Readers may recall this piece Monckton’s Schenectady showdown in which he schools a number of students despite “en-masse” collections (to use Donald Rodbell’s words) of naysayers. Mr. Rodbell and Erin Delman, pictured below, wrote this essay (which I’ve excerpted below) in their student newspaper The Concordiensis, citing their angst that Monckton was speaking.
A lord’s opinion can’t compete with scientific truth
Erin Delman (left), President of the Environmental Club, debates with Monckton – photo by Charlotte Lehman | Department Chair and Professor of Geology Donald Rodbell (right) asks Lord Christopher Monckton a question at the event on the “other side” of global warming. – photo by Rachel Steiner, Concordiensis
By Donald Rodbell and Erin Delman in Opinions | March 7, 2012
As Earth scientists, we were torn. The College Republicans and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) were hosting Lord Monckton, a globally recognized climate skeptic, on Mon., March 5, and we were not quite sure how to respond. Frankly, the sentiment vacillated between utter disgust and sheer anger. On one hand, it seemed ludicrous to give Monckton a second of time or thought. On the other, however, dismissing him and allowing his speech without rejection risked that he would have an impact, and a dangerous one at that.
And thus, the college environmentalists – including Environmental Club members, the leaders and members of U-Sustain, concerned citizens, and renowned Earth scientists with PhDs from prestigious research institutions – decided to oppose the presence of Lord Monckton on our campus. We collected en-masse before his presentation to make it unambiguously clear that we would not allow such erroneous discourse to go unnoticed.
…
Lord Monckton does not stand alone in his beliefs on this issue; however, 97 percent of scientists overwhelmingly oppose his viewpoint. He kept asserting that this debate must follow a rigorous, science-based approach, and that the consensus of experts is, by itself, an insufficient basis on which to decide the veracity of the evidence for significant human-induced global warming.
…
Serious scientific debate cannot be carried out in the blogosphere, nor in highly charged and politically motivated presentations either by Lord Monckton or by Al Gore. The fact of the matter is that science has spoken, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence has shown very, very clearly that global warming is occurring and is at least mostly caused by humans. While scientific consensus can be wrong, it most often is not.
[end excerpts]
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Sigh, there’s that ridiculous 97% figure again. You’d think these “educated” people would bother to check such things before mindlessly regurgitating them and making themselves look like sycophants. And then there’s this: “Serious scientific debate cannot be carried out in the blogosphere…” well, then, PLEASE tell that to the RealClimate team so they stop trying to do that on the taxpayers dime.
It seems Erin Delman is training to be a professional enviro-legal troublemaker…
She is interested in pursuing a joint Ph.D. and law degree in geology and environmental law and is considering a career in environmental policy, particularly involving water rights.
…so I suppose I’m not surprised at this article. With that California background and water rights bent, I predict she’ll be joining the Pacific Institute to supplement Gleick’s mission.
Full article here: A lord’s opinion can’t compete with scientific truth
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Monckton responds in comments to that article
Monckton of Brenchley March 16, 2012 at 2:34 pm | Permalink
Oh, come off it, Professor!
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Professor Donald Rodbell’s personal attack on me in Concordiensis (“A Lord’s Opinion Can’t Compete with Scientific Truth”) deserves an answer. The Professor does not seem to be too keen on freedom of speech: on learning that I was to address students at Union College, he said that he “vacillated between utter disgust and sheer anger”. My oh my!
The Professor should be reminded of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”. I exercised freedom of speech at Union College. The Professor may disagree with what I said (though his article is lamentably unspecific about what points in my lecture – if any – he disagreed with); but, under the Constitution, he may not deny or abridge my right to say it.
He and his fellow climate extremists ought not, therefore, to have talked of “opposing the presence of Lord Monckton”: for that would be to abridge my freedom of speech. It would have been fair enough for the Professor to talk of opposing my arguments – yet that, curiously, is what his rant in Concordiensis entirely fails to do.
The Professor says it is certain that “the world is warming, climatic patterns are changing, and humans are a driving force”. Let us look at these three statements in turn.
– The world is not warming at present. It has not been warming for almost a decade and a half, though it has been warming since 1695. In the 40 years to 1735, before the Industrial Revolution even began, the temperature in Central England (not a bad proxy for global temperatures) rose by 4 Fahrenheit degrees, compared with just 1 F° in the whole of the 20th century.
