Love him or hate him, the man can win a debate. Andrew Bolt shares the results of the National Press Club Debate in Australia writing:
No wonder the warmists hate debate
The National Press Club debate’s results:
Lord Monckton – 10
Former Greens adviser Richard Denniss – 1
Journalists – 0.
Watch the video of the debate in full:
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Louise – please see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/20/monckton-wins-national-press-club-debate-on-climate/#comment-703462 and Richard S Courtney’s last comment.
Brendan H – It’s tempting to continue, but this issue is so irrelevant to climate science I’ll go with Richard S Courtney’s excellent explanation and his LET THAT BE AN END TO THE MATTER. As far as the dialogue between us two is concerned, I am happy to leave you with the last word.
A general comment : Lord Monckton’s win (it was a clear win) in the debate, is not of itself significant, debates tend to be won by the best debater. What really counted in this event was that Monckton won by addressing the core science (climate sensitivity) and his opponent used argument by authority.
Now, back on topic: William – your http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/20/monckton-wins-national-press-club-debate-on-climate/#comment-704469 is an excellent explanation of how the Hockey Stick is more propaganda than science. I would however like to have one nitpick. You say “It is not scientifically valid to splice on 20th century instrumentation temperature readings to a tree ring proxy temperature series. If the specific tree ring data is continued into the twentieth century it widely disagrees with instrument temperature readings. That makes sense as the tree rings size in that series does not correlate with temperature and is not a valid proxy for temperature.“. I would argue that splicing on the instrumental record would not have been a crime if they had not also truncated (1) the later part of the proxy records (Briffa from 1960, another from ?1980), (2) the earliest part of the proxy records (pre-1550), and (3) the earlier part of the instrumental record (pre-?1950) in order to hide what would have been the blindingly obvious uselessness of the proxies.
See http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/ and other posts on climateaudit.com
Note: In other circumstances I might have used the passive “which had the effect of hiding” instead of the active “in order to hide”. In light of the Climategate “hide the decline” email, it is crystal clear that there was indeed an active intention to hide.
Richard Courtney: “Hence, those heriditary peers who are not elected to sit and vote in the House of Lords remain as being Lords of the Realm and Members of the House of Lords.”
Not according to the people who run the show: “…you are not and have never been a Member of the House of Lords. Your assertion that you are a Member, but without the right to sit or vote, is a contradiction in terms.”
Smoking Frog says:
Regarding Lord Monckton’s comments at about 41:10 on the debate:
“He not only abridged the argument, but he mixed it in with evidence for a per-century warming. So his entire remarks at 41:10 were somewhat incoherent.”
—
How kind you are to offer up this defense for him. And the same kind defense could be offered up for him getting a bit carried away in his speaking and bringing up references to Nazi’s (more than on one occasion, despite apologies. Or perhaps you could defend his continual reference to being a member of the House of Lords, despite being asked not to by that same body.
I would say the good Lord seems ton need a lot of defending and is perhaps not the asset some skeptics might wish him to be.
Friends:
OK, I failed. At July 22, 2011 at 2:15 pm I tried to get the troll, Brendan H, to stop waving his Red Herring. But at July 22, 2011 at 8:48 pm he does it again.
I refuse to believe that he is as stupid as he pretends to be. Clearly, he did not read what I wrote or he failed to understand it, or he chose to ignore it.
I think he chose to ignore it, so I ask everybody to ignore his posts in the hope that he will get tired of waving his Red Herring and go away.
Richard
Richard S coutrney – I think the point is that whatever you wrote is your personal opinion, even if you are a friend of Lord Monckton. You personal opinion is trumped by the Clerk of the Parliaments who is able to state the official position (ie not personal opinion) that “…you are not and have never been a Member of the House of Lords. Your assertion that you are a Member, but without the right to sit or vote, is a contradiction in terms.”
and
“I must therefore again ask that you desist from claiming to be a Member of the House of Lords, either directly or by implication, and also that you desist from claiming to be a Member “without the right to sit or vote”.”
Sorry Richard. I’ll have one more go, but only this one (I promise). Since this irrelevant issue – membership of the House of Lords – is clearly continuing, I’ve done a bit of digging for more information:-
The dispute hinges on the hereditary peers’ status, following the House of Lords Act 1999.
