UPDATE: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley thanks readers and responds to some critics of his title in an update posted below. – Anthony
UPDATE2: A new condensed version of Monckton’s rebuttal is available below
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I don’t have a dog in this fight, as this is between two people with opposing viewpoints, but I’m happy to pass on this rebuttal from Christopher Monckton, who writes:
Professor Abraham, who had widely circulated a serially mendacious 83-minute personal attack on me on the internet, has had a month to reply to my questions.
I now attach a) a press statement; b) a copy of the long letter in which I ask the Professor almost 500 questions about his unprovoked attack on me; and c) the full subsequent correspondence. I’d be most grateful if you would circulate all this material as widely as you can. The other side has had much fun at my expense: without you, I can’t get my side heard, so I’d be most grateful if you would publicize this material.
Links to both Abraham’s and Monckton’s presentations follow.
I’ll let readers be the judge.
Abraham: http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/
(NOTE: He uses Adobe presenter – may not work on all browsers)
Monckton: monckton-warm-abra-qq2 (PDF)
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UPDATE: 7/13/10 6:40PM PST In comments, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley thanks readers and responds to some critics of his title in an update posted below. – Anthony
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From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
I am most grateful to Anthony Watts for having allowed my letter asking Professor Abraham some questions to be circulated, and to so many of you for having taken the trouble to comment. I have asked a good firm of MN libel lawyers to give me a hard-headed assessment of whether I have a libel case against Abraham and his university, or whether I’m taking this too seriously.
I am charmed that so many of you are fascinated by the question whether I am a member of the House of Lords. Perhaps this is because your own Constitution denies you any orders or titles of nobility. Here is the answer I recently gave to the US House of Representatives’ Global Warming Committee on that subject:
“The House of Lords Act 1999 debarred all but 92 of the 650 Hereditary Peers, including my father, from sitting or voting, and purported to – but did not – remove membership of the Upper House. Letters Patent granting peerages, and consequently membership, are the personal gift of the Monarch. Only a specific law can annul a grant. The 1999 Act was a general law. The then Government, realizing this defect, took three maladroit steps: it wrote asking expelled Peers to return their Letters Patent (though that does not annul them); in 2009 it withdrew the passes admitting expelled Peers to the House (and implying they were members); and it told the enquiry clerks to deny they were members: but a written Parliamentary Answer by the Lord President of the Council admits that general legislation cannot annul Letters Patent, so I am The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (as my passport shows), a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote, and I have never pretended otherwise.”
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UPDATE2: A new condensed rebuttal for easier reading is here
If all people can come up with is questioning if Mockton is a Lord then that is pathetic.
Er, one of Monckton’s questions is about Abraham’s Professorship, and he devotes half a page to the man and his academy.
A Letter Patent is the instrument by which the Monarch creates a peerage, in this case a hereditary peerage. The Reform Act of 1999 could not be clearer
Exclusion of hereditary peers
No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage.
Mockton’s argument is that his Letter Patent still entitles him to membership, despite the clear intentions of the Act [which was given Royal Assent, what the Monarch grants, the Monarch can remove]. Well, he is entitled to his opinion, but it would seem to be something of a minority view…..
So, Bill Tuttle, if I look at 100 Monckton graphs with 4-5 year periods being given trend lines, I would be distorting what he is saying if I draw attention to these trend lines and say that they are not indicative of the past trend or the likely future trend.
If not, why is he putting trend lines on graphs that are, in any climate perspective, meaningless.
(No doubt I will get a letter telling me that there are in fact only 57 Monckton graphs with meaningless short-term trend lines, and asking me to withdraw the “ad hominem” libel.)
Another curious thing. He aligns himself with some of the findings of Mörner, but seems not to align himself with Mörner’s dodgy analysis of satellite sea-level data. Could it be that Mörner’s vague assertions about the safety of the Maldives and Bangladesh, and the antics of tree-pulling tree-huggers are harder to rebut than the deluded belief that there is yet another world conspiracy on recent sea-level rise? Cherry picking the evidence, perhaps?
As an aside, are there any people from the UK who think CM is Churchillian in any way, and who do not agree that he is an eccentric who harks back to the golden age when oiks were oiks and knew their place?
Didn’t the Americans fight a war to get rid of people like CM?
Phil Clarke: July 14, 2010 at 1:56 am
“Which now opens up the interesting point that all those sites and commenters claiming he is *not* are open to charges of slander.”
That would include the House of Lords Information Office itself, then. According to them there is no such thing as a non-voting, non-sitting member.
