Guardian Photo
If you have a spare 95 minutes [sic!], the video below makes interesting viewing. The 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley aka Christopher Monckton gave a speech at St Paul Minnesota (where he was introduced as the “viz-count” Monckton...)
Monckton tears into the paranoia about global warming. The Guardian calls him their “very favourite climate change sceptic” and if the Grauniad are against him, then ipso facto I’m for him, for they are very unsound on the Islamic threat issue…. Monbiot at the Guardian has a "Royal Flush" of climate change deniers (actually, it's a straight, neither royal, nor a flush, so that rather busts Monbiot, wot?), and Monckton's the Nine of Diamonds, and rather cutely nicknamed Viscount Monckhausen by "some environmentalists". Yuck, yuck, those environmentalists, they crack me up!
Monckton tears into the paranoia about global warming. The Guardian calls him their “very favourite climate change sceptic” and if the Grauniad are against him, then ipso facto I’m for him, for they are very unsound on the Islamic threat issue…. Monbiot at the Guardian has a "Royal Flush" of climate change deniers (actually, it's a straight, neither royal, nor a flush, so that rather busts Monbiot, wot?), and Monckton's the Nine of Diamonds, and rather cutely nicknamed Viscount Monckhausen by "some environmentalists". Yuck, yuck, those environmentalists, they crack me up!
There is other criticism of Monckton on the web, as you’d imagine, but most focuses on the last few minutes of his lecture where he warns that signing the climate change treaty will sign away signatories' sovereignty. Apart from some criticism of his UN Climate Change panel predictions, there’s remarkably little attempt to attack his main points: that climate change has been hyped, that it’s not happening, and that in any case, nothing that’s done by man has had/can have any effect.
And just in: our favourite expat Aussie, Clive James, on BBC radio takes a look at Montaigne, golf-ball crisps and our attitude towards climate change
In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that's the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don't know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled and it isn't….
Sceptics, say the believers, don't care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it.
Me, I’m still in the ditherer’s camp. Even if there is man-made global warming, there is nothing we can do about it which is effective without ceasing all economic activity and even then it may have no effect. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to clean up our act. But that’s something we should do in any case. And we Aussies should not utter another word on the subject until we embrace nuclear energy, clean efficient, carbon-free nuclear energy. For us to sell uranium but not to use it ourselves is the grossest hypocrisy.
**Make sure you download the Powerpoint presentation with this link, and follow along with the slides (it comes up in top left of the video after a few moments).
Some interesting stats on US temperatures here.
**Make sure you download the Powerpoint presentation with this link, and follow along with the slides (it comes up in top left of the video after a few moments).
Some interesting stats on US temperatures here.