This act is a general act, and Baroness Ashton of Upholland has stated in the House of Lords that the effect of Letters Patent creating peerages cannot be changed by legislation of general application.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2008-09-29a.398.0
This is confirmed in Hansard (http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1999/apr/27/house-of-lords-bill-1) “I proposed the convention of the constitution by which hereditary Peers would agree not to have their votes taken into account. This is the proposition in my Amendment No.68A. The great advantage of this amendment is that the Government would not need to introduce a Bill to abolish Letters Patent, nor rights existing in common law and custom. It also avoids having to pass a Bill to annul each Letters Patent for each hereditary peerage and the parliamentary time and expense of so doing.“. [my bold]
The House of Lords Information Office http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/hoflbpmembership.pdf states that:
“Letters Patent are issued by the Queen. Recipients become Members of the House automatically when Letters Patent are received. They can then be written to at the House of Lords, using their new title of Lord or Baroness. They cannot sit or vote until after their introduction.”
This clearly establishes that membership of the House of Lords is granted by Letters Patent. Also that membership and the entitlement to sit or vote are not one and the same thing. It is possible to be a member but not have the right to sit or vote. In fact all members of the House of Lords necessarily spend some time in this state.
I found further information, mostly in Hansard, confirming the above, but I think that is enough.
Louise and Mike Jonas:
This is the second thread on WUWT that trolls have dragged into an irrelevant cul-de-sac during the past week, and I would appreciate suggestions on how to stop them doing it.
Louise, I stated a fundamental point of the British Constitution. My personal opinion has nothing to do with whether or not Chris Monckton is a Member of the House of Lords. Only the monarch can decide that. He obtained his Letters Patent by inheritance from his father. The Queen did not then revoke his Letters Patent so she has decided he is a Member of the House of Lords. Hence, it is a matter of Constitutional Law that he is a Member of the House of Lords and nobody’s opinion can affect that in any way. My post explained this in as clear and non-technical a manner as I could manage.
Indeed, Mike Jonas confirms the pertinent facts which I stated in my post with a link to them provided by the House of Lords when he writes:
“The House of Lords Information Office http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/hoflbpmembership.pdf states that:
“Letters Patent are issued by the Queen. Recipients become Members of the House automatically when Letters Patent are received. They can then be written to at the House of Lords, using their new title of Lord or Baroness. They cannot sit or vote until after their introduction.”
This clearly establishes that membership of the House of Lords is granted by Letters Patent. Also that membership and the entitlement to sit or vote are not one and the same thing. It is possible to be a member but not have the right to sit or vote. In fact all members of the House of Lords necessarily spend some time in this state.”
Yes, Mike, and that distinction between Membership of the House and the right to sit and vote in the House is important. The 92 peers elected to sit and vote in the House are elected by and from all the heriditary peers. Hence, those Members of the House choose the 92 of them who will sit and vote in the House. If they were not Members of the House then it would be a nonsense for them alone to decide which of them could sit and vote.
So, Louise and all other trolls. STOP WAVING THIS RED HERRING. It has no relevance of any kind to the subject of this thread. In addition to the logical falacy of ‘red herring’, it is also the logical falacy of ‘poisoning the well’, and it demonstrates that you know and understand nothing about that on which you post.
In conclusion, I ask all others to ignore further daft and uninformed comments concernig this red herring.
Richard
PS Mike, as a point of interest for you, the distinction between Membership and the right to sit and vote also applies in the House of Commons. A Member of that House cannot sit and vote until after he/she swears an oath of loyalty to the Crown. During the recent ‘troubles’ Irish republicans were elected to Parliament but refused to take the oath so they were Members of the House of Commons (and were provided with offices in the House) but had no right to sit or vote in the House.
Richard S Courtney
The House Of Lords Act 1999, precludes Monckton and many other peers from sitting and voting in the House Of Lords.
The Queen may not have revoked his Letters Patent, but she did give the House of Lords Act 1999, Royal Assent on 11 Novenber 1999.
Based on that Royal Assent, The Queen says Monckton is not a member of the House Of Lords.
Get over it.
You may take your Red Herring and place it where the sun don’t shine.
Patrick Davis says:
July 22, 2011 at 8:46 am
“SteveE says:
July 22, 2011 at 6:27 am”
So, with all the walking you do, exhaling at least 40,000ppm/v CO2, do you think you are contributing to catastrophic climate change via YOUR carbon footprint? Or is CAGW just via energy consumption by humans? Because we can prove all human activity and emissions of “GHG” are dwarfed by insects, rain forrests, volcanos, oceans…yadda yadda yadda…I just want to know where you stand in terms of sources of GHG’s, that ~3% of ~390ppm/v p/a of which ~50% “disappears”. Just asking.
