A clock tune in honor of a true man of true science

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The generous businessman who sponsored the successful case against Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy horror movie An Inconvenient Truth in the London High Court in 2007 contacted me recently to say we should take steps to honor the memory of the late Bob Carter, whose testimony alongside that of Dick Lindzen was decisive in defeating Her Majesty’s Government and obliging it to circulate 77 pages of corrective guidance to every school in England before the movie could be shown there.

I have many good reasons to be grateful to Bob Carter. On my first speaking tour of Australia I was recovering from 20 years’ grave illness and it was not clear that I’d be fit enough to survive the month-long tour. Bob Carter shared with Ian Plimer the task of serving as my warm-up act. Both were ready to step in and take over if my health failed.

Then and often thereafter, I came to know and love Bob and his wife Anne, both of whom were the soul of gentleness, kindness and truth.

Bob was visibly saddened by the shameful and mendacious abandonment of any semblance of scientific rigor or method on the part of so many academic colleagues when it came to the profitable scam that is “global warming”.

More than any of us, he felt the totalitarians’ sullen, vicious assault on science and reason personally. He was wounded by it. Often and often he agonized over how men of science could have sunk so low.

Yet he remained generally cheerful, and was the sharpest brain and the clearest voice of sanity and reason against the Green Blob. His talks were models of clarity, incision and wit.

That great man was treated with bitchy pettiness by his university in his closing years, solely because he refused to be Assimilated by the Borg. In an act of extreme childishness, his right to use his own university’s library was summarily removed.

And the poisonous totalitarians who have all but silenced free speech worldwide on the climate issue by their vile personal attacks on any who dare to speak out against the Party Line could not let Bob Carter alone even in death. A number of disfiguringly spiteful attacks on him have been published.

The truth is that Bob Carter made Them uneasy. His assertions of the truth were so clear, so difficult for Them to challenge, that They came to fear him, and – as is usual with Their wretched kind – with fear came hatred.

I had the privilege of spending two weeks in Paris with Bob at the U.N. climate gabfest. One of the hate-speakers in the soulless le Bourget conference center, seeing me pass by, said, “All we have to do is wait. You’re all old. You’ll all die. And what you stood for will be forgotten. And we’ll have won.”

How ironic that, after that remark, Bob Carter should have been taken from us so soon after the Paris nonsense ended.

What then, is to be done to remember that great man? Well, just about the last thing I heard him say was that he liked my piano-playing in the foyer of the Hotel California, just off the Champs Elysees, where the skeptics were all staying.

In the German-speaking princedoms of Baroque Europe, by an elegant custom, composers honoured the dead by composing clock-tunes in their honor. These clock-tunes – or Turmuhrglockenspielmelodie – can be heard to this day from clock-towers all over Germany and Austria, ringing out their merriment every quarter of an hour.

I have decided to revive that charming tradition of recalling those in eternity by counting the hours that no longer imprison them. I have composed a clock-tune in Bob’s memory, and as a very small mark of gratitude for his unfailing kindnesses to me and my lovely wife.

The usual Classical rule for clock-tunes is that the quarter-hour tune should state the theme in a simple form; that the half-hour and three-quarter tunes – respectively twice and thrice the length of the quarter-tune – should elaborate upon it; and that the three tunes should be chimed in continuous succession for the hour, with perhaps a short cadenza at the end.

Concert performances generally follow this pattern, as does the recording here. The .mp3 file, professionally recorded on a 9ft Shiguro Kawai concert grand, is here:

…and the score is here: bob-carters-peal

At the rising of the sun and at its setting, we will remember him.