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
Lucy Skywalker says:
July 12, 2010 at 5:44 pm (Edit)
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. It has the sense of fatal drumbeat I remember from the Watergate inquiry.
Nicely put Lucy. I think people stateside probably underestimate the impact of the case Monckton backed in the UK courts when the lorry driver took issue with Gore’s movie being rammed down the throat of his kid at school.
The british public became aware of the Judges verdict, and quietly formed ther opinions about ‘global warming’. The polls showed belief diminishing from that day forward. Brit’s don’t like the inculcation of thei children with a one sided viewpoint.
I think Viscount Monckton’s pockets probably are pretty deep, but I’d certainly be willing to kick into the fund if he manages to get this one to court and needs our support.
Tallbloke, ahem, that would be ‘a proof reader’s report’.
Monkton seems to have peculiar values, he calls University of St. Thomas a ‘Bible school’ then demands $100000 because he thinks they insult him.
Phil Clarke (1:16 pm), is the world warming or cooling?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif
From Monbiot’s Blog
“Viscount Monckton, another fallen idol of climate denial
Professor John Abraham’s withering scrutiny reveals how the gurus of climate scepticism repeat a pattern of manipulation
Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.”
What will Monbiot say next! Sue me too?
To use the youthful vernacular, Associate Professor Abraham has been PWND! I think the term PWND is entirely appropriate as Associate Professor Abraham has created a presentation of the standard of an indisciplined teenage student.
From what I saw of Abraham’s PDF presentation, I found it to be inaccurate and misleading and I gave up reading/watching it after a very short while as I could easily see the gaping flaws in it’s first few arguments.
I did not bother finishing it. This rebuttal from Viscount Monkton has highlighted even more mistakes, misinterpretations and outright lies that I was not aware of. It makes me think that Associate Professor Abraham did not actually watch Viscount Monkton’s presentation at all, but merely looked at the slides, misunderstood them and then without the common courtecy of even contacting Monkton, set about to wilfully libel his work.
That this man, Abraham, has somehow achieved the position of Associate Professor astounds me when his sloppiness in research is worse than would be expected of a first year A level physics student in the UK.
Viscount Monkton has thoroughly rebutted this pathetic presentation, which is bordering on a libellous defamation of character.
If anyone has the gall to even think of mentioning Abraham’s name when discussing credibility in Climate Research, They will have already deserted their own credibility entirely.
The beauty here is that Monckton laid out all the arguments against AGW in his presentation and some boofhead from a University trying to get a taste of the AGW funding pool came along and challenged him. Perfect!
Let the court case begin.
Is it acceptable to abbreviate “Associate Professor Abraham” as “Ass. Prof. Abraham?”
Probably not. However Abraham’s snarky attack on Monckton sinks me to the level of snark, especially as I was subjected to Abraham’s sort of “scientific” disdain, when I first began innocently asking questions about the “science” of global warming.
I often lose debates simply because I lose my temper. Once, when arguing “peace is better than war,” I was so infuriated by my younger brother that our discussion disintegrated into a brawl. (So much for peace.)
Due to my own weakness, I greatly appreciate Monckton’s ability to painstakingly dissect Abraham’s guff, demonstrating not only Abraham’s incorrect interpretation of facts, and his misuse of logic, but also Abraham’s failure to be polite and have good manners.
Abraham winds up looking inept and intellectually lazy. It is the intellectual laziness, combined with arrogant displays of power, that has always infuriated me about Alarmists. All I have needed to do is ask questions, and I have witnessed people scorning, scoffing, and looking down sniffy noses, calling me all sorts of names, without answering my questions.
When “Villabollo” talks of “threats and intimidation” I feel he is forgetting what it was like to even dare question the idea of Global Warming, even only four years ago. Abraham’s rant is actually a fine example of the sort of “threats and intimidation” I’d receive. It might not discourage the likes of Monckton, but to an ordinary fellow like myself it was definitely intimidating to get hit by a whole slew of “science.” I was often condescendingly informed I couldn’t understand, because I was not an Ass. Prof.
I wonder if Abraham was not actually fishing for funding, when he took on Monckton. Although some scientists and schools, like Mann and Penn State, have received money from the stimulus slush-fund, most scientists are chronically underfunded, and the current economic crisis is starting to hit home in small, back-water colleges that employ Ass. Profs.
In a time of crisis we are faced with a choice. We can stand by Truth, and use the painstaking logic that Monckton uses, or we can sink to the level of Abraham, which strikes me as a sort of juvenile bullying.
If we build on Truth we build on a rock, but if we build on adolescent bullying we are building on a swamp.
