Monckton
tlambert | October 3, 2007On June 6, someone with IP address 81.77.248.148 added this passage to Christopher Monckton's wikipedia page (emphasis mine):
Monckton has been published in academic journals on the subject of climate change and his principal calculations have been reviewed and found accurate by one of the IPCC's expert reviewers. Monckton is currently studying higher mathematics at university level. The Guardian was compelled to publish a correction the day after one of its columnists had criticized Monckton's climate-change analysis as scientifically inaccurate, and is reported to have paid Monckton £50,…
tlambert | September 24, 2007William Connolley provides an example of Christopher Monckton telling a fib. I have another example. In Monckton's letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, he writes:
Finally, you may wonder why it is that a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature, wholly unconnected with and unpaid by the corporation that is the victim of your lamentable letter, should take the unusual step of calling upon you as members of the Upper House of the United States legislature either to withdraw what you have written or resign your sinecures.
But Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is not a…
tlambert | September 8, 2007Schulte has published a reply to Oreskes' response. While Schulte claims not to be a contrarian, Kevin Grandia has been looking at his links with Christopher Monckton. Meanwhile, John Lynch posts on Shulte's reply and commenter "Chris" (who is, I suspect, Christopher Monckton) threatens lawsuits against Oreskes and Lynch:
By making the allegations his own and endorsing them with such lamentably unscientific enthusiasm, however, he has exposed himself to the legal action which may well follow if Oreskes does not come forward quickly with an unreserved apology to Schulte.
Also posting is…
tlambert | May 29, 2007Remember how Christopher Monckton claimed that Gavin Menzies' fantasies about the Chinese navy sailing around the Arctic in 1421 proved it was warmer then?
EG Beck (of CO2 graph nonsense fame) makes the same argument and has a map to prove it:
Hey, who can argue if he has a map? By the way, all the dotted lines are journeys the fleet took. Really.
Via Stefan Rahmstorf, who has more on another dodgy Beck graph.
tlambert | May 8, 2007Christopher Monckton gets profiled in the Observer:
From those momentous words on, in his own head, Christopher Monckton appears always to have been starring in a Boy's Own adventure entitled 'Monckton Saves the Day!' ...
For a start, in this adventure, in which he routinely wore a bowler hat, Monckton won the Falklands conflict from his armchair after suggesting, he claims, to the Prime Minister that the best way to undermine the Argies was to have the SAS introduce a mild bacillus into the water supply in Port Stanley. 'I can tell you from experience there is nothing more demoralising than…
tlambert | February 5, 2007William Connolley is somewhat bemused by Christopher Monckton's review of the IPCC's Summary for Policy Makers. Because the IPCC changed the way sea level rises were reported, critics seem to inevitably misunderstand them and claim that the IPCC has substantially reduced its projections.
Monckton:
Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches.
Connolley:
And after that, the sea level rise? The TAR SPM pic is here. The SLR is 0.88 top-of-range and this is presumably what M is using for 3 feet.…
tlambert | January 26, 2007Earlier I wrote about Khilyuk and Chilingar
their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not.
So who has discredited themselves by citing them?
Robert M. Carter, C. R. de Freitas, Indur M. Goklany, David Holland and Richard S. Lindzen
Ron Bailey
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Andrew Bolt
Tim Blair
The Idsos
Pat Michaels
Pat Michaels went way beyond merely citing them, writing over a thousand words about how it was peer-reviewed and how the authors were from USC and how it…
tlambert | January 6, 2007Eli Rabett is calling for nominations for the S Fred award for spreading disinformation. He has started with:
Diplom Beck proving CO2 concentrations over smokestacks in the 1940s were higher than they are today globally.
Willis Eschenbach and the moving line
Monckton of Blenchley whose climate analysis has now found its home in a flying saucer mag.
