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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Brenden H. Has it not occurred to you that whatever the House of Lords says has nothing at all to do with any of the facts mentioned in the debate, or any fact regarding climate change at all.
Brendan H says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Monckton chooses to claim that he is entitled to sit in the House of Lords. There are two issues here:
Brendan H: You are dead wrong on the above statement. Below is what Monckton himself says about his title of Lord and the right to sit in The House of Lords.
The below found at Jo Nova site available thru WUWT.
Lord Monckton:
“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.”
So Brendan please retract your statement.
R Gate: The problem for you is that Monckton won this debate because the scientific facts are on his side, and not because he is a wonderful debater, that is just a bonus. That is why Dennis could not state one scientific fact that backs up his claims, not one. That’s the problem there aren’t any facts that back up the so called consensus view. None. There are only computer models.
This debate was held in the National Press Club which is the traditional home of the left leaning Canberra Press Gallery. It was also stacked with anti-sceptic activists out to discredit Monckton and derail his argument. They failed dismally. Monckton was his normal impressive self and everything he said made sense to me.
I was staggered by the apparent lack of knowledge of Dr Richard Dennis – an economist who used several false analogies as the main thrust of his argument together with his belief in consensus. He seems to believe that CO2 is a pollutant and did not raise the greenhouse effect once in his argument or any of the other phenomena that affect climate.
I was also bewildered as to what the debate was all about. And even after watching the intro once again on YouTube again I am still at a loss. I believe it was earlier billed as a debate on the subject of ‘The World is Not Warming” but it seemed to have changed to the very broad “Climate Change Debate”
As it was, Dr Dennis used the opportunity to promote Gillard’s carbon tax and knock Abbott’s Direct Action Plan whereas Monckton argued that neither was necessary and we should adapt to climate change and use the billions wasted on either plan on more productive causes.
I have one question for Dr Dennis on his obvious faith in a consensus of economists to forecast the future of the world’s climate. How many of them forecast the global financial crisis to their clients up to one day before it hit us?
Lord Monckton decisively won this debate while facing an obviously hostile audience because observational evidence and fundamental analysis indicates total warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels will be less than 1C. His arguments were based on facts in peer review papers.
Lord Monckton is not a denier. He does not deny the fact that increasing atmospheric CO2 will cause some warming of the planet. The hard scientific facts support the assertion that the warming due to a doubling of will be less than 1C for a doubling of CO2. Warming of 1C with most of the warming occurring at high latitudes will be beneficial to the environment. The biosphere will and is expanding the increased atmospheric CO2.
Observational evidence in published papers such as measurement of the total radiation at top of atmosphere measured by satellite over the last 20 years supports the assertion that the planetary sensitivity to a change in forcing is negative (planetary cloud cover increases when the planet is warmer to reflect more solar radiation into space). The IPCC predicted warming of 3.3C for a doubling of C02 requires the feedback to be positive rather than negative.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data
[1] Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data. It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy_pubs.html
LIMITS ON CO2 CLIMATE FORCING FROM RECENT TEMPERATURE DATA OF EARTH
The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years. The global anomalies are calculated from the average of climate effects occurring in the tropical and the extratropical latitude bands. El Niño/La Niña effects in the tropical band are shown to explain the 1998 maximum while variations in the background of the global anomalies largely come from climate effects in the northern extratropics. These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.
The science is not openly debate because the facts do not support a worldwide carbon tax, a worldwide carbon monitoring bureaucracy, and spending the trillions of dollars on carbon sequestration and carbon off sets. If the cost to mitigate a risk is higher than cost to directly manage the risk itself the do nothing alternative is the best choice. There is no scientific or logical reason to spend trillions of dollars trying to slow the rise of atmospheric CO2. There are not trillions of surplus public funds to spend on a mitigating a problem which is not a problem. In the case of this “problem” simple and cost effective energy conservation as opposed to carbon taxes and carbon sequestration which serve no purpose is the best government action based on the facts.
CO2 is a fertilizer. Plants eat CO2. A doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in roughly 30% to 40% increase in crop yield. The blog Real Climate does not include threads discussing the fact that CO2 is a fertilizer.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/05/030509084556.htm
http://www.advancegreenhouses.com/use_of_co2_in_a_greenhouse.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6036529.ece
http://www.greenhousemegastore.com/Johnson-CO2-Generator/productinfo/CO-1001/
SteveE says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:36 pm
James Sexton says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:12 pm
Read my post again mate, the first paragraph is a quote from Monckton, not a statement from me.