– Climatic patterns are indeed changing. But they have been changing for 4,567 million years, and they will go on changing long into the future. However, the fact of climate change does not tell us the cause of climate change.
– Humans are indeed exercising some influence. Indeed, though the Professor implies otherwise, I stated explicitly in my lecture that the IPCC might be right in saying that more than half of the warming since 1950 was caused by us. However, that tells us little about how much warming we may expect in future. My best estimate is that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century will cause around 1 C° of warming by 2100. But that is not far short of the IPCC’s own central estimate of 1.5 C°.
Next, the Professor asserts, without any evidence, that “97% of scientists overwhelmingly oppose [Monckton’s] viewpoint”. Overlooking the tautology (the word “overwhelmingly” should have been omitted), as far as I am aware there has been no survey of scientists or of public opinion generally to determine how many oppose my viewpoint. I am aware of two surveys in which 97% of scientists asserted that the world had warmed in the past 60 years: but, in that respect, they agree with my viewpoint. No survey has found 97% of scientists agreeing with the far more extreme proposition that unchecked emissions of CO2 will be very likely to cause dangerous global warming. And, even if there had been such a survey, the notion that science is done by head-counting in this way is the shop-worn logical fallacy of the argumentum ad populum – the headcount fallacy. That fallacy was first described by Aristotle 2300 years ago, and it is depressing to see a Professor trotting it out today.
Science is not done by headcount among scientists. It is done by measurement, observation, and experiment, and by the application of established theory to the results. Until Einstein, 100% of scientists thought that time and space were invariant. They were all wrong. So much for consensus.
Next, the Professor says I made “numerous inaccuracies and mis-statements”. Yet he does not mention a single one in his article, which really amounts to mere hand-waving. He then asserts that I have “no interest whatsoever in pursuing a truly scientific approach”. Those who were present, however, will be aware that I presented large quantities of data and analysis demonstrating that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC climate assessments are defective; that the warming to be expected from a doubling of CO2 is 1 C°; and that, even if 21st-century warming were 3 C°, it would still be 10-100 times cheaper and more cost-effective to do nothing now and adapt in a focused way later than to try to stop the warming by controlling CO2.
The Professor goes on to say that “the fundamental building block of all science is peer-reviewed publications”. No: rigorous thought is the cornerstone of science. That is what is lacking in the IPCC’s approach. All of its principal conclusions are based on modeling. However, not one of the models upon which it relies has been peer-reviewed. Nor is any of the IPCC’s documents peer-reviewed in the accepted sense. There are reviewers, but the authors are allowed to override them, and that is not peer review at all. That is how the IPCC’s deliberate error about the alleged disappearance of all Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was not corrected. Worse, almost one-third of all references cited in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report were not peer-reviewed either. They were written by environmental campaigners, journalists and even students. That is not good enough.
Next, the Professor says that, in not publishing my own analysis of “global warming” in a reviewed journal, I am “fundamentally non-scientific”. Yet he does not take Al Gore to task for never having had anything published in a reviewed journal. Why this disfiguring double standard? The most important thing, surely, is to shut down the IPCC, whose approach – on the Professor’s own peer-review test – is “fundamentally non-scientific”.
The Professor goes on to say, “It is impossible to scrutinize [Monckton’s] methods, calculations, and conclusions without a complete and detailed peer-reviewed publication that presents the important details.” On the contrary: my slides are publicly available, and they show precisely how I reached my conclusions, with numerous references to the peer-reviewed literature and to the (non-peer-reviewed) IPCC assessment reports.
Next, the Professor says that “rather substantial errors” were pointed out to me at Union College. Yet in every case I was able to answer the points raised: and, here as elsewhere, the Professor is careful not to be specific about what “errors” I am thought to have made. I pointed out some very serious errors in the documents of the IPCC: why does the Professor look the other way when confronted with these “official” errors? Once again, a double standard seems to be at work.