Indeed, it would. The 1999 general law changed the rules and limited the number of Lords Temporal allowed a seat in the chamber (to the point of issuing and revoking passes) but absent a specific law redefining Lords Temporal — who, along with the Lords Spiritual, compose the “House,” even when not assembled — the Information Office is dispensing disinformation…
It’s revealing that the immediate response from the warmists/left wingers to this document has been more personal attacks on Monckton and attempts to dismiss the rebuttal out of hand. We’ve seen an example of it on here with Villabolo simply making things up as he/she goes along, another tactic of some people on that side of the spectrum.
I think part of the reason Monckton is so resented is because he refuses to bow to the usual smearing, personal attacks and other rough tactics used by some ‘environmentalists’. Rather, he takes them on at their own game. It’s down to that old school ‘stiff upper lip’ the British used to have. More power to him.
House of Lords Act 1999 section 1
“No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage.”
That would seem to be fairly unambiguous.
Steve Milesworthy says:
July 14, 2010 at 3:35 am
says…..’Didn’t the Americans fight a war to get rid of people like CM?’
….No
Although I think America fought in a war once, after they lost a fleet of warships at Pearl Harbour, to Bombs from a Japanese war fleet.
King Monckton, deserves all the pats on the back I can manage and all the support I can give him, although i have no qualifications (I do have a best son in the world mug from my mum?) so my vote doesn’t count according to some people.
richard telford says:
July 14, 2010 at 3:44 am
House of Lords Act 1999 section 1
“No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage.”
That would seem to be fairly unambiguous.
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It is also unconstitutional and unlawful. It purports to revoke constitutional laws without repealing them explicitly. The principle of implied repeal does not apply to constitutional law (see the judgement in the metric martyrs case). I would also argue that it is in any case ultra vires. No matter what scholars might claim to the contrary (through misrepresentation of Hobbes and Dicey), Parliament does not have the right to legislate however it chooses, but only in accordance with prior rights. Like the US, Britain is not now, never was, and never was intended to be, a democracy (which enshrines the despicable principle that if two people gang up on a third and rob him, that’s OK). It has a system of representative government, a very different thing, which is supposed to enshrine the opposite principle that a just government must respect all the rights of everyone all the time, and not rob any of them without full recompense.
Steve Milesworthy says:
“Didn’t the Americans fight a war to get rid of people like CM?”
No.
Americans fought a war over taxation without representation. Even while the war was being fought, the majority of Americans supported primogeniture and entail.
richard telford July 14, 2010 at 3:44 am
That was precisely Monckton’s point – that no sweeping act of parliament can cancel, at a stroke, the HoL membership of hereditary peers (or even of life peers such as Lord Lawson, etc). The staff of the House of Lords may say so, and so may the British government (at least the previous one); and they may prevent them from sitting and voting – but they have no legal right to actually withdraw a peerage and therefore a House of Lords membership (the two being one and the same).
A peerage (like a knighthood), is granted on an individual basis by the Crown – in practice, on the government’s recommendation and the Crown’s assent. Likewise, legally, it could also only be withdrawn on an individual basis, again with the Crown’s assent.
That is Monckton’s point (if I have understood him correctly), which would mean that, from a legal point of view, the Blair government – shock! – simply made a mess of the reform of the House of Lords.
Perhaps it would have been wiser from a PR point of view for Lord Monckton to play down the issue, but, from strictly legal point of view, he may well be right (in my opinion – I am not a lawyer, just someone who’s a bit familiar with the arcane aspects of the British “constitution”.
Engineer, actually. I’ve got as much claim to being a scientist as Abraham does. More, I say, after going through the first ten minutes of dreck that was, presumably, intended to be a thorough drubbing of Lord Monckton.
Now and then you see something laughably amateurish masquerading as serious work. If his thesis defense was anywhere near this badly done, the entire Mechanical Engineering department at Minnesota should be discredited. Or even disaccredited.
I contacted Monckton and was informed that sources for his rebuttal were currently unavailable due to the haste with which this document was put together.
I’m finding it nearly impossible to navigate a document of this length without citations for many of the the claims made therein and I would imagine anyone attempting to give it a thorough review is having similar troubles.
Much to my appreciation, Monckton did provide an answer to a specific question and I look forward to examining the sources for the rest.
[snip – read his reply in the update above]
Steve Milesworthy: July 14, 2010 at 3:35 am
So, Bill Tuttle, if I look at 100 Monckton graphs with 4-5 year periods being given trend lines, I would be distorting what he is saying if I draw attention to these trend lines and say that they are not indicative of the past trend or the likely future trend.