=======================================================================
Sigh, yes, I know. And it has nothing to do with Lindzen’s theories about CO2 sensitivity. Rather, Monckton was speaking about how few climatologists have actually tried to discern the earth’s climate sensitivity, and use Lindzen’s estimates towards that notion.
I’ll put Monckton’s quote that you posted up again..
“Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling.”
Ok, so far, we’ve determined that Monckton and Lindzen believe there have been very few scientists that have studied climate sensitivity (to CO2) and they’ve reached their conclusions by modeling and not measurement and observation.
Your next paragraph addresses your thoughts as to whether scientists use observation and measurements. (I should point out, it is impossible to attribute any particular bit of warming to CO2, so, there would be no measurements and observation to use, but I’ll digress.)
Your next paragraph starts with…..
“A number of peer-reviewed papers have exposed fatal flaws in Lindzen’s methods. His result of low climate sensitivity is heavily dependent on the choice …..”
Now, for most readers, we expect one to tie sequential paragraphs with a thing we like to call relevance. From your quote of Monckton, Monckton wasn’t referencing Lindzen’s thoughts to climate sensitivity, but Lindzen’s thoughts on how few scientists have actually sought to determine the sensitivity and whether or not they’ve used observation and measurements. (Which we know they haven’t, because one can’t observe anthropogenic caused atmospheric CO2 causing heat vs. the other known and unknown mechanisms which go into the totality of our planet’s climate.)
So, I think my original question is still valid. Sorry mate, but it is disjointed.
Please take the time to explain how these issues are issues of this debate. How do they remotely affect the science or the issues at debate?? Can you not stay focused for a nano-second?? GK
dz alexander says:
July 20, 2011 at 9:50 am
Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society, claimed that he never lost a debate.
Yes, that’s because he was part of the consensus!
Smokey says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:54 pm
“Dangerousdaze is right:
IPCC wg1, TAR, 14.2.2.2:”
The sad thing is that that it took literally 30 seconds of Googling to put the lie to Dave H’s accusation. Yet if you Google Monckton lying about chaotic climate you find way too many people who fail at basic searching skills (including this very thread – damn but Google’s on the ball!)
SteveE says:
July 20, 2011 at 11:47 am
Richard Denniss failed to even mention what scientific evidence this catastrophic global warming was even based on, though he liked to mention often it was the so called consensus. In fact under peer reviewed literature this is actually not the consensus. There are many papers which support little or moderate warming of the planet. It is the worst case scenario only based on models, not scientific observations and therefore can’t possible be a consensus, even if there was such a thing in science. The biggest mis-information is that of claiming that there is a consensus on catastrophic warming. In reality this only exists with CO2 being a greenhouse gas where higher levels will cause a little warming.
If it is high sensitivity then why is there a long pause in warming? The planet Earth actually shows a low sensitivity because virtually all the warming at least since the 1970’s has occurred in steps brought about by strong El Nino’s dependent on cloud albedo and solar activity. Global cloud albedo was declining since the 1980’s until around 2001. (Hence little/no warming since after) Unless of course you think that a little rise in CO2 causes strong El Nino’s and the decline in cloud albedo that is no more.
nofreewind,
“Doctor analogy is a very poor analogy. Many thousands of patients [die] each year from treatments recommended by Doctors that they would have been better off not receiving. Medicine is far from scientific fact is many, many instances. ”
No doubt true. But the point that Lord Monckton should have made, imho, is that at least in the annals of medicine there exists a database of millions of patients who have cancer, and a vast array of statistics to provide at least some reasonable assurance that if you have X type of cancer, and take treatment Y you have a Z probability of survival. Even the molecular mechanisms that lead to cancer are well understood.
In climate science, there is only one Earth, and nothing but nothing on which to make assertions regarding probability outcomes. The mechanism that govern the climate are poorly understood, partly because of the insufficiency of data. We don’t have data on tropospheric temperatures that go back more than 30 years. Ocean heat content is only now being measured with anything like the sufficiency required and measurements of TOA radiation budgets is so in its infancy it is still sucking at its mother’s teat. We need another 100 years of a concerted data collection exercise using the most accurate and reliable methods as technology becomes available. Maybe then we will have a good understanding of all the myriad of feedbacks and interactions.
