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
The Monkton Rebuttal has not been written with Abrahams, nor the wider blogosphere as the primary target readers. Its primary reader is the future Judge who it may come before in a defamation/libel case. Monkton is no fool and probably received legal advice. He demonstrates throughout his ‘reasonable’ behaviour compared to the ‘unreasonable’ behaviour of the other parties. He carefully identifies at the beginning that a number of parties have libelled him with the implication that Abrahams, the Uni, the authority within the Uni who authorised Abrahams address, could all be sued. (By the way if the Uni’s Defamation Insurance policy is sensible they will counter-sue Abrahams for any damages they may sustain).
He provides the opportunity and time for the accused to recant. He even sets out what he considers to be reasonable actions to recover his damaged reputation (withdrawal, apology and donation).
Given all this a future Judge might question (having found that Monkton had indeed been defamed) why had Abrahams et al not taken any one of the several opportunities offered to settle the matter before court. A court punishment could be very substantial. Monkton knows this. Abrahams thinks this is a just an argument. He is out of his league. The real win for Monkton though is the wider damage that could be visited upon the whole AGW religion.
“Mike says:
July 12, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Lord M is clever. Of course since he is threatening to sue, Prof A cannot answer his questions! And Lord can then say: “He hasn’t answered my questions!!!” Is this “normal in the academe”?
”
A month is more then enough time for him to contact an attourney and respond in an adequete matter to this. The fact that he “buried” his head in the sand tells stories about this fellow.
Maybe we do need to put global warming on trial. Like Mr. Hansen of NASA wants. I mean after all, lets get the real facts out there and not the rubbish Mr. Hansen says.
Its almost too bad that Abraham is so tediously boring. Presentations such as his will have the undecided persons BS (Bad Science) alarm going off so quickly that most will be pushed into the skeptical camp. These pathetic rebuttals from the AGW camp use such consistent bad methods of ad hominem attacks, logical fallacies, inconsistencies, appeals to authority, etc; that one would think they all took the same class on how to write bad rebuttals. My favorite is how indignant they become when someone uses the data or observations from a paper and then dare to disagree with the conclusions from the author of the paper.
Monckton not only gets his facts straight, he does so in such an entertaining manner that I enjoyed reading all 500 questions.
Mike says:
July 12, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Lord M is clever. Of course since he is threatening to sue, Prof A cannot answer his questions! And Lord can then say: “He hasn’t answered my questions!!!” Is this “normal in the academe”?
Superbly peer-ceptive Mike. He’s terribly clever but the questions he asked were terribly straight-forward. He asked for clarification, on issues that challenged his integrity, his un-peer- reviewed questioning to the self-referenced gatekeepers whom more, and more. appear to be holding a defensive position based more on precedent than philosophy!
He asked the wrong question, is that your gripe?
If that’s your defence against his thinking then I am forced to enquire as to why you persist with a train of thought that will result in the de-raillment of a mechanism that has doubled our longevity , quintupled our prosperity but because YOU have adjudged it sinfull, while hypocritically accepting the “two-legs iz good” dictum of the Gorist Beach Frontists, who’ll happily purchase property that they’ve massively depreciated!
Some depracate, like you did Mike, that the noble Lord threatens the sanctity of those whom call him a fool, a paltroon and a liar that I have no sense of anxiety as to the fate of CM, from either side of the court, as to being other than a gold-medallist
Get this into your thinking, Lord M has no need to resort to other than the truth, for him the facts are sufficient. And as much as that sits badly with the powers of the moment, well that is life and a bit of a reminder that just because Physics and Politics begin with the same letter I’d just a reminder about the non-associatively betwixt correlation and causeation unless it suits your cause.
But whY do I know?
tallbloke says:
July 12, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Got any data to show us yet Ben?
No. But supposedly he has a rat on his doorstep.
Monckton’s not a scientist? Al Gore is?
I’d love to see Monckton come back to Minnesota and challenge Abrahams in a debate.
I also can’t believe a college professor doesn’t have the brains to realize he’s going to get hammered on something this stupid. I’m an engineer, rule #1 on the job – always tell the truth. Abrahams must have failed Engineering Ethics.
I’ve watched Abraham’s attack and read the first 60 or so of Lord M’s rebuttal. Like UnfrozenCavemanMD, I was affronted by Abraham’s claim to be responding “how a typical scientist” would. I noticed quickly that Abraham wasn’t distinguishing published peer reviewed results of papers from just the discussion part of the paper which receives less peer review scrutiny and he was going to the authors of the papers for what they thought, as distinguished from what they could back up. He also was not making an effort see what validity there might be to Lord Monckton’s points as scientist would first do in good faith. He tried to rebutt points about 4 years flattening of the sea temperatures and ten years of little net reduction in Arctic ice, with the long term trend data, which was not being denied. It seems to me that rather the point being made was that natural variation was not being given its due.
On my first and only viewing so far, I noticed that Abraham’s quotes Dr. Frank uncritically:
“Evidence for anthropogenic causes of this modern warm comes from the fact that climate models can only reproduce modern warmth by including anthropogenic forcings.”