The Professor ends by saying that “science has spoken” and that, “while scientific consensus can be wrong, it most often is not”. Well, the eugenics consensus of the 1920s, to the effect that breeding humans like racehorses would improve the stock, was near-universally held among scientists, but it was wrong, and it led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka. The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s and 1950s, to the effect that soaking seed-corn in water over the winter would help it to germinate, wrecked 20 successive Soviet harvests and killed 20 million of the proletariat. The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s has led to 40 million malaria deaths in children (and counting), 1.25 million of them lasts year alone. The don’t-stop-AIDS consensus of the 1980s has killed 33 million, with another 33 million infected and waiting to die.
The climate “consensus” is also killing millions by diverting billions of dollars from helping the poor to enriching governments, bureaucrats, bankers, landowners, windfarm scamsters, and environmentalist racketeers, and by denying to the Third World the fossil-fueled electricity it so desperately needs. It is time to stop the killing. If arguing for a more rational and scientifically-based policy will bring the slaughter of our fellow citizens of this planet to an end, then I shall continue to argue for it, whether the Professor likes it or not.
He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Smokey says:
March 17, 2012 at 8:13 pm
Michael Palmer,
I don’t want substitutes, I want the real thing: DDT. Where can I buy some?
It’s almost as though it’s been banned.☺
—
It seems we have a case against DDT after all – it seems to be highly addictive to some, and compromise their mental faculties. It should be banned!
Equally important is it legal to import DDT into the US?
Cannot be legally sold or bought in the US. http://www.epa.gov/international/toxics/pop.html
And it does appear to monitored when imported. – http://www.cec.org/Page.asp?PageID=924&ContentID=1262
I didn’t see a quick indication that you can legally import it into the US on the other claw I didn’t see that you can’t. If you do import it from India you certainly would be monitored if it wasn’t confiscated. And you couldn’t sell it. There might be repercussions as well if you attempted to use it.
So it isn’t specifically banned but it certainly isn’t something you can buy in the US so it is effectively banned. I would thus state for the record that DDT is banned.
Michael Palmer says:
“It should be banned!”
Haven’t you noticed? It is.
LamontT says:
March 17, 2012 at 8:10 pm
“Ah Hugh… I asked you to pick two examples from the linked lecture by Lord Monckton and rebut them.”
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May I take this? Thank you.
This is easy. Two things I have already done, see above, about “the temperature in Central England (not a bad proxy for global temperatures)” and the absence of correlation between CO2 and the temperature.
The third one is the thing about warming having stopped 12-15 years ago. I’ll just give an example. Look at this “warming”: 1-2-3-2-3-4-5-4-5-6-7-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13. You can see, may “warming” stopped for a while, but then…
The problem is, he uses not only valid arguments, but also invalid ones.
Sorry Greg,
The recent warming has a lower high:
http://climate-change-theory.com/360month.jpg
I don’t pretend to know anything about climate science but have the following points been dealt with by sceptics? Both sides of the argument have their fair share of acolytes- I suspect many who know nothing, hang on every word Monckton has to say.
Lord Monckton: ….therefore not CAGW…
Dr. Rodbell: Liar! Liar! LALALALALALALALALALALA! I can’t hear youuuuuuu!
Michael Palmer says:
March 17, 2012 at 6:35 pm
For someone who claims to have gone to medical school or to be, God-forbid, lecturing students, you’ve yet to learn to distinguish between livestock breeding, genetics and eugenics. The latter may employ and apropriate principles of the former two to support its inherent ideology, but it is an entitity on its own. Eugenics is a racist ideology developed in California, of all places, and well before Hitler. It was about protecting and enriching a presumed superior human group, the “Nordic Race,” and to enhance its health and intelligence, as subjectively defined by some people at the time, through programs including selective breeding, forced sterilization and genocide.
So, learned doctor, when you pop a howler like “you [johanna] are confusing ethical with scientific objections”, I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Are you defending, for example, David Starr Jordan’s “race and blood theory,” the notion that only 10 percent of the White population is eugenically viable, that Blacks are mentally inferior, that Jews are genetically poisonous? Those were some of the central, unchallenged conclusions reached and acted on by eugenic “science.” No, those were not mistakes, those were pre-dermined goals and conclusions fraudulently represented as honest science. Do, then, try to comprehend this simple point: Eugenics is what it historically was, not what you want it to be. It is not some sort of a potentially benign version of “applied genetics” as you appear to imply, but an ignorant superstition tarted-up with scientific-sounding gobledeygook and poor or fraudulent research to resemble real science…in other words, a pseudoscience. It was wildly successful with “policy-makers” in the US and Germany for the same reasons that CAGW succeeded; it was supported by powerful people and institutions, it was lavishly funded, addressed the vanities and fears of people and was legitimized by a temporarily dominant cadre of morally deficient, fundamentally stupid and corrupt academics. Rings a bell?