To continue the medical analogy, it is the 19th century and all the doctor’s agree that the patient is sick because he has too much blood.
The the physician analogy is extremely inappropriate. Medicine bears little resemblance to climate science. The modern trend in medicine is “evidence based medicine”. The state of the art is a constantly moving target. As evidence accumulates the standards of practice shift. Ask any physician over the age of about 45 or 50. Odds are that they learned that beta blockers were absolutely contraindicated in cases of congestive heart failure. There was sound theoretical and clinical evidence to back this up. But it was wrong. Today beta blockers are mainstays in the management of CHF. The basic premise was challenged, experiments were conducted and empirical evidence was evaluated. You don’t see that happening in climate science. It is heresy to challenge the basic premise of the CO2 mythology, experiments in the real world are all but impossible and the only empirical evidence that exists does not support the AGW fraud.
Suppose you have a suspicious looking mole on your back and you see a dermatologist. Odds are he will biopsy the mole. A pathologist will confirm the diagnosis of melanoma. The dermatologist will refer you to an oncologist. The oncologist will recommend treatment that the best available current evidence suggests. Everything is evidence based. This doesn’t happen in climate science. In the Church of Climatology a dolt who measures tree rings can fabricate a “new” history of climate and convince politicians to squander wealth in the pursuit of remediation of a speculative hypothetical problem. There exists scant little empirical evidence in the field of climate science. Computer models are NOT evidence…in fact in most cases they’re not even good guesses.
Denniss utilized a very poor analogy. He might better have quoted all the economists that accurately predicted the housing bubble and resulting crash of the economy. Some saw it coming but the “consensus” maintained there was no problem.
G.Karst
I read the letter Monckton refers to about Lord-dom. As I recall he does not claim anthing more than to be entitled to be referred to as Lord Monckton. I am not sure why you think he refers to himself as a sitting member of the House, that membership being a sub-group of all lords. I thought this was settled ages ago. Oh yeah, it was, when the plebs looked up the rules of peerage. Are the anti-royalist-warmists still hoping to get people to stop listening to Monckton’s central arguments by repeating (inventing?) liar-liar-pants-on-fire memes? Do they have 30 peer-reviewed formulas for that?
Monckton’s question about Flannery publishing a peer-reviewed paper was spot on. Hot, flat and nutty.
Dangerousdaze says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Dave H says:
“He’s been making this claim again and again and again, despite the fact that that is **not** what the IPCC says.”
What does it say here?
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
It seems to say exactly what you claim it doesn’t. Did you check for yourself?
===========================================================
lol, obviously not. He didn’t bother. Why check for the facts when its easier just to assume people that believe differently are wrong? Lambert found another sucker to believe his nonsense.
Dave H, how does it feel to be played?
Would you all stop calling him ”lord” . He’s no lord at all. It’s a self proclaim title he stole from his father. He has never been proclaimed or named ”lord” by the Queen, the Parliement, nor the Lord Chamber.
As far has debating is concerned, mixing facts (creating confusion), saying one thing when talking about the other is the science Monckton is the lord of, and later gives the excuse he was not talking about that to cover his mistakes (numerous).
Back in the good old days, such guy was selling medecine bottles filled with brandy and a lot of water. Charlatanism, that’s all.
The guy creates confusion in a debate and people are just looking to hear what he’s saying, because that’s what they want to hear. Gauging the comments above, it is still very easy to abuse human’s credulity with good manner and large (empty) speaches.
The Australian Warmists are going to have to deal with Vaclav Klaus as well
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/07/vaclav-klaus-in-australia-schedule.html
>>King of Cool
>>I have one question for Dr Dennis on his obvious faith in a consensus of
>>economists to forecast the future of the world’s climate. How many of them
>>forecast the global financial crisis to their clients up to one day before it hit us?
Ha, ha. None.
But I did, back in 2006, and got into a right tussle with the Sunday Times economists about it. Perhaps I should be the climate tax advisor to the Aussie government. Got to be better than the current crowd.
.
The other interesting point about the debate was that a large number of tickets were sold to “Get-up” the propaganda arm of AGW and other socialist agendas, and they still couldnt come up with a relevent question or counter any of his arguments.
We know Lord Monckton, won the debate and so does the Leftest ABC ((think BBC for outside Aus)propaganda arm of the labor party and the greens), because they scheduled to show the debate on TV at 10.00pm here in Australia and cancelled after they realised they had lost and didnt want that getting out to the general public.
