“It is not often realized how much those of us who dare to question the Party Line are made to suffer, and how much is spent on making us suffer.“To take one example, in October 2009 I made a speech in St Paul, Minneapolis, revealing in the peroration that the then draft Copenhagen climate treaty was proposing to establish a global ‘government’. The word ‘government’ actually appeared in the treaty draft. Someone at that well-attended talk filmed the last four minutes of my speech and posted it up on YouTube. Within a week, it had received some five million hits, spread across several YouTube channels. Then the hit-counters stopped rising. I had naively assumed that everyone who had wanted to hear me had heard me.
“Then I took a call from a professor at Texas A&M University, who said that the university’s monitoring had established that the speech would eventually have reached 20 million hits, but that someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel. I asked how it was that those pages had attracted more hits than the genuine page. The professor explained that the major search engines had been paid handsomely to prioritize the bogus pages over the genuine page. I asked how much that exercise had cost. The professor said the cost was, at minimum, $250,000, and probably a great deal more, just to silence one speech.
“It is significant, then, that the attorneys for two cities in the Sunstroke State decided that they could more easily impress the judge in the oil corporations’ case by making personal attacks on our reputations than by trying to answer the two scientific points we had raised: first, that the supposed scientific consensus amounted to no more than 0.5%, and secondly, that climate panic was based solely on a significant scientific error that we had recently discovered.“It was by reputational attacks that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century established themselves and neutralized their opponents. It is by reputational attacks that the totalitarians of the 21st century seek to do the same. But the totalitarians of the 21st century have made the same mistakes as the totalitarians in the 20th. They have gotten the science wrong, wherefore whatever harm they try to do to us in the short term will rebound on them with heavy interest in the long. They have the money, the power and the glory, but we have the truth, and the truth will prevail.”
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Having read this I wonder how many “Amicus” would come to stand with them if the boot was on the other foot.
A very well put together and succinct rebuttal.
James Bull
Not one amicus brief filed for Mann against Steyn (ongoing!) says quite a lot.
Yet Mann will probably win that case.
Mann isn’t behaving like someone confident of winning.
He could only win if the judge is incompetent.
“… someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel.”
Some time ago, during the Obama Administration, I attempted to find the video showing Mrs. Obama stating, in essence, that she had been ashamed of the US all her life. I found dozens of videos, none of which contained the anti-American statement. Now I know why. They were buried by the search engines. This is Evil.
Is this the quote from 2008? Its a similar sentiment but not quite the words;
“….for the first time my adult life I am proud of my country.”
http://www.newsweek.com/michelle-obamas-proud-remarks-83559
Its also on you tube. I found it (in the UK) by typing in
“mrs obama i have been ashamed of america all my life”
tonyb
“Now I know why. They were buried by the search engines. This is Evil.”
Conspiracy ideation in action……
“Its also on you tube. I found it (in the UK) by typing in
“mrs obama i have been ashamed of america all my life”
tonyb”
LOL
For those in need of cheering up I suggest looking for Jolie Holland – ‘Goodbye California’. Works for me every time.
The main point here is that the sad old tropes about Willie Soon’ s funding and Monckton’s expertise etc etc are to be exposed in court as arguments for ‘global warming’. Let’s hope for lots of publicity.
Btw my qualifications as a climate scientist are impeccable – I have a degree in railway engineering and I write steamy novels. And if you don’t spot the joke here you haven’t been paying attention.
I see what you did there.
RE: “I have a degree in railway engineering and I write steamy novels.”
Not a fan of diesel-electrics, eh?
IPCC chief, railway engineer, smut-author and all-round horny-old-bastard Rajendra Pachauri resigned over allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace.
The complainant “handed hundreds of emails, texts and WhatsApp messages to the police for investigation. Pachauri denies the charges, claiming that his computer was hacked.” Right-O!
The irony is that, compared to many of the deceitful climate scientists who promoted the global warming scam, Pachauri is a “straight-up guy”. 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/30/ipcc-now-in-bizzaroland-pachauri-releases-smutty-romance-novel/
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/24/rajendra-pachauri-stands-down-from-ipcc-over-sexual-harassment-allegations/
Interesting comments.
From my perspective, when a debate as large as Climate Change starts being discussed in the minutia, the whole concept is crumbling. Or like a woollen jumper, beginning to unravel.
The longer this goes on, the more bored, complacent and sceptical the man in the street becomes. Articles on Climate Change in the media will gradually move from front page news to small columns somewhere near the back as people stop believing them.
And people will stop believing them when they realise that nothing climatically dramatic is happening. That will take some decades, however, as our rebellious youth (as we all were once) grow older and begin to recognise that the planet is in much the same state as it was when we old fogies were young, and our parents, and grandparents.