———————
This statement fails to take into account the other half of the carbon cycle. As you also learned in grade school, plants are the opposite to animals in this respect: Through photosynthesis, they take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, in a chemical equation opposite to the one above. (They also perform some respiration, because they need to eat as well, but it is outweighed by the photosynthesis.) The carbon they collect from the CO2 in the air forms their tissues – roots, stems, leaves, and fruit.
These tissues form the base of the food chain, as they are eaten by animals, which are eaten by other animals, and so on. As humans, we are part of this food chain. All the carbon in our body comes either directly or indirectly from plants, which took it out of the air only recently.
Therefore, when we breathe out, all the carbon dioxide we exhale has already been accounted for. By performing cellular respiration, we are simply returning to the air the same carbon that was there to begin with. Remember, it’s a carbon cycle, not a straight line – and a good thing, too!
Buring fossil fuels is returning to the atmosphere carbon that was taken out of the cycle millions of years ago.
Hope that helps your understanding of the Carbon cycle, as you clearly didn’t understand it when you were taught it at school. Any other questions please just ask.
SteveE:
You assert that “There are many determinations of climate sensitivity based on measurements and observations.” This assertion is false.
The “climate sensitivity” is more properly known as the “equilibrium climate sensitivity.” It is the increase in the equilibrium temperature from a doubling of the CO2 concentration. As the equilibrium temperature is not an observable, the equilibrium climate sensitivity cannot be measured or observed.
Mike Jonas: “The House of Lords Information Office…“Letters Patent are issued by the Queen. Recipients become Members of the House automatically when Letters Patent are received”.
This clearly establishes that membership of the House of Lords is granted by Letters Patent.”
No it doesn’t. Read the quote in context. Immediately before your quote above is this comment setting out the process of becoming a member of the House of Lords.
“The Announcement is made by No. 10 Downing Street…that certain people are to become Members of the House. Before anyone becomes a Member, a title has to be agreed, and documents—the Writ of Summons and Letters Patent—prepared.”
The automatic right to become a member on receipt of Letters Patent refers to life peers, who are also chosen to become members. You must be a peer in order to be a member, but not all peers are members. Monckton belongs in this latter category.
The document you cite also notes: “Members no longer pass on sitting and voting rights to their offspring when they die, although a small proportion of hereditary Members remains…”
Clearly, “sitting” and “voting” are activities that comprise membership. If you don’t have the right to sit and vote, you are not a member.
Also refer to: “The changing membership of the Lords…1999 House of Lords Act [r]emoves all except 92 hereditary peers from the House”.
URKidding, Brendan H and other daft trolls:
The UK is a Constitutional Monarchy.
The Crown provides Letters Patent.
Only the Crown can revoke Letters Patent.
The Crown has not revoked any Letters Patent.
It matters not one jot what some flunky wrote because the opinion of anybody does not and cannot overcome the decision of the Crown in a Constitutional Monarchy.
If one of you had bothered to borrow the family brain cell and had used it then you could have worked this out for yourself before posting nonsense.
But I suppose some smear blog such as DeSmogBlog or SkepticalScience or etc. posted the lie that heriditary peers are no longer Members of the House of Lords as a method to demean Lord Monckton. Those sites rely on moronic fools picking up their lies and spreading them.
Stop spreading the lie here as a method to destroy this thread.
Richard.
Richard S Courtney said “This is the second thread on WUWT that trolls have dragged into an irrelevant cul-de-sac during the past week, and I would appreciate suggestions on how to stop them doing it.“.
Blatant trolls do get sin-binned sometimes, but I would say that WUWT is much more open and democratic than certain other sites and tends to give quite a lot of leeway. People (including trolls) submit comments. Others read the comments and form their own opinions. When factual information and good analysis are posted, the trolls won’t change their views, but others hopefully will. It is frustrating at times, but IMHO you just have to trust the general readership’s intelligence.
At a higher level, if a website bars comments it doesn’t like then people eventually realise that and go elsewhere, leaving the site with only true believers. Hence WUWT’s success.