Honestly, Lord Monckton abuses his Lord title purely for the purpose of weeding out poor debaters. He WANTS people to assail his credibility because it tells him whether or not to pay attention, or go for the jugular. Most CAGW believers want to completely tear him down before distracting you with their pathetic analogies because it’s perceived as low-hanging fruit. Brendan H would be wise to see that he’s been trolled even though he thinks he’s doing the trolling.
Member of parliament or not, he’s got you. The alarmism you CAGW believers espouse is completely misplaced and the word is out. I’m very sorry that you wasted your energy on these endeavors, but you are not the first people in human history to believe in human doom, so please take comfort in that you’re only human like the rest of us.
I love it when warmists whip out the old “If you had a disease, you’d believe the doctors, wouldn’t you?” tripe.
Well, let’s compare apples to apples, so to speak. Let’s compare the immature and rather un-robust science of climatology today to the science of medicine at a time when it was similarly immature and rather un-robust. To do that, we’d need to go back several hundred years. Now ask yourself the same question… “If you had a disease, would you (knowing what you know, as a 21’st century citizen) buy the doctor’s prescription that they treat you with the accepted remedy of the day?” After all, the consensus treatment way back then for your particular disease had been around for a couple of millenia, and it had been practiced by the ancient Mayans and Aztecs, as well as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. So it had to be good, right?
So step right up and offer the good doctor (or barber, if you prefer) your neck so that we can give you a good bleed. Hold still. This won’t hurt a bit. I promise we’ll stop as soon as you pass out from blood loss.
Now, how do you feel about trusting the good Dr. Warmist?
@Tom T: “Steve E. You will do yourself well to read Lord Monckton defense against an hour long video attacking him that I believe WUWT published a year or so back.”
And much like this debate you’ll either have to take Monckton at his word or spend some serious time doing research on your own since the defense includes almost no sources for any of his claims (note: This was the state of Monckton’s defense at the time it was published. He mentioned several times that the sources were forthcoming so you can disregard this comment if he actually got around to doing as he had promised back then.)
I wish to hellangone that Dr. Denniss wouldn’t have been as stupid as he was in using skin cancer as his example of controversy in medicine when there really isn’t a helluva lot of such in the matter of basal cell or plain squamous cell carcinoma (Ca), and that those in this forum didn’t bring up a particular kind of skin cancer – malignant melanoma – when most of the controversies we can and do speak of involve the relative values of pre-operative computerized tomographic, nuclear magnetic resonance, and positron emission tomographic imaging as well as perioperative ultrasonographic and roentgenological (lymphoscintographic) imaging followed by appropriate regional lymphatic surgical staging when initial wide excision (IWE) is undertaken, and adjuvant and neoadjuvant therapies are considered.
In melanoma, though, if you can cut at all, you always cut. Some of the studies have yielded evidence that you do it even in Stage IV. Some of the very, very few definite “saves” I’ve had in my medical career have been the result of simply spotting a malignant melanoma when it was still in Stage I or Stage II and getting ’em under a good surgeon’s blade damned fast.
The U.S. Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) had a couple of pretty good continuing medical education (CME) activities on these subjects a couple of years ago, the monographs for which are maintained online. The current management activity took place in 2008 and the one on minimizing the adverse effects of treatment was conducted in 2009.
I’m not plugged into the Melanoma Mafia’s dickering over these issues the way I used to be back in the ’90s, but these ought to serve as concise updates about as good as anything you’re going to find outside a paywall.
It’s a miserable goddam disease, and Dr. Denniss is a miserable excuse for an economist.
M.’s answer regarding why climate skepticism is “cool” despite “overwhelming consensus” was embarrassingly bad. It plays right into alarmists stereotypes about skeptics holding to loony conspiracy theories concerning marxists wanting “to bring down the west.” How depressing.He should have hammered away on the fact that there are plenty of credible scientists who think AGW is a lot of b.s. That in fact the supposed consensus is a lie. That’s what the questioned demanded, pure and simple.
You people celebrate all you want. But I don’t think this guy is the best representative of the skeptical side by a long shot.
I hope people get inspired by C. Monckton. There are too many climate – bots out there going along with any thing the alarmists put out there. thank you C. Monckton
For folks who may have missed this WUWT article, Lord Monckton won another major debate at the Oxford Union last year:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/24/lord-monckton-wins-global-warming-debate-at-oxford-union