And by then, the debate will have moved on to some other global discussion, perhaps the pernicious pick pocketing of the worlds masses by their political leaders to fund wilder and wilder schemes, like…….Climate Change mitigation.
It a long downhill slope for the alarmists now, but they are on it, and can’t get off.
And as I posted on notalotofpeopleknowthat “Isn’t it just unbelievably tragic that we AGW sceptics must wish for precisely what we don’t want [a colder climate], to disprove a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”
The problem is that your average persons memory of climate only goes back a decade or two, at most.
So when the alarmists scream that the latest storm is unprecedented, they are liable to believe it. The fact that similar storms have occurred in the past escapes their memory and they aren’t interested enough to look it up for themselves.
MarkW
Good point, but I don’t think you credit the average man in the street with as much sense as he actually has.
I remember Typhoons as a child living in the far east in the early 60’s, then hurricanes in Scotland as a teenager in the early 70’s, the baking hot summer of 1976 across the UK, and snowfalls in Southern England in 2009/10 as bad as I have ever seen in Scotland. And that particular event saw the NE of Scotland under snow for almost 6 months, I cant recall that ever happening in my 20 years there.
And yes, as an uneducated man, I realise there is a distinct difference between weather and climate however, these events remain engrained.
But perhaps the point is that we have always had, and always will have extreme weather events, irrespective of climate change. Will they ever go away? I doubt it, they will just move location and take another form.
One man’s extreme weather, is another man’s norm.
Sorry, kind of rambled a bit there.
Monckton is not only a good man but bright as a button, these kalifornication lawyers are well out of their depth. They will soon need a safe space like most snow flakes.
Rob Trolley referred to Wikipedia. Fail. The Anarchist People’s Green Army of SJWs has attacked and the very results appear in Wikipedia. It’s sad that smear campaigns show up so badly there. A good example of fact-making. I like Wikipedia at many topics, but unfortunately global warming related stuff is like an article named ‘results of communism’ in Sovietopedia. This is SJWs for you.
They attack persons instead of argumenting. They attack some people and they try to silence them, as no argument other than slander works. The more scathing sceptic or lukewarmer, the more vicious attack.
I assume that WP gatekeeping is an orchestrated activity, where a group of admin-powered SWJs makes sure ‘dissent’ like Pielke and Curry quotes are kept away.
Hugs – look up Wiki’s Chief Gatekeeper William Connolley.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/14/willia-connolley-now-climate-topic-banned-at-wikipedia/
Wikipedia is about as reliable as Facebook.
http://anonhq.com/beware-wikipedia-never-trust/
Doesn’t even need overt orchestration. Edit wars are won by whoever has the most time to waste on waging them. An unemployed citizen on the dole can sit around and refresh a wiki page for a lot longer than a taxpaying citizen holding down a job.
Someone who’s job depends on belief in AGW can afford to spend even more time.
But it is also the internet that is allowing the fight back, without the internet the global warming scam would have won the day.
Nigel Farage would have not succeeded without youtube- it is here he picked up his following.
I recall an instance when a regular citizen, a project opposition agitator I believe, made a completely valid scientific comment about the safety of a particular project and the comment got a look by staff, standard response that all was well, “this is standard procedure that has been historically proven safe yada yada” and all that, then on to the next question, there are lots and lots of such opposition comments after all, most bogus, and eventually I suppose one tended to dismiss them as a matter of routine. Even the government regulators saw the comment and it got by them. Well in a few years the exact point of the comment became 100% horrifyingly true and cost the company untold $$$. The comment was rediscovered in the post mortem, in retrospect the comment was embarrassingly simple, scientifically true and undeniable, yet somehow it got lost and forgotten probably because the comment was from a opposition agitator and not a recognized “expert”. If the comment was taken at face value and properly and rigorously addressed at the time all that could had been avoided.
The issue was a little bit outside of the expertise of most, and that’s why it got missed. Eerily parallel to the issue raised here. The issue must be addressed on its merits.
(I’m being purposely vague about the specifics to avoid additional embarrassment)
Think about it.
The really evil people throughout history have had a clever trick up their sleeve – for a while.
Just like the “people” who run social media platforms in the early 21st century.
From the article:
“…the brief by Monckton et al. replying to the vicious personal attacks on them by attorneys for “the people of California”.
… thus to gain some insight into the relentless, baseless and remarkably well funded campaign of personal ad-hominem assaults on the reputations of so many of us who have dared to question the errors and exaggerations of official climatology.”
A few observations about the Law Business, based on actual practice in my province in Canada:
There is no downside to blatant lying in Court, so dishonestly is actually encouraged within our so-called “justice system”.
Legal organizations appear to be deeply and widely corrupted and incapable of self-governance. Given their history of dishonest process, all such organizations should be placed under strict external governance. Perjury by lawyers and their clients should be severely punished, as should deceit and delay in court proceedings.