I nominate Khilyuk and Chilingar for comparing natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet with anthropogenic emissions over the past two centuries.
tlambert | January 1, 2007
Christopher Monckton was talking about how he was going to get his silly Telegraph article published in a journal and now he has.
It's been published in Nexus magazine, right between articles on UFOs and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory folk seem to think that "An Inconvenient Truth" is part of the plan by the UN to take over the world.
Monckton's is not the only article in that issue of Nexus that mentions Global Warming. There's also the interview on Time-travel portals and weather wars:
Chemtrails were developed by Edward Teller and are basically the seeding of thousands…
tlambert | December 6, 2006William Connolley has the latest on Monckton. It seems that he's throwing around threats to sue for libel.
Also Eli Rabett describes yet another Monckton error.
tlambert | November 23, 2006Monckton responding to an email about how volcanoes cause ozone depletion:
I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the
general-circulation models, so I'm not sure how it is that the ozone
hole appears only over the Antarctic. One possibility is that the
circumpolar circulation (which sailors take advantage of) acts as a
cage for the weather within. Another, which I'm trying to find data
for, is the volcanic activity of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's active
volcano. In a good year for eruptions, Erebus can put out as much CFCs
as Man used to. It would be very amusing if the activity…
tlambert | November 21, 2006Christopher Monckton and George Monbiot have an exchange in the Guardian and William Connolley is not impressed.
Today's grauniad has a piece by Monckton, "This wasn't gibberish. I got my facts right on global warming". Its in the "response" column, where people get a chance to reply. Sadly its all more gibberish. But also somewhat sadly the piece it responds to by Monbiot also contains some mistakes, and is itself a reaction to Monckton's bit in the Torygraph (in fact its all so badly written its rather hard to tell if Monbiot is just quoting Monckton or making mistakes of his own; and what…
tlambert | November 19, 2006The Daily Telegraph has published a piece by Al Gore that corrects Monckton's numerous errors. An extract:
Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and, as a result, have misled people by exaggerating the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to extra carbon dioxide.
If this were true, the entire global scientific community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the…
tlambert | November 11, 2006Christopher Monckton's attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming was fulloferrors.
In a follow-up article he only corrects three of them, and even makes another error in his correction.
Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several feet by 2000, but it was the US Senate, and by 2100; I added a tautologous "per second" to "watts per square metre"; and I mentioned the perhaps apocryphal Arctic voyage of Chen Ho.
No, adding "per second" is not tautologous -- it's wrong. "Watts per square metre per second" is a measure of how…
tlambert | November 10, 2006John Quiggin catches Andrew Bolt pointing to stratospheric cooling as evidence against global warming. Stratospheric cooling is one of the pieces of evidence that suggest that the warming at the Earth's surface (where people other than Andrew Bolt live) is caused by greenhouse gasses rather than the sun (which would warm the stratosphere as well). Eli Rabett has a post on the attribution of stratospheric cooling.
Also, Rabett finds another Monckton blunder and comes up with Needy Rapacious Scientists and Publicists for our favourite Canadian astroturfers.
tlambert | November 9, 2006Gavin Schmidt explains where Monckton went wrong in his calculations of climate sensitivity. John Quiggin collects some of the nutty ideas the global warming denialists have latched onto.
I exchanged a few emails with Monckton. He conceded that
the 1421 claim was rubbish
that the graph in his article was bogus (he said the the Telegraph insisted on its inclusion and that they were the ones who sexed it up)
that Hansen did not predict temperature rise of 0.3 degrees and a sea level rise of a few feet by 2000
We got stuck on his claim that the Andean glaciers had vanished in the medieval…
tlambert | November 5, 2006Christopher Monckton has a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph where he attempts to debunk the notion that there is significant anthropogenic global warming. The main problem with his article is that he doesn't know what he's writing about it. He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of which are true but out of context, some of which are not at all true, and some of which he seems to have conjured up out of thin air. What they all have in common is that they support his position. Monckton seems to be unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. My favourite factoid is this one:…