Here is a quote from the St Thomas website;
“The legal body that governs the university is the board of trustees. It is the final authority on setting our important policies, on the definition of major goals, and on the preservation of the academic mission.”
That last clause seems the operative bit.
I checked out the list of members of the Board of Trustees. Plenty of interesting people who have vested interests in academic integrity, an a number of high-powered lawyers, too. I expect there to be a lot of communication between these people since Monckton went public. And I bet one of the questions will be ‘ why weren’t we informed?’
Here they are;
Lee R. Anderson/Chairman, APi Group, Inc.
George W. Buckley/Chairman, President and CEO, 3M
Rodney P. Burwell/CEO, Burwell Enterprises, Inc.
Michael V. Ciresi/Partner and Chairman of the Exec. Board, Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, L.L.P.
Burton Cohen/CEO and Publisher, MSP Communications
Reverend Dennis Dease/President, University of St. Thomas
Gail Dorn/Marketing and Community Relations Consultant, Target Corporation
Michael E. Dougherty/Chairman and CEO, Dougherty Financial Group LLC
John J. “Hap” Fauth/Chairman, The Churchill Companies
Maureen A. Fay, O.P./President Emerita, University of Detroit Mercy
Archbishop Harry J. Flynn, D.D/Archbishop Emeritus, Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis ..Chair, University of St. Thomas Board of Trustees
Ron L. Fowler/Chairman, President and CEO, Liquid Investments, Inc.
Timothy P. Flynn/Chairman, KPMG LLP
Eugene U. Frey/Chairman, Wabash Management Inc.
Geoffrey C. Gage/President and Owner, Brand Solutions
Antoine M. Garibaldi/President, Gannon University
James P. Gearen/Executive Vice President, Zeller Realty Corporation
Amy R. Goldman/Chairman and Executive Director, GHR Foundation
Pierson M. Grieve/Retired Chairman and CEO, Ecolab, Inc.
Daniel J. Haggerty/Retired CEO, Norwest Venture Capital
Stephen J. Hemsley/President and CEO, UnitedHealth Group
Kathleen J. Higgins Victor/President, Centera Corporation
Stanley S. Hubbard/President and CEO, Hubbard Broadcasting, Inc.
John J. Huber/Controller – U.S. Accounting Operations, Canadian Pacific Railway
Sister Carol Keehan, DC/President and CEO, The Catholic Health Association
Laurence E. LeJeune/Chairman of the Board, LeJeune Investments, Inc.
Reverend Edward Malloy, CSC/President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame
Reverend John M. Malone/Vice President for Mission, University of St. Thomas
Mary G. Marso/CEO, Jeane Thorne, Inc.
Reverend Kevin McDonough/Pastor, Church of Saint Peter Claver
Harry G. McNeely, Jr./Chairman Emeritus, Meritex Enterprises & McNeely Foundation
Alvin E. McQuinn/Chairman and CEO, QuinStar Investment Partners, LLC
John M. Morrison/Chairman, Central Financial Services, Inc.
The Honorable Diana E. Murphy/U.S. Circuit Judge, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals
Stephen P. Nachtsheim/Chairman, Deluxe Corporation
John F. O’Shaughnessy, Jr./Chairman and CEO, General Parts, Inc.
The Most Reverend Lee A. Piché/Auxiliary Bishop, Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis
Gerald A. Rauenhorst/Founding Chairman, Opus Corporation
Richard M. Schulze/Chairman, Best Buy Co., Inc.
Robert J. Ulrich/Chairman, MIM
Frank B. Wilderson/President, Wilderson and Associates, Inc.
Ann Winblad/Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Mark Zesbaugh/CEO, Lennox Re
The Board of Trustees holds meetings three times per year, in February, May and October. The Executive Committee of the Board meets bi-monthly.
Given that WUWT is the #1 science site on the whole web, Abraham is now obviously going to be agenda item #1 for the October meeting.
“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., he asks a serious of leading questions, which no one could have time to address. Since he does not make statements, he can’t be called a liar, but can say “Prof A has not answered my questions!” If his original claims are correct all he needed to do was justify them. ”
Mike, yes, I have read ALL the questions, which is why I waited until I had finished reading them before I gave my opinion.
Lord Monkton DID refute and rebut the ill-informed and misleading nonsense that Associate Professor Abraham published. He rebuts them in the form of detailed questions that can only be answered honestly in a way that will show how incompetently the Professor has conducted his sloppy hatched job.
You are right, Mike, in stating that these questions cannot be answered, well, not in a way that can allow the Associate Professor to retain any credibility as these questions rightly cut to the very heart of the massive mistakes in the Associate professor’s serious and defaming allegations against Viscount Monkton.