Lawyers, Crown Prosecutors and judges who collaborate in “Fraud Upon the Court” and “Breach of Trust by a Public Officer” should be disbarred and in some cases imprisoned, according to existing (unenforced) laws.
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-122.html
Indeed, all legal systems are corrupt.
Soft corruption gives rise to an expensive, profitable industry that perversely benefit the primary participants.
Magistrates and judges drag out cases to enrich their court and fill the pockets of their lawyer mates.
The case in question is a good example.
Alsup should have dismissed it on day one; however, he didn’t because that’s not what the litigation industry expects (soft corruption). Alsup knows there is no case because the statute of limitations for Nuisance is 3-years.
It has been said ok let’s ignore the statute of limitations . . . if you discount plaintiff’s top estimate of $55 billion damages at 7% (the same rate the CalPERS uses to discount their pension obligations) for a period of 250 years to adjust for when the primary damages are expected to occur then the present value of the asserted damages is roughly $2500.
As I’ve often said; The primary purpose of the legal system is to employ lawyers.
Warren and Mark – it appears we have a clear consensus:
“100% of those polled agreed that the Law Business is systemically incompetent and widely corrupted.”
That’s even better than the 97% claimed by some climate hysterics.
+100 …full agreement. There are undoubtedly good men and women in the legal system who strive to maintain objectivity and honesty, but the potential big money aspect of the legal system leads to the problems which you highlight. I would like to see monetary restraints imposed on what lawyers can make. In many legal matters only the lawyers come out winners. That is a sick joke.
Hello goldminer,
Deceit and Delay are the primary tools of the Law Business, and if lawyers and judges had any true competence or ethics they would root out this endemic corruption within their “profession” – but they do not, because Deceit and Delay are highly profitable for the Law Business.
If the Law Business were run competently and ethically, society would need only a small fraction of the lawyers and judges that now infest our courtrooms. These people are parasites, bleeding society of wealth.
The legal system should be looked upon as a public service/utility, imo. That should be the basis for regulation, as the legal system is an essential part of our free society.
Hello again goldminer – we may agree on the problem, but not the solution.
Lawyers and judges are already far too close to governments, and are already deeply and widely corrupted. Here, they are actively engaged in covering-up their own incompetence and corruption as well as the murder of civilians by the police, with the complicity of the Crown Prosecutor’s office. See
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/anthony-heffernan-calgary-police-shot-asirt-charges-1.3730911
The same cop who murdered Anthony Heffernan also killed quadriplegic Dave McQueen – what a man!
Making the Law Business into a utility will simply make the problem worse – more cover-up and even less accountability – although less than zero is moot.
I suggest disbarring and jail time for Perjury, Fraud Upon the Court and Breach of Trust by a Public Officer – for the lot of them.
We are far off-topic here, so let’s end this discussion.
The are quite a few search engines. duckduckgo is one.
The Response to the Motion is indeed an ugly thing, and I hope the judge appreciates its ugliness. He should do. Its very first point
(A) Plaintiff says: … “the proposed amici are (with one exception) not climate
scientists …”
renders the judge himself not qualified to rule on any of this.
Since climate scientists are tested to prove they have a belief in man made climate change based on CO2 they should be excluded as biased and unreliable witnesses. Surely no court would in say a burglary case accept that the detectives and the prosecution were pre selected by formal testing that they believe the defendant guilty and any witnesses for the defence banned as not qualified as they were not pre tested to accept that belief.
Answer to California lawsuit:
1. Who burned all that fuel?
2. If you knew it was bad for 20 years and let your people keep burning the fuel, it’s YOU we should be suing.
Have never belonged to Facebook. Never will. I prefer “friending” the old fashioned way. At least then I have a chance to apply my own discernment.
Here’s a thought: Auto manufacturers produce something that actually kills people and has been for many years, unlike oil companies. Furthermore, they have known for many years how dangerous their product is, the proof being that they keep adding more and more “safety” features. Despite all that, thousands continue to die every year due to their product, and many thousands more will. But wait, there’s more. In addition to causing many deaths, and indeed many injuries from crashes, exhaust from said cars has also contributed to smog, injuring people’s health, and causing those with asthma and other breathing difficulties serious, and even life-threatening health conditions.
Kookifornia should therefore sue auto manufacturers for the multiple harms automakers have caused, and will continue to, despite them knowing all along of the extreme dangers of their product. About $500 bil ought to do it, and they’d be getting off cheap at that. Other states could as well, but they’d better act fast. The dough supply could run out pretty fast.