So, Steve Milesworthy, haven’t read the rebuttal, eh? He makes that *exact* point when he calls attention to those graphs — which, BTW, are not his, but from several sources, all of which are duly noted — in large print — *on the graphs*.
If not, why is he putting trend lines on graphs that are, in any climate perspective, meaningless.
If you read *carefully*, you’ll see that he isn’t putting any trend lines on the graphs — he is using them as examples to call attention to the fact that you can’t realistically base a long-term trend (a century or more) on short-term observations (less than a decade).
Paul Birch, the UK does not have a constitution, maybe only the only country that does not, so nothing there can be unconstitutional.
Steve Milesworthy says:
“Didn’t the Americans fight a war to get rid of people like CM?”
No.
Americans fought a war over taxation without representation. Even while the war was being fought, the majority of Americans supported primogeniture and entail.
Well yes it was a throwaway remark. But the Tea Act was brought in by the government of Lord North.
Note that Monckton claimed to be a member of the “Upper House of the Legislature”. Yes he might now have some convoluted argument about his title, but the legislature is the body that makes the law and he isn’t or hasn’t ever been part of it, and therefore doesn’t have the influence he claimed to have.
Bill Tuttle,
“If you read *carefully*, you’ll see that he isn’t putting any trend lines on the graphs — he is using them as examples to call attention to the fact that you can’t realistically base a long-term trend (a century or more) on short-term observations (less than a decade).”
Not at all. Question 177 Monckton says he used a 9-year trend because Tom Karl “refuse[d] to admit that since the turn of the millennium global temperatures have been on a declining trend”.
Why would he want a climate scientist to “admit” anything about a non-significant trend unless he wanted to draw attention to the trend?
Look at the way people misinterpreted Phil Jones when he said (with different words) that there was a 5-6% chance that the CRU trend from 1995-2009 was negative.
On the professor thing, in the US, all tenure track faculty, Asst., Assoc, and Full are entitled to use the title Professor except when their rank is specifically called for in such places as on a CV or similar. Abraham clearly labels his rank on the college web site as is correct, and also is entitled to be addressed as Prof. Abraham. In any case, the big step in the US is from Asst. to Assoc. which carries with it tenure.
Monckton may be making a fuss about this, because when he was in University in Britain, each department had one Professor who was head of department, so the title Professor for him is the equivalent of Head. The other faculty had titles like, Lecturer, Reader, etc. However, today, the British, even in Oxford, have multiple Professors in each department.
Go to Germany, France, etc., and the rules change as to who is called what and what that implies, but John Abraham is tenured at a US college, and he clearly has the right to use the title Prof. Abraham. Viscount Monckton is way off base on this one.
[snip, if you want to make a personal crusade against Monckton, take it up with the British House of Lords, but WUWT is not going to publish your opinions on the matter here ~mod]
Re: “Abraham from Monckton” – Monckton takes the World Cup!
PS Re: “Lairds and Ladies” – Americans cannot comprehend the ‘apparent’ difference between members of the British nobility and the ‘commons’. We have an old piece of paper in a vault that says we’re all kings and queens (we wrote it ourselves;-). The world is a crazy place!
I am against hereditary peers in general, coming from a working class background, but if more of them would grow some balls and stand up for us the way that Viscount Monckton of Brenchley does then we would support them.
Lord Monckton,
Thank you for the clarification.
Eli Rabett says:
July 14, 2010 at 7:39 am
Paul Birch, the UK does not have a constitution, maybe only the only country that does not, so nothing there can be unconstitutional.
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A lot of people make this mistake, because there is no single document called “The British Constitution”. In fact and in law, the British Constitution is composed of various statutes, charters, oaths, liberties and customs. Examples include Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1688 and (allegedly) the Single European Act 1972. The last is debatable, because it is arguably unconstitutional itself, breaching several provisions of Magna Carta and the Act of Settlement, but was held to be constitutional law, and thus not subject to implied repeal, in the crucial Metric Martyrs case.
Steve Milesworthy: July 14, 2010 at 8:03 am
“…he is using them as examples to call attention to the fact that you can’t realistically base a long-term trend (a century or more) on short-term observations (less than a decade).”
Not at all. Question 177 Monckton says he used a 9-year trend because Tom Karl “refuse[d] to admit that since the turn of the millennium global temperatures have been on a declining trend”.
So, using a nine-year trend line to illustrate a nine-year trend somehow negates my statement about *long-term* trends — exactly *how*?
I *hate* it when I forget to check the html…