First of all, it the statement uses the standard IPCC fudge phrase “anthropogenic forcings”, which conflates the anthropogenic GHGs with the anthropogenic aerosols. CO2 forcing can’t reproduce the midcentury cooling or the steep temperature rise of the 80s and 90s without anthropogenic aerosols either, and those aerosols are so poorly constrained by data that models that vary by over a factor of two in climate sensitivity can “match” the 20th century climate chiefly by using different levels of aerosols. Statement’s like Frank’s have been one of the chief arguments against a larger attribution to solar, but even though the IPCC acknowledges that solar variation is poorly understood allowing that it might be a factor of two greater than in the Lean data typical used for solar forcing in the model runs, I’ve never seen an attempt to match the 20th century warming using solar forcing with twice the variation. You’d think that would at least have been tried in true fairness to a competing hypothesis. You would think that the failures of the models to reproduce the PDO and NAO which were in positive phases for the recent warming and negative phases for the mid century cooling would give one pause before citing their inability as “evidence”. Of course there is a lot of other diagnostic literature documenting problems with the models including a failure to reproduce the signature of the solar cycle seen in the observations. It would be nice if they were validated for solar before being used to reject it as a hypothesis.
Later on, Abraham goes on to cite a number of solar articles, once again uncritically. Most were just mere correlation studies, so of course, since solar forcing was fairly flat when the temperature was rising in the 80s and 90s, and CO2 forcing was also rising, the correlation with CO2 was better. But solar forcing does not have to rise for warming of the oceans and climate to continue, it just has to be maintain a higher level of forcing than the ocean’s have yet to equilibrate to, and the oceans, which contain nearly all the thermal mass of the climate system, were still recovering from the little ice age. The full climate response to earlier poorly understood increases in solar forcing, may, just like the response to CO2 forcing, have been modulated by the anthropogenic aerosols and the PDO and NAO multidecadal oscillations. The earlier papers cited, like Solanki’s in 2003 were published before the climate commitment studies of Meehl, et al and Wigley, et al, in 2005, which might have given Solanki pause before using mere correlation. Surely, there should be more evidence than mere model failures, before dismissing a solar grand maximum in the latter half of the 20th century as mere coincidence.
As a scientist whose specialty is radiative transfer, Abraham should know that direct effects of CO2 and other well mixed GHG forcings could only explain less than a third of the recent warming. Attributing anything more to them requires that the climate system have net positive feedback to their forcing. That is the key question in the science, since the direct effects alone would only result in a climate sensitivity of about 1 degree C. That would not be enough to justify sacrificing trilliosn of dollars of economic growth. The science is unresolved as yet, there is still the possibility that if the net feedback is negative or only slightly positive, most of the recent warming is due to solar, aerosols and internal variation. GHG warming would be a perturbation on top of natural variation, not the other way around. While the climate will likely be warmer in the year 2100, that decade may well be cooler depending upon natural variation.
Lucy Skywalker says:
July 12, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Now I’ve scanned Monckton (I too get nauseous now at anything over a few seconds’ exposure to the Dark Side) I think this is a tour de force, worthy of Churchill’s speeches but in the coin appropriate for the current battle in Science. It’s at once a restatement of Monckton’s speech, with excellent clear pictures to scupper each familiar rotten icon of the warmistas, and a refusal to let the warmistas take pot shots at him from the ivory towers of abused public trust. It’s a worthy call to arms, to eject the usurpers of Climate Science from their thrones, using the proper procedure – the full rigor of Scientific Method, amplified and backed with the power of law and a passion for truth and justice.
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Yes. Bravo. Well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
July 12, 2010 at 4:58 pm
This presentation reflects very badly on the University of St. Thomas.
But you wouldn’t know because your just a caveman, thawed out. Our world frightens and confuses you. 😉
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3388136/9476695
I sometimes tire of people (even myself) calling AGW a religion. Let’s be fair; if it is a religion, it is one of the more badly constructed, factually challenged religions. It’s apologia stinks. Just look at Dr. Abraham’s presentation. It would never stand up to the rigorous challenges that religiously mature apologia must endure. It is filled with obvious speaking -to-the-choir (or ignorant) easy to dispute assertions (as CM does so devastatingly). It really is more like a cult, a unique, historically temporary, streak-of-faith-filled-frenzy supported by carefully arranged, mutually reinforcing factoids (a cargo cult?). Dr. Abraham’s behavior embodies every stinking bad behavior we associate with narrow minded cultists: intolerance and holier than thou ad hominem attacks hiding behind a thin veneer of arrogant rationality. Anyway, my hat is still off to the late Michael Crichton.
Mike says:
July 12, 2010 at 6:33 pm
“Did you all read question #466? It is first time I have seen a rebuttal demand a cash payment! Your Lord is a joke. Instead of actually rebutting Assoc. Prof. A.,” […]
Read the e-mail to Anthony and the letter again. You’re being distracted by details. Christopher Monckton was not writing a rebuttal. Associate Professor Abraham was writing a rebuttal.
