Monckton
tlambert | September 28, 2008So the latest headline on Drudge is this:
BBC investigated for 'deliberately misrepresenting' global warming skeptics...
Which sounds serious, but if you read the linked article in the Daily Mail, all that has happened is that Monckton complained to Ofcom that the BBC Climate Wars documentary was unfair to him.
How was it unfair? It seems they didn't give enough screen time:
'The BBC very gravely misrepresented me and several others, as well as the science behind our argument. It is a breach of its code of conduct.
'I was interviewed for 90 minutes and all my views were backed up by sound…
tlambert | September 26, 2008Monckton has written to the New Scientist in response to Lawrence Krauss' article:
I have not been a "journalist" for 15 years. Until I retired two years ago I directed a leading technical consultancy. I have made a fortune from probabilistic combinatorics.
I think that means he made money from his jigsaw puzzle.
My paper contained much unpublished material, including several new equations, each of which the editor asked me to justify before publication. My conclusions have not been "debunked".
They most definitely have.
I have never said my paper "had been accepted by a peer-reviewed…
tlambert | September 15, 2008The saga of Monckton's Physics and Society article continues (previous posts: 1 2 3 45). Via Eli Rabett, here is Arthur Smith's list of 125 errors in Monckton's piece.
Also, a few more snippets on how Monckton's article ended up in Physics and Society. Lawrence Krauss (outgoing chair of the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society (FPS)) wrote:
Earlier this year, the editors ran a piece submitted by Gerald Marsh, a frequent contributor to FPS, in which he questioned the accuracy of climate change predictions and estimations of anthropogenic contributions to it. The article…
tlambert | August 23, 2008Richard Littlemore has posted an annotated transcript of his debate with Monckton, with corrections to Monckton's numerous false statements.
Andrew Bolt thinks the best argument that Monckton had in the debate with Littlemore was his defamation of one of the funders of Desmogblog, so he repeats it, falsely accusing John Lefebvre of being "a convicted Internet fraudster", when in fact Lefebvre has not been charged with fraud, let alone convicted of it. I don't know much about the law, but doesn't that make Bolt liable as well as Mockton if Lefebvre decides to sue?
Jacob Sullum comments on what…
tlambert | August 6, 2008Eli Rabett has the latest: Monckton and SPPI seem to think that if you declare that it is "for educational purposes" you can ignore copyright.
tlambert | July 31, 2008This is the very first paragraph of Monckton's response to Gavin Schmidt's demolition of Monckton's paper on climate sensitivity.
For the second time, the FalseClimate propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of
the now-discredited "hockey-stick" graph by which the UN's climate panel tried
unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent,
scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me.
Monckton goes on to make many more ad hominem attacks on Schmidt. And what are the ad hominem attacks that Monckton alleges that…
tlambert | July 27, 2008Last year Christopher Monckton was threatening legal action if Naomi Oreskes did not apologize to Schulte:
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.
Now he's claiming that UCSD asked Oreskes to apologize:
Dr. Oreskes thrice publicly accused Mr. Schulte of having misrepresented her when he had not in fact done so, and when she had not read any draft of the paper she said had…
tlambert | July 25, 2008Catherine Brahic, at the New Scientist enviromental blog has more on Monkcton and the APS:
[Al Saperstein, an editor of Physics and Society,] stressed that that the article was not sent to anyone for peer-reviewing. Saperstein himself edited it. "I'm a little ticked off that some people have claimed that this was peer-reviewed," he said. "It was not." ...
In April, the newsletter ran an article by retired nuclear physicist Gerald Marsh. Marsh argued that solar variations play a major role in the Earth's climate, one which overrides human emissions of greenhouse gases. ...
The editors put out…
tlambert | July 20, 2008Duae Quartunciae has been more patient than me, and found even more problems with Monckton's paper.
Monckton has struck back at the APS. Check out this press release from the SPPI
Said, Monckton elsewhere, "Trying to duck the usual process of scientific discourse by arguments about peer-review procedures is an ad-hominem approach which is not worthy of the name of science. What has happened is that the usual suspects, instead of ploughing through the (not particularly difficult) math and saying what I got wrong and why (which is what Popper calls the EE or "error-elimination" step in the…
tlambert | July 19, 2008Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not jornal) by our old friend Christoper Monckton. Monckton's article now carries a disclaimer saying:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article…
tlambert | March 27, 2008Desmogblog posted John Mashey's detailed examination of the spread of Monckton/Schulte's misinformation. For your amusement, Monckton's reply, in full:
"Dr." Mashey says Mr. Schulte plagiarized my research. He did no such thing. It was he, not I, who conducted the research. "Dr." Mashey was told this.
"Dr." Mashey submitted his over-long complaint formally to Mr. Schulte's academic institution, whose investigator rejected it on all counts.
"Dr." Mashey is now himself under investigation for circulating his complaint publicly, in a form in which which inter alia he breaches doctor-patient…
tlambert | March 22, 2008Was I being unfair to Energy and Environment when I described it as a forum for laundering pseudo-science? I mean, didn't they reject Schulte? According to Boehmer-Christiansen:
For your information, I have informed Dr.Schulte that I am happy to publish his own research findings on the effect on patients of climate alamism/'Angst'.
His survey of papers critical of the consensus was a bit patchy and nothing new, as you point out. it was not what was of interest to me; nothing has been published.
Nothing had been published when she wrote that, but now his patchy and nothing new survey of…
tlambert | March 7, 2008Monckton 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…
tlambert | March 6, 2008Good old Christopher Monckton speaking at the Global Warming Denial Conference
According to Monckton, the movement behind global warming alarmism can be traced to some ugly things, and being wrong about it could have a grave impact on humanity.
"I think the question you're asking is who's behind the scare," Monckton said. "There's been a long history of scares recently and scientific frauds of various kinds. It began, I suppose, with the eugenics movement in the 1930s which led to Hitler. It followed on with the Lysenko movement in Russia under Stalin. It went on with the great leap back…
tlambert | December 17, 2007Christopher Monckton has responded to my Monckton Watch post. In a long and rambling post he writes:
If the science behind the scare is as certain as the zombies say, why are they so terrified of a few doubters? Google me and you'll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I'm not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I'm a member of the House of Lords when - er - I'm a member…
tlambert | December 10, 2007In the olden days to become a distinguished climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials. The group consists of distinguished scientists from Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The scientists, citing pivotal evidence on climate change published in peer-reviewed…
tlambert | December 9, 2007John Mashey has written an account of Monckton and Schulte vs Oreskes affair. Schulte seems to be guilty of professional misconduct.
tlambert | December 8, 2007Ben Thurley encounters a global warming denier at the Bali conference:
I just had my first conversation with a climate change sceptic/denier here at the UN Climate Change talks. I was at the Hadley Centre stand (it's a research unit associated with the UK Meteorological Office). Everything he said sounded strangely familiar, but it was funny to have a fairly posh Englishman telling me that "The southern hemisphere is cooling overall. " Sorry, I'm from the southern hemisphere, and believe me, Australia, like the rest of the hemisphere, is warming.
Yep, it was Monckton. So what's Monckton on…
tlambert | October 14, 2007When last we heard from Christopher Monckton he was too gravely ill to answers questions about how someone claiming to be him and using his ISP had altered his own wikipedia entry and added on obvious fabrication, to wit,The Guardian "is reported to have paid Monckton £50,000 in damages.". Monckton seems to have made a rapid recovery, because within a week or two he was speechifying at Cambridge University:
He challenged Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, describing it as the "Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror" film of the year, and claimed to have found serious and deliberate scientific errors…