The specific cash payment is to a charity, NOT to Viscount Monkton and this is necessary in this case as a precursor to a possible legal claim for damages.
This presentation by Associate Professor Abraham is full of massive and obvious mistakes, deliberate misrepresentation and demonstrates a level of competence equivalent to a first year A level student in the UK. It is the kind of work that a lazy student who could not be bothered actually watching Viscount Monkton’s presentation, but who would only look at some of the slides, fail to understand them or their context (which were fully explained in the presentation itself) and then create a very biased and poor hatchet job of Viscount Monkton himself.
This was not evidence of competent academic research, on the part of Associate Professor Abraham, but of personal spite and wilful defamation and sloppy investigation (what little investigation there was plainly did not even stretch as far as actually watching the presentation in full) If Associate Professor Abraham had actually watched the presentation, then I am even more at a loss as to how a professed “learned” man could not understand many of the slides as the way in which he misrepresented what was presented by Viscount Monkton is little short of grotesque.
Your Associate Professor Abraham has been made to look like a very foolish, lazy, sloppy, ill-educated, ill-mannered and silly little man indeed.
If Chris Monkton tries to sue Abrahams for libel, then I will show my backside in the marketplace. From the above comments Monckton clearly knows his market, and that’s all that matters to him.
Abrahams looks mild and sensible enough not to rise to Monckton’s bait and sue Monckton. Monckton has done what a reasonable person ought not to have done and simply turned up the volume. He’s lost it big time.
Clearly it really *really* galls Monckton that Rajendra Pachauri has vastly more relevant peer reviewed papers than dear Monckton’s one little article.
I was amused to see that the latest sea level data blows Monckton’s “no sea level rise for 4 years” graph out of the water. Ah but because it was true when Monckton gave the presentation, that’s all that matters! Well no, not really. It’s just proof of the obvious cherry-picking that Monckton likes to do.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.jpg
Ken Hall
Good reply to Mike’s comment but I would not go so far to suggest the good associate professor as you did: rather I would summarise his effort as one of intellectual incompetence. 🙂
I keep getting download errors when trying to download the Monckton piece. Does anyone have a Word file of it or something I could try?
Or is it up somewhere else in a different format?
Thanks
““Evidence for anthropogenic causes of this modern warm comes from the fact that climate models can only reproduce modern warmth by including anthropogenic forcings.””
Oh gosh darn! That is another bovine waste meter broken!
Am I the only one who reads the above ridiculous defence of model-based evidence and only sees,
“Sorry, we can’t get out models to work, because our models are wrong!”
We only have ONE model worth examining, and that is the big one we live on.
The other comparative computer models cannot get the same results without adding “anthropogenic forcings” because they are NOT models of the actual earth’s climate (because they cannot model things that humans still have no clue about, even simple things like clouds and the effect of the sun’s radiative, magnetic, electronic and other effects and the effects of the changes in the earth’s gravity, magnetic strength and polarity, and sub oceanic volcanic and earthquake activity and literally millions of other small, but critical interactions of energy that actually take place in our real non-predictable, non-linear climate) and therefore are programmed to give the political outcome that the computer programmers who wrote the code were paid a lot to produce and therefore those computer models are NOT modeling the earth accurately and therefore the computer models are WRONG!!!
bigbloke says:
July 12, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Tallbloke, ahem, that would be ‘a proof reader’s report’.
Uh-Oh, apostrophe catastrophe alert. BB is watching you 🙂
‘I’ve got ‘Coaldust’ chiding me for using them where I shouldn’t on my blog, and you chiding me for missing ’em out here.
Read this and gimme a break! 😉
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/about/
OK…. so I’m on slide 8 of Dr Abraham’s Presentation. (refuting slide 1 of the Monkton presentation)…. this isn’t going well……
The Quote that Abraham refutes is actually from a Sunday Telegraph article ‘Me and my God – Moral Outlook: Earthquake, Wind and Fire’ an interview with Frances Welch (10th September 1995)……
I guess I’ll keep listening, but already Abraham shows himself to be light on research and big on appeal to authority (his)…….
John from CA,
I’m sort of getting your point that this university, like every other university, has a published statement of ethical guidelines that sounds pretty neat. Although this has nothing to do with human experimentation, so that part of your quote threw me.
I’m not saying Father Dease would necessarily be unethical and/or ineffective. I’m saying there’s no reason to assume he is less likely to be so than anyone else in his position.
“Father” in front of a person’s name does not guarantee he’s better at doing his job than anyone else doing the same job. (Nor does it disqualify him.)
