Posted by Monckton tells Glenn Beck how he organised the lawsuit against An Inconvenient Truth:
What happened is that I looked at Al Gore’s movie with mounting horror and I identified three dozen scientific errors in it. So I had a weather mate of mine who takes an interest in these matters and also had the money to pay for a court case and I said I thought this film was rubbish. Two weeks later he rang up and said he wanted to do something to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense, which is what global warming is really all about. And so I said, well, the best thing is that you dish your review, a rather peculiar kind of court case in the high court in London in front of custard faced judges. And he said, right, I’ll do it.
And he wants $2 million to sue Al Gore in the US:
So if any of your listeners out there have got a spare $2 million and you would be willing to take Al Gore on in court, then get in touch with Glenn Beck and he’ll get in touch with me and I’ll put you in touch with the guy who originally fought some of the early environmental cases 30 years ago who’s still in practice. He is now a judge himself. …
This is John Yaniker (ph) who originally represented the Environmental Defense Fund 35 years ago when they managed to get DDT banned. Now, once he won the case for them, he said to the Environmental Defense Fund, look, what you mustn’t do is insist that the ban be applied inside people’s houses in these poorer countries because if you ban it even inside houses, lots of children will die of malaria. And he said, I’ve got scientific papers, I read them all up, which is what will happen. So you mustn’t push this too far. Then fired him on the spot and as he left the room, he heard the then head of the Environmental Defense Fund say we would never again employ a lawyer who knows any science.
That would be Victor Yannacone, fabricator of the infamous Wurster quote. At the time however, Yannacone told a rather different story. Science (Dec 26 1969, p 1603):
Earlier, EDF had rejected as unpromising Yannacone’s proposal to bring a $30-billion damage suit against DDT manufacturers as a “class action” on behalf of all citizens of the United States; Yannacone finally filed this action with his wife as plaintiff. The Long Island Press recently quoted Yannacone as attributing his problems with EDF partly to this suit, which he said some trustees regarded as an embarrassment to EDF in its efforts to obtain a grant from the Ford Foundation. However, according to Reginald C. Smith, an attorney EDF hired several months ago to represent it in its dealings with its general counsel, the suit had nothing to do with the “strained relations” between EDF and Yannacone. The trouble, he said, grew out of Yannacone’s “evident lack of respect [for] the EDF trustees” and his failure to take direction.
Roderick A. Cameron of Stony Brook, an attorney and executive director of EDF, told Science that EDF was getting a “bad deal” and that Yannacone, who, besides representing EDF, has carried on a private law practice of his own, had not been doing enough work for EDF to earn his $5,000-a-month retainer.
Yannacone is a AGW denier, apparently because he doesn’t like wind power.
More Monckton:
There are a number of different ways this can be done, a number of different courts in which it could be tried and obviously once we know that we’ve got somebody who can back us to do this, we will then consult with Judge Yaniker (ph) and find the best forum to do this. Interesting as you know that just this morning John Coleman, who is a veteran forecaster in the U.S. has actually said that Gore should be prosecuted criminally because he is peddling a false prospective in his generation investment management company by talking all this science, pseudoscientific rubbish, which is absolutely in correct, exaggerated all in the direction of alarm. …
I’ve already made that complaint about Gore and James Hansen who has political and financial links with him. James Hansen is a scientist at NASA who has been pushing all sorts of alarmists and again scientifically inaccurate results onto the public. And Hansen made the mistake of issuing a public statement condemning a presentation which I was going to make to both houses of the Kentucky state legislature last year and he hadn’t even seen what I was going to say. But he condemned it anyway.
Now, that’s not scientific. So I wrote to the administrator of NASA and I said, this conduct is not acceptable; I want it investigated and I think there are financial irregularities behind the conduct of your people in this matter and given that they have financial links with Al Gore. And so they are, in fact, now investigating it. It was referred to the inspector general of NASA who is their internal affairs officer, and he is now looking at this. And if they don’t come back to me very soon and say that they have disciplined this man for making unscientific statements when he’s a paid public official against a private citizen — that’s what he did — then I am going to refer this case via diplomatic channels to the U.S. attorney general’s office because they are the only office who are allowed to refer investigations to the Securities & Exchange Commission.
So Monckton thinks that NASA (or maybe the SEC??) should muzzle Hansen. Because that sure worked the last time they tried it..
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