Hugh Pepper says:
March 17, 2012 at 3:13 pm
“…It would be very difficult to “debate” Mr Monckton. His style stresses the limits of reasionable (sic) discourse. In short: as has been outlined by Professor Abraham and others, he males (?) stuff up. He’s a very inventive guy with words and numbers. He cannot reference his assertions to research which he has actually conducted…”
You could also make the same comment about another public speaker – Academy Award winning, Nobel prize winner, Al Gore.
“…He’s a very inventive guy with words and numbers. He cannot reference his assertions to research which he has actually conducted…”
Let’s be clear. “Facts” are not ideas conjured through some intellectual exercise alone. “Facts” about the real world are established by a rigorous exercise of observation and measurement. There are accepted protocols which work to ensure that the practice of finding the truth is legitimate. If everybody follows the “rules”, this system works. It is legitimate for Al Gore, who you apparently have demonized, to quote research which has been apprpriately conducted by others. You are also free to follow this style as well, and I encourage you to do this.
The physics of climate science has ben well established for many years, and universally accepted. Read Michael Mann’s recent book, for example, for an authoritative summary of this basic work. But then, I suppose, he has also been thoroughly demonized.
Once again, many thanks to the overwhelming majority of commenters here for their kind support. The trolls are fewer and dimmer than ever, confirming that they know the climate scare is over.
Mr. Vukcevik (not a troll) asks why I support Dr. Scafetta. Not the least of many reasons is that he has done what I lack the skill to do: he has been able to subtract the naturally-occurring ocean oscillations from the temperature record, isolating a long-run residual increase at a rate of 0.9 C/century that may be anthropogenic. Another compelling reason is that his forecast of the global temperature trend, which he began in 2000, has proven skilful, while that of the IPCC has proven exaggerated beyond all reason. Dr. Scafetta is getting it right: the IPCC is getting it wrong.
One wonders what research Mr. Pepper did before concluding I had done “no research”.
And let us be clear about the DDT ban. DDT was indeed banned by the US and many Western countries. Many of them made banning DDT a condition of their aid to Third-World countries, many of whom were, in effect, bribed to stop using it. The consequences have been heartbreaking, and I cannot any longer bear to read them out during my talks, which is why I now show the DDT and other “consensus” slides in absolute silence. DDT was first banned at the instigation of the Environmental Defense Fund. Its then lawyer, Victor John Yannacone Jr., advised the Board of the EDF that they should press for a ban only on the outdoor use of DDT: indoors it would save children’s lives without giving the mosquitoes a chance to acquire resistance.
The chairman of the EDF sacked Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, he heard one of the Board say: “That’s the last time we employ a lawyer who knows anything about science.” Result: deaths from malaria, which chiefly kills children, rose from 50,000 per year before the worldwide ban to more than 1 million a year afterwards. Some 40 million children have died as a direct result of the DDT ban, 1.25 million of them last year alone. Had the ban not been introduced in the West and then imposed on the rest via strings attached to foreign aid, malaria might have been wiped out almost everywhere in the world by now. There are few more poignant demonstrations of the massacre caused by a cruel, scientifically-illiterate, politically-motivated “consensus”.
On 15 December 2006, Dr. Arata Kochi, newly-appointed head of the World Health Organization’s malaria program, announced that the WHO was lifting the DDT ban, He said: “In this field, politics usually comes first and science second. We will now take a stand on the science and the data.” He was ignored by almost all nations, who seem to prefer the now-accelerating massacre of the innocents that is malaria today.
If the “global warming” scare continues to divert trillions away from giving fossil-fueled electricity, clean water, safe sewerage, decent health care and education to the world’s poorest people, then tens of millions will die who would otherwise have been saved. Consensus kills.