Steve Milesworthy,
Thank you. Your link merely proves Viscount Monkton to be correct. If you took your blinkers off and look at what Monkton shows in his presentation, he shows a long term trend, the end of which (the last four years) was largely flat. This .jpg also shows that and then it shows a return to the exact same trend that Monkton demonstrated in his presentation.
This trend does not show a trend of 20 feet rise per century, (as Al Gore predicted) much less the 20 meter rise that some hysterical alarmists predict.
In fact it clearly shows 3.2mm per year +/- 0.4mm It says so on the graph itself at the bottom left above the years 2004 2006 2008.
Let’s do some really easy sums…
If one multiplies 3.2(mm) x 100 (years) this equals 320mm. 320mm divided by 10 gives us 32 centimetres. This means this graph which you posted shows a 32cm rise over 100 years, which is 1.04 feet.
The long term trend is approximately 1 foot per century in that graph.
So, where is Viscount Monkton wrong?
Steve, you are wrong.
Steve Milesworthy says:
July 13, 2010 at 3:11 am (Edit)
I was amused to see that the latest sea level data blows Monckton’s “no sea level rise for 4 years” graph out of the water. Ah but because it was true when Monckton gave the presentation, that’s all that matters! Well no, not really. It’s just proof of the obvious cherry-picking that Monckton likes to do.
I see a lot of graphs still being paraded by warmists which end at 2000-2003. At least Monckton’s graph was up to date when he wrote his presentation. At how was giving a graph which started with the beginning of the satellite record and ended up to date cherry picking anyway?
Get a grip
But who is Sheridan Stewart? According to the properties of the pdf, he/she is the author.
jcrabb says:
SO!! It is run by members of the clergy, isn’t it? and Moncton did say he would donate it all to charity, (of their choosing?)
Hi there,
interesting smearing on both sides . . makes me a bit wodnering if we forget the big picture in all the details..
Anyhou, I found this one by Lubos about the Houghton-question
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/02/sir-john-houghton-is-liar.html
Seems that this one can be answered quite clearly . .
All the best,
LoN
Look, that’s my problem with this. Christopher Monckton’s chosen method of addressing this was ridiculous.
He scores some hits, but by dividing his point into almost 500 pin-pricks, some of them come across as trivial and silly. Like, as only one example, when Abraham points out Monckton is saying the sea levels aren’t rising, Monckton replies, but I said they were rising until recently.
Well, that would mean Abraham was right, doesn’t it?
Etc.
Sure, there’s another way to look at it, but rather than engaging in a concise, hard-hitting, debunking, we get 500 questions.
Is it fair that Monckton should ask some questions? Sure. But this comes across as ridiculous to someone not already predisposed to like him.
And who the hell would have time to answer them all, even within a month, while otherwise working?
Now, Abraham brought this on himself by not giving Monckton a timely chance to respond before Abraham published. But instead of replying with a knockout blow against Abraham, we get something that isn’t even a long diatribe. Monckton’s hits are buried within a format most people would consider unreasonable if they received such a request.
And the concluding with request for monetary donations to charity while cute, was also arrogant, and much less effective than just closing with a particularly strong debunking point.
Steve Milesworthy says:
“Clearly it really *really* galls Monckton that Rajendra Pachauri has vastly more relevant peer reviewed papers than dear Monckton’s one little article.”
You seem to be unaware of the fact that the climate peer review system has been thoroughly corrupted. Here is a good starting place to get some knowledge.
“Ah but because it was true when Monckton gave the presentation, that’s all that matters! Well no, not really. It’s just proof of the obvious cherry-picking that Monckton likes to do.” But your own ‘latest’ sea level chart is cherry-picked.
This chart shows it’s not time to panic. But if you need to be frightened, by all means, scare yourself. The rest of us know the sea level is simply the result of the rebound from the LIA, and there is nothing to get alarmed about.
And claiming that “Rajendra Pachauri has vastly more relevant peer reviewed papers than dear Monckton’s one little article” shows how little you know about the corruption of the climate peer review process, not to mention Pachauri’s own personal ethics challenges.
Lord Monckton has asked some embarrassing questions of John Abraham. Unless Abraham can provide satisfactory answers, his ad hominem attack will backfire — which is already happening, as we can see from the responses here.
“421: Have you heard of Mr. Alexander Graham Bell’s wondrous invention, the electric telephone?
422: Have you heard of Mr. Albert Arnold Gore’s astounding invention, the World Wide Web?
423: If you had been truly interested in discovering any of my sources that a non-climatologist such as yourself would not be familiar with, why did you not, even once in the months you say you spent preparing your talk, use either the electric telephone or the World Wide Web to contact me and simply ask? Yes, I have raised this question several times before in this letter, but that is because in your talk you kept on and
on and on about it.”
😀