please let the “skeptic” sounds be dominated by them and them and the earlier reasonable people who are undecided or uninterested will see reason in the arguments of the “believers”.
Caveman (Reappropriation), Greenman and SkS keep on doing the good work!
A difference of course from just being wrong and being a fraud. Most of Monckton’s nonsense is deliberate obfuscation. He’s not playing fair. Not just stupid but borderline criminal — like Big Tobacco’s misrepresentations of consensus science of effects of smoking.
In short, Monckton’s fate should be that of the King and Duke in Twain’s novel, wherein Huck’s final glimpse of the two con men is of their being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.
Monckton has yet to realise that there is no systematic causal relationship between carbon dioxide levels and climate change simply because the greenhouse conjecture is not based on real world physics.
Prof Claes Johnson has proved in Computational Blackbody Radiation* that energy in radiation only gets converted to thermal energy if the peak frequency of the radiation from the source is above the peak frequency of the radiation from the target.
This essentially provides a mechanism which explains why the Second Law of Thermodynamics also applies for radiative heat transfer, as it does for heat transferred by conduction.
There seems no plausible alternative explanation for the observed Second Law, so I suggest we all heed what Johnson has deduced mathematically, being as he is, a Professor of Applied Mathematics.
It is not the net radiative flux (or even its direction) which determines whether (and in which direction) thermal energy is transferred. For example, if the emissivity of two bodies is very different, there can be more radiative flux from the cooler one. But all that flux will be scattered by the warmer one and not converted to thermal energy. Only the flux from the warmer one (no matter how weak) will be converted to thermal energy in the cooler one. This “ensures” that the Second Law is valid in all cases because it depends
on peak frequency which is proportional to absolute temperature – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien's_displacement_law
Thus the IPCC “backradiation” cannot affect the temperature of the surface and there can be no atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect.
* http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
Why do I detect a strong whiff of B.S.?
Now I’m no mathematics whizz, so I look to the experts in the field. If it’s good, they’ll cite it, if not they won’t. So since 2008, how many experts have thought it valuable and worth citing?
Computational Blackbody Radiation 2008 is cited six times, every one is a citation by the author, so he cited himself six times, very impressive – not.
No-one believes it.
For comparison,
Thermal radiation heat transfer R Siegel… – 2002
Cited by 4668
The whiff of B.S. has now become a noisome stench!
So, newclimatechangetheory, go away and take your garbage with you.
It’s a terrible (terribly silly?) model that also disproves woolly jumpers, house insulation, duvets and all sorts of things known (ie observed) to work in the real world.
File under funny things only “skeptics” are gullible enough to believe, along with the Iron Sun ‘theory’ (http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EarthsHeatSource-TheSun,EE20(2009)131-144.pdf).
I note that the newclimatechangetheory makes this claim on his website:
‘My posts which Skeptical Science and Science of Doom cannot answer.’
Except no-one bothers to disprove irrelevant gibberish.
What gets up my nose is how Christopher Walter promotes himself, with a classics degree and journalism diploma, as former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher, with an honours science degree.
That’s why the following excerpt from a Radio National Breakfast program on 21 March 2011 8.10 AM is so informative.
Fran Kelly: “John Gummer has been a Conservative Party MP in Britain for 35 years, serving as Cabinet Minister for Agriculture and Environment under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.”
John Gummer: “Well, Lord Monkton isn’t taken seriously by anybody. I mean he was a bag carrier in Mrs Thatcher’s office. And the idea that he advised her on climate change is laughable. The fact of the matter is, he’s not a figure of importance and has made no difference to the debate. We always find it rather surprising that he should come here. Mrs Thatcher used to have the best scientists in the world in and she would nail them to the wall as she argued with them, because she was a scientist. And, like me, she didn’t want to believe in climate change, it’s the science makes it absolutely impossible not to believe that this is the most likely interpretation of what facts, which are becoming more and more clear.” http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/british-mp-calls-for-a-carbon-tax/3014168
And, looking farther, and it would appear that a number of others in Margaret’s policy unit have churlishly not recognised Lord Monckton’s contribution. An article, whose point was previously noted on this site, in The Guardian Tuesday 22 March 2010 11.42 BST by Bob Ward deals with the same scientific advisor issue as he writes, tongue-in-cheek:
“On page 640 of her 1993 autobiography Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, the former prime minister describes how she grappled with the issue of climate change, referring only to “George Guise, who advised me on science in the policy unit”. Indeed, given Monckton’s crucial role, it seems to be heartless ingratitude from the Iron Lady that she does not find room to mention him anywhere in the 914-page volume on crucial role, on her years as prime minister.”
Ward writes more in his article:
“It is perhaps surprising that this novel and important innovation by Viscount Monckton was not recognised by the current minister for science and universities, David Willets, who was also a member of the prime minister’s policy unit between 1984 and 1986. In 1986, “Two Brains” wrote a prize-winning essay on the role of the unit, but mysteriously omitted to mention Lord Monckton’s historic contribution.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/22/thatcher-climate-sceptic-monckton
But there’s more. On the Oxford International Biomedical Centre, where George Guise is listed as a trustee and is described as “formerly science advisor to prime minister Margaret Thatcher”. http://www.oibc.org.uk/trustees.html
The truth will come out in Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministerial Files as they are released and posted on the Margaret Thatcher Foundation Website. Currently the files are up to the year 1981 but alas, my search for Lord Monckton, Christopher Walter, etc. comes up a blank. The files for 1982 comes out this year and those for 1983 to 1986 will be released over the coming years. Hopefully, the “scientific advisor issue” or just plain old “advisor” issue can be laid to rest. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ and http://www.margaretthatcher.org/search/search.asp. Perhaps, as an admission of the likely outcome, Monckton is now introduced on Fox News as “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher”. This too in time may regress to “member of the Thatcher government’s policy unit”.
Leaving out his pseudoscientific nonsense, a falsehoods like this strikes at the core of Monckton’s credibility.