WHere is your research published Mr Monckton? Please refer me to this work and I will be delighted to read it. Please note: I am not referring to intellectual commentary, which can be easily done from the sactuary of our homes. There are legions of people (thankfully) who trudge around the frozen regions of our world, and who venture onto the oceans, folks who do actual research and who write papers summarizing their work. It is this kind of inquiry, Mr Monckton, which I am asking you to cite.
Michael Palmer
DDT
It’s a game of semantics and cute arguments, except when it’s not!
JDN says: March 17, 2012 at 1:32 pm
@Monckton: The constitution only applies to the US congress and states via the commerce clause (usually). Universities and university professors abridge free speech all the time. They don’t make federal laws and are, therefore, unconstrained by the bill of rights. Otherwise, nice job.
The courts have generally held that the 14th ammendment puts State and local governments under the limitations of the Bill of Rights. Otherwise Utah could legally make Mormonism, and Georgia could make the Southern Baptist Church their official State religions.
Bad editing that was supposed to read:
JDN says: March 17, 2012 at 1:32 pm
@Monckton: The constitution only applies to the US congress and states via the commerce clause (usually). Universities and university professors abridge free speech all the time. They don’t make federal laws and are, therefore, unconstrained by the bill of rights. Otherwise, nice job.
The courts have generally held that the 14th ammendment puts State and local governments under the limitations of the Bill of Rights. Otherwise Utah could legally make Mormonism, and Georgia could make the Southern Baptist Church their official State religions.
Sam Geoghegan says:
March 17, 2012 at 9:25 pm
I would rather comment on something in writing since that is easier to quote. But to comment on one item, Monckton says the trend is down from January 1, 2001 over the next 9 years. He uses Hadcrut3. Then the narrator says the trend is UP over 10 years! But that is NOT what Monckton said!
Take a look at the graphs below. It DOES go down over the 9 years as Monckton stated. While it goes up over the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, Monckton never said anything about a 10 year period.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/to:2010/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2000/to:2010/trend
“… their student newspaper The Concordiensis”
As in “Hail Eris” and all that ? Well, that explains a lot 😉
OT as far as the content of this post is, but a Latin grammar question for those readers who are better informed than me [probably 97% at least…].
The Concordiensis??? WTF? “ensis” is an adjectival suffix denoting geographical origin or location, at least in biological Latin, of which I have a reasonable knowledge. Something like ‘Acta Diurna [or whatever time frame is used] Concordiensis’ would seem to make sense. ‘The Concordian’ [noun] would make sense. But the Concordiensis? Perhaps I am wrong, in which case I am pleased to be informed. But I worry when a school of higher learning seems to lack the basic knowledge of our culture.
Michael Palmer says:
March 17, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Eugenics may or may not work – the fact of the matter is that it has not been tried (and I’m not suggesting that it should). The extermination campaigns of the Nazis may have been influenced by, but certainly are not the same as a planned breeding program; nor can it be assumed that most people who would support planned breeding would support murder.
Eugenics most certainly *was* tried — the National Socialists’ program in the ’30s encompassed euthanasia, sterilization, and selective breeding. The extermination camps of the “Final Solution” were political establishments, and separate from the effort to create a race of übermenschen.
Greg House says:
March 17, 2012 at 9:01 pm
LamontT says:
March 17, 2012 at 8:10 pm
“Ah Hugh… I asked you to pick two examples from the linked lecture by Lord Monckton and rebut them.”
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May I take this? Thank you.
This is easy. Two things I have already done, see above, about “the temperature in Central England (not a bad proxy for global temperatures)” and the absence of correlation between CO2 and the temperature.
The third one is the thing about warming having stopped 12-15 years ago. I’ll just give an example. Look at this “warming”: 1-2-3-2-3-4-5-4-5-6-7-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13. You can see, may “warming” stopped for a while, but then…
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Greg, if I may……. the use of the word “proxy” may the problem. Historically, Central England has a pretty good correlation with the rest of the world’s temps…. though admittedly that’s subjective. I don’t believe Monckton or anyone else is asserting there are any predictive or intuitive properties with Central England temps and how they would relate to the rest of the world, but rather, there’s simply a good historical correlation.
The correlation between CO2 and temps is subjective as well, and depending upon the time frame, it may hold different meanings to different people. Clearly, there is no correlation in the last 15 years. One can pick some start point and say, “aha! a correlation”….. but, that’s entirely subjective.
