No really, i’m not kidding. Remember that CO2 satellite NASA lost after a launch failure last October? (click here for the video). Well, according to Lord Monckton, the crash was “extremely dissapointing” for other more nefarious reasons:
”Not greatly to my surprise – indeed I predicted it – the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they want is real world hard data,” he told a climate sceptics’ lunch in South Yarra yesterday.
NASA understood that getting the satellite into orbit would have demonstrated ”the whole darn thing” – climate-change science – ”is nonsense”.
Now we’ve established that Lord Monckton is pedelling a conspiracy theory where NASA deliberately destroys their own infra-structure to hide evidence of global warming, we can pretty much declare that anything Monckton has to say from here on in is null and void. For entertainments sake, here are a few other highlights from his Australian tour courtesy of The Age newspaper:
Bold claims are stock-in-trade for Lord Monckton, a hereditary peer and one-time adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher who swung through Melbourne yesterday as part of a two-week national speaking tour.
He said he was the first to explain the theory of global warming on British television in the late 1980s; that the United Nations wanted to use climate change policy to create a world government; that today’s environmentalists were just yesterday’s communists in different clothing.
His biggest laugh at the first of his two Melbourne speeches came when he said describing environmentalists as ”green” was a misnomer. ”I tend to call them the traffic-light tendency – greens too yellow to admit they’re really red.”
His interests stretch beyond climate change. He makes the extraordinary claim, one that he admits sounds ”bonkers”, that he has also manufactured a cure to a long-term illness that attacked his endocrine system and patented the cure in conjunction with a British surgeon.
Though stressing it was in its early stages, he said the drug had had positive results treating HIV and multiple sclerosis. ”It also has been used to cure cases of colds, flu,” he said.
Lord Monckton’s stump speech is built around attacks on the science underpinning man-made climate change and the scientists and those that believe them. Though not a climate scientist, he said he had uncovered flaws through his understanding of mathematics – ”the language of science”.
He described government attempts to tackle climate change as ”a plot by the rich against the poor” that would ”kill 5 billion, 6 billion people”.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was guilty of ”systematically telling lies” and exaggerating by up to 15 times the global warming that was likely by 2100.
Scientists associated with the UN panel dismiss his claims. Even Senate leader Barnaby Joyce, probably Federal Parliament’s most prominent climate sceptic, has described Lord Monckton as being on ”the fringe”.
In the blogosphere, where the climate science debate thrives, his views are reviled and celebrated in roughly equal enthusiasm.
Yesterday he drew about 100 people -mostly retirees – to his lunch-time speech and an estimated 1000 to an evening address at the Sofitel.
Having attended one of the good Lord’s sermons, (Noosa, where his Australian tour sponsors, a couple of retired professional engineers, and hundreds of devoted fans filled a local hall to overflowing), I can only confirm the above description of this lunatic.
His take on climate change is ridiculously self-contradictory. He produces graphs to show that global warming has been caused by sunspots rising in intensity since the Maunder Minimum in the 17th Century, and then performs some monstrous surgery on the temperature record in order to show that the temperature is not rising. He attacks the IPCC for using invalid ‘cherry picking’ graphs to ‘fake’ evidence for Anthropogenic warming, and then uses the same graphing technique to ‘prove’ that global warming ended on 31 December, 1998, East Anglia Time.
Of all of the crazy advice he offered to his audience, perhaps the most frightening was his insistence on the wisdom of a ‘do nothing’ approach to the mitigation of climate change.
I was reminded of the nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’. Monckton would prefer to employ ‘all the kings horses and all the king’s men’,after it has happened, when we know how serious climate change really is.
Sadly,it would be foolish to write off this avuncular self-congratulatory buffoon as a harmless fool. The enthusiasm of the audience for his ‘Moncktup’ version of history was truly disturbing. One could almost feel the ghosts of pre-war Germany floating into the room. DDT was banned, it seems, by selfish greenies who would prefer to look after a few rare birds than protect millions from malaria. Thalidomide has had a ‘bad press’. Price pressure on grains from biofuel will starve the third world, and food riots have already killed thousands! The UN is the last hiding place of a group of neo-nazi-socialist-greenies who escaped East Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union and who invented the climate change hoodoo in order to create a totalitarian world government. Monckton himself saved the world from ‘a Copenholocaust’ by finding a ‘secret UN ‘negotiating document’ setting out the evil plans of this cabal. Curiously enough, the document was marked ‘general distribution’, but that was probably just a cruel hoax. And throughout this mind boggling litany of conspiracy theories promulgated by the boggle eyed Lord, seemingly intelligent middle-class retirees, most of whom have lived long enough to have developed a ‘BS’ detector, just sat there in wrapt attention, cheering each new absurdity and cowardly accusation.
Bunkton is a plankton . Says we cant trust CRU, MET, NASA bla blah blah because of preceived corruption…….then he uses THEIR graphs, albeit with cherry picked dates to defend his assertions.
Spends hours ranting about science ……to the public, not scientists whom he says are wrong. If they are wrong, submit the paper showing so. The guy is a political activist & his only desire is to delay action, not to promote an understanding of science.
What it worries me is that we have senior politicians in Canberra that believe this man and his bunk! Perhaps getting out into the town halls is a good idea … afterall, the absolute urgency of this issue has not gone away!
Knowing that leading politicians are buying into Monckton’s paranoid take on climate science and dismissing the considered conclusions of CSIRO and Office of Chief Scientist in favour of someone who is making a lot of money telling people what they want to hear is very disturbing. Are would-be leaders of our nation this gullible or is it a matter of knowingly putting scientific reality in second place to short term self (and vested) interest? Either way doesn’t bode well.
The political knee-jerk expedient of choosing to deny the reality of climate change rather than face it head on with eyes open is leaving a major part of the political mainstream incapable of developing any effective policy on the greatest challenge of our times.
DDT has not be banned for use in combatting maleria: only as an agricultural pesticide. Yet another of TVMOB’s untruths.
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