Will the general readership here believe that if someone is not able to sit and vote in the House of Lords then they are not a member, or will they believe that if someone has Letters Patent and the right to vote on who sits and votes in the House of Lords then maybe they really are a member? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I believe, other than that I can’t assume the former because of powerful evidence in favour of the latter. To argue that the Clerk of the Parliaments or anyone else says the former is in the end only an appeal to authority and does not address the basic issue, which is that the general legislation of the House of Lords Act 1999 cannot change or annul Letters Patent. There are sufficient logical or factual errors in comments here supporting the former, that the evidence in favour of the latter has not been overturned
Example 1: Brendan H’s last comment quotes “Before anyone becomes a Member, a title has to be agreed, and documents—the Writ of Summons and Letters Patent—prepared“. This does not prove that Lord Monckton is not a member, because Lord Monckton does indeed have Letters Patent, and it is the Letters Patent not the writ of summons that confers membership (the HoL document continues: “The Writ of Summons … is the document which calls the Member to the House and then acts as their ‘entry ticket’.“, ie. they are a member before they get the writ of summons.).
Example 2: Brendan H’s last comment says “Clearly, “sitting” and “voting” are activities that comprise membership“, but that is the wrong way round. Membership can confer the right to sit and vote, but does not logically have to [think of organisations such as the US Congress that have non-voting members]. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that a non-member can have the right to vote on who can sit and vote.
It looks like the UK government may have stuffed up on this, and hopefully it will get properly resolved before there is a constitutional crisis.
Richard S Courtney said “This is the second thread on WUWT that trolls have dragged into an irrelevant cul-de-sac during the past week, and I would appreciate suggestions on how to stop them doing it.“.
Blatant trolls should and do get sin-binned sometimes, but I would say that WUWT is much more open than certain other sites and tends to give quite a lot of leeway. People (including trolls) submit comments. Others read the comments and form their own opinions. When factual information and good analysis are posted, the trolls won’t change their views, but others hopefully will. It is frustrating at times, but IMHO you just have to trust the general readership’s intelligence.
At a higher level, if a website bars comments it doesn’t like then people eventually realise that and go elsewhere, leaving the site with only true believers. Hence WUWT’s success.
Richard S Courtney
Well Richard, unlike your family, mine has a brain cell to borrow.
And anyone who believes anything Monckton says, is incapable of believing the truth.
Enjoy your herring.
>>Patrick Davis says: July 22, 2011 at 8:18 am
>>Never seen “scientific” papers, originally, written in Greek, or any other
>>early language than Arabic. Reason, Arabic language very is specific
>>in terms. Think Algebra. NOT explored in Greek or Latin until after
>>the event.
Come off it.
Geometric algebra goes back to the Greeks, while formula algebra goes back to the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta. Nothing to do with Arabic.
.
>>Mike Jonas says: July 23, 2011 at 3:14 pm
>>Blatant trolls should and do get sin-binned sometimes, but I would
>>say that WUWT is much more open than certain other sites and tends
>>to give quite a lot of leeway. People (including trolls) submit comments.
There are no trolls on WUWT, just posters that Richard does not like, because they point out the flaws in his arguments.
Perhaps Richard would like to explain why fractured coal seams are good for the UK coal industry.
.
“Ralph says:
July 24, 2011 at 3:02 am”
A quick visit to Wikipedia would support your post, but it isn’t entirely accurate IMO. What you are suggesting is that the instrument used to find Mecca, was derived from the Sextant, and not the other way? I guess the point I am trying to make is that Arabic STANDARDISED the science, because of very specific language, and took it forward.
That is the difference between opinion (yours) and research. She has that power. Although rarely exercised, it still belongs to her (or him when her son or grandson suceeds her). In matters of royalty, she has full discretion (thus who gets to be called Lord or Lady, and what they are entitled to do with that title).
Mike Jonas:
I undertand the point you make in your post at July 23, 2011 at 3:14 pm. But the problem remains.
The trolls can now strike up another win on WUWT.
They have hijacked this thread onto meaningless and irrelevant discussion of a minor point of UK Constitutional Law which they clearly know as much about as ‘Ralph’ knows about the history of the UK coal industry (i.e. nothing).
Do those issues have anything to do with the subjects of the threads they have side-tracked into nothingness? No, none, not any.
So, this red-herring ploy is proving a successful tactic for the trolls of WUWT, and I repeat that I would welcome suggestions on how to deal with it.
Richard
[Snip. Zero redeeming value. Please take your insults elsewhere. ~dbs, mod.]