Monckton wrote a conditionally confidential letter to Abraham, not a rebuttal. As near as I can make out, Monckton laid out the points of his libel case, should he decide to pursue the matter, and offered a reasonable way for Abraham (and St. Thomas) to avoid any legal unpleasantries.
[Hey Bill you got your own blog that’s great, but we aren’t discussing your opinions posted on your blog about Monckton here, nice try at trolling for traffic though]
I eagerly await the next instalment of this thrilling drama. As has been mentioned it seems common for Monckton’s detractors to bring a spork to a gunfight.
I believe Monckton has seized the opening afforded to him by the unsuspecting Abrahams and his naive institution to lay a foundation for a case to test not just the facts of this dispute, but by extension the science of AGW, the integrity of the IPCC, and the hockey stick team in a U.K. court of law. This could be a trial of decade, affording the skeptics the opportunity denied them by the various inquiries to date – to frame the case against the true believers. This will certainly be a more level playing field than the various inquiries have been to date. I hope the good Lord’s pockets (and those of his supporters) are deep, because the true believers will certainly fund Abrahams with whatever it takes. This should be good sport for all, and an interesting outcome is certainly assured.
The demand for monetary compensation for the damages to reputation are required for legal purposes to establish legal standing to bring a lawsuit before a court of law.
I think it obvious that Monckton’s education at Churchhill College,Cambridge and Cardiff trumps the teaching staff at St. Thomas (oh excuse me, I just turned a particular into a general argument). However I don’t often come across such a poorly worded brief as that put forward by the good professor. If I were students under him, I would be worried about my quality of education. I also would hope that he is not representative of the remainder of the instructors there.
Monckton was a terrific read and I always enjoy the manner in which he adds his own brand of humor.
Liam says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Weird, on paper I have similar education and qualifications to Prof Abraham, both PhDs, both Engineers specialising in energy/thermodynamics. Somehow he is a true believer and crusading for AGW, while I am still looking for convincing evidence.
Might I guess that you also actually have a real job in the real world where generating real results are a necessary feature of your working life. As opposed to academia.
Smokey says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Bill Tuttle says at 12:21 pm:
“Worse. He brought a plastic spoon.”
I have it on good authority that Assistant Professors are allowed to use sporks.
Perhaps it was a Progressive Spoon – i.e. it has the appearance of a spoon, but will only function as a spoon 40% of the time if it recieves a taxpayer funded stimulus… the other 60% of the time – it pretends to be a politically correct fork.
Demolition time – remind me never to get on Lord Monckton’s bad side, that was a masterpiece! Good luck to him, I hope it gets very widely publicised!
Villabolo: “Sundance, Lord Monckton has a history of attempted intimidations against scientists, including threats of lawsuits and harassment directed at Institutions that the scientist belongs to or associates with.”
I see this said a lot, and to be honest I don’t follow Monckton’s career that much, so I’m totally unaware of any threats or intimidations. The assertions are never accompanied by citations, so perhaps you could clarify for us who Monckton threatened and why. If you have no citations could I suggest you withdraw your comment because it is defamation if untrue.
REPLY: I second that, Villabolo, put up or shut up. Show citations or withdraw the claim – Anthony
Curious why Prof A produced a “revised” version. Both are still available from his faculty page:
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/jpabraham/
I don’t have the inclination to listen to both and compare, but there’s a substantial revision to the Willie Soon slides that tones down the question of motive by funding sources, while still raising the question.
It’s as if Prof A needed to re-do his presentation to remove the libel, but in that case, why leave the older version available? Smells of rotting walleye.
University of St Thomas in St Paul MN is (according to US News) a 3rd tier university, with an endowment of ~$350M USD (they can afford the $100K, but not a lot more) that accepts ~80% of applicants. In other words, not very selective. They charge $28K in tuition and fees for their 6164 undergraduate students.
Prof A claims ~80 publications, but a quick scan suggests that most of these are conference presentations, which are typically not peer reviewed. He has a heavy teaching load, but finds time to consult for a broad variety of industrial activities that verge on “green” energy efforts, which may explain his financial biases.
My academic institution would not be happy with me if I had put it in the jeopardy that Prof A has put the University of St Thomas in!
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
July 12, 2010 at 8:12 pm (Edit)
tallbloke says:
July 12, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Got any data to show us yet Ben?
No. But supposedly he has a rat on his doorstep.
He’s had Overpeck round to call?
Angela says:
July 12, 2010 at 11:07 pm (Edit)
Demolition time – remind me never to get on Lord Monckton’s bad side, that was a masterpiece! Good luck to him, I hope it gets very widely publicised!
The parts I read were pretty good, but full of typos and missed words. Someone with the aptitude and time could usefully help him with a proof readers report.
Larry G says:
July 12, 2010 at 9:38 pm (Edit)
I hope the good Lord’s pockets (and those of his supporters) are deep, because the true believers will certainly fund Abrahams with whatever it takes. This should be good sport for all, and an interesting outcome is certainly assured.
The extent to which they would back Abrahams financially would itself speak volumes about their propaganda machine. It would also be fun to find out whse money was being used, and where it came from…