Lastly, when people say “the warming has stopped”, they’re using the present participle. Notice, there’s no indication or prediction of future events when such a statement is made. So, your example isn’t valid towards the statement ‘the warming has stopped’. For it to be a valid representation, it would look like this…… 1-2-3-2-3-4-5-4-5-6-7-6-6-6-6-6-6-6. See the difference?
Here’s the CO2 correlation for the entire Mauna record. CO2 really only correlated for 20 years out of the 54 year record.
For those interested in DDT I strongly recommend this article by the late Dr. Edwards. It is perhaps the single best, succinct description of DDT I have ever read.
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf
That said, I actually know a few things about insecticides as we apply them to humans to treat mite and lice infestations. I’m also a gardener. DDT today is a niche application insecticide. It possesses several rather unique properties. It is virtually non-toxic to humans in normally encountered doses, it doesn’t stink, it has repellant properties and most importantly it has “persistence.” A single application of DDT can last a month or more. Although in the early days a number of agricultural pests developed resistance (not “immunity”) to DDT, the mosquito never did to any great extent. In his previous comment, Lord Monckton was absolutely correct in his description of how DDT was politicized (and resulted in the death of millions). We really don’t need DDT in the US. But they need it certainly for indoor use in Africa, India, Indonesia, etc. Just like using antimicrobials to treat human infection, the smartest choice is the agent with the most focused spectrum of activity to reduce the development of resistant strains. Same is true for insecticides. I’m a big fan of permethrin. It’s non-toxic, it doesn’t stink and it’s extremely broad spectrum. That’s why I seldom use it in the lawn or garden except when the big guns are necessary. We do, however, shampoo the heads of our children with this stuff at a 1% concentration to kill head lice. This is a concentration MUCH higher than landscapers or even exterminators use.
This comment thread ties together some important points about CAGW as a belief system.
1. Most humans are harming Gaia
2. A few enlightened people undetstand the price to be paid will need to be a culling of the unworthy
3. Deniers have forfeited their right to live on mother earth
4. Since Malthus predicts that most of the human race are fated to starve anyway, banning carbon will only speed up the inevitable (hopefully) limiting the damage to Gaia.
5. Of course, we the enlightened get to survive and keep our private jets and waterfront mansions in the new sustainable world we create.
/bitter sarc.
Is Lord Monckton always right? No. But he presents an important opposing viewpoint that I appreciate is out there. To me, he is like Richard Dawkins. I don’t agree with many of his claims, but I think he is an important counter-balance to other points of view.
So the professor was not content with getting mullah’d once, he thought he would have another go and got mullah’d again ..
“we were torn … the sentiment vacillated between utter disgust and sheer anger …. it seemed ludicrous …. dismissing him and allowing his speech without rejection ”
Is this was passes for the language of scientific debate amongst climatologists, these days?
Sam Geoghegan says:
March 17, 2012 at 9:25 pm
I don’t pretend to know anything about climate science but have the following points been dealt with by sceptics? Both sides of the argument have their fair share of acolytes- I suspect many who know nothing, hang on every word Monckton has to say.
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I suspect you don’t know jack. If you don’t pretend then don’t bring up things that have been hashed and rehashed. If you have a specific question. Ask it. If you want to know all of the specific replies to what that contextually challenged individual stated, it’s in the archives here.
James Sexton says:
March 17, 2012 at 11:16 pm
——————————————————
James, maybe I caused some misunderstanding trying to be concise in my previous posts.
Generally you can not a)prove causality alone with correlation and b)disprove causality alone with absence of correlation. This is a central point. If you do not agree with that, I will go into details next time.
Second, the argument about “stopped warming” misses the point. The AGW side can rightfully argue, that they do not mean the warming must be really continuous, they mean specifically long term trends. However, this argument about “stopped warming” is not completely useless, because a lot of people have got the impression from the pro AGW media, that the warming is continuous and catastrophic, so debunking the claims of the media is a good thing.
Third, about good correlation between temperature records, the thing is, that a good correlation is not enough to use one weather station or one region as a proxy for others for many reasons. I’ll give you just one simple example: the records (5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-6-7) and (5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-4-3) correlate very well, but the trends are different.
Generally I strongly recommend to be very suspicious of anything coming from the climate science, including alleged measurements, statistics and conclusions.