Took them to the woodshed! As a former some time consultant both to plaintiffs and defendants involving petroleum interests, among others, I have read a few legal documents of this kind. However, I rarely, if ever, recall this kind of detailed rebuttal, but never encountered this amount of lying either. Lord Monckton, et al., should be applauded for this as a well worth reading classic.
Unfortunately, I am afraid all this is true across a wide area of academia, and I hope it gets cleaned up before somebody else does it, for as history suggests, it would be worse for the innocents.
Getting down to philosophical brass tacks, a scientist is someone who studies, poses questions about a subject and investigates those questions through experiment and reasoning. The result of this process is supposed to be that the people with the most knowledge are able to ask the most relevant questions. They may not be able to answer those questions but that’s ok. The science will need to await a new effort but the body of work to that point retains its integrity and usefulness.
In climate “science” , political biases poisoned the scientific well early on. It became necessary for the climate cognoscenti to declare that the science is settled. This either makes climate the ONLY SETTLED SCIENCE KNOWN TO MAN, or else it is the most politically corrupted.
No real scientist would ever declare their field of study settled, but political activists masquerading as scientists are more than happy to do so, and to continue to apply for grants to find results they already “know”.
This was a legitimate area of study that got over fertilized and infested with parasites. It is now a dead zone in terms of scientific legitimacy. Time to bury it as the stench is getting too bad. It smells “settled”.
I think the primary statement Christopher Monckton intended here is that we in the disorganized opposition are up against a broad, resolute sedition by identifiable but dissembling Marxist functionaries. Many are “useful idiots” who don’t even know it. The rest are right on target. Monckton, Darwall, Ball, and others familiar with that flavor of politics have already spotted it and done their best to expose it.
It should be no surprise. If so, it is time we woke up. Every tactic of our Left is out of the old (but very effective) Marxist playbook. (Or Alinsky, if you want new.) I have recommended, and again urge on everyone, a reading of Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.” He was a Nobel Prize winning economist, a close colleague of Keynes. His analysis should have laid to rest socialism’s shifty, bloody history decades ago. The problem is that nobody reads the book any more.
Ignorance can be very un-blissful.
I agree with you Tom. Well said!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/25/al-gore-bilks-people-at-christmas-asking-for-climate-crisis-money/comment-page-1/#comment-2701695
[excerpt]
Marxism made simple!
The Groucho Marxists are the leaders – they want power for its own sake at any cost, and typically are sociopaths or psychopaths. The great killers of recent history, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. etc. were of this odious ilk – first they get power, then they implement their crazy schemes that do not work and too often kill everyone who opposes them.
The Harpo Marxists are the followers – the “sheeple” – these are people of less-than-average intelligence who are easily duped and follow the Groucho’s until it is too late, their rights are lost and their society destroyed. They are attracted to simplistic concepts that “feel good” but rarely “do good”.
George Carlin said: “You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
One can easily identify many members of these two groups in the global warming debate – and none of them are ”climate skeptics”.
An introductory lecture about Hayek in historical context:
Thank you Jurgen for posting on Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”.
Following are my own observations based on business trips to Honecker’s East Germany and Castro’s Cuba:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/26/strategic-minerals-our-next-energy-and-security-crisis/comment-page-1/#comment-2753300
[excerpt]
I certainly agree that bigwigs are too often given the “gilded tour” of the Potemkin Villages and many are too stupid or corrupt to realize it – we had a socialist leader of the NDP political party return from East Germany and the traitor extolled it as the “economic model for Canada”, circa the early 1980’s. I was there in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall fell, and it was a sh!thole. Details below.
I was also in Cuba under Fidel, for a Board meeting, and it was also a failed state, economically poorer but less repressive at that time than East Germany.
Best, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/31/mother-jones-trump-effect-undermining-support-for-german-green-energy/comment-page-1/#comment-2386559
[excerpt]
Here is something I wrote long ago on the subject.
This article is true. I’ve also been to Cuba, and it is a cesspool of poverty and degradation (Trudeau boys, please take note).
What is truly interesting is that there are still apologists for Castro and Cuba here in Canada, even as Fidel himself has recently admitted that Cuba is a failed state.
They are probably the same “useful idiots” who said that Communist East Germany was a good model for Canada to emulate. I seem to recall several former NDP leaders who tried to sell us that line of BS (the names Broadbent and Lewis come to mind).
I travelled to East Germany, going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989, shortly before the Wall fell. East Germany was a cesspool too. While not as materially poor as Castro’s Cuba, it was an even more vicious police state where neighbour spied upon neighbour, and nobody felt safe from the Stasi secret police. Those who tried to escape were shot, and allowed to bleed to death in “no-man’s land” between the many barbed-wire fences that formed “the Wall”.
Epilogue
The last person to be shot and killed while trying to cross the border from East to West Germany was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989. He was 20 years old. Rest in peace, kid.
More on East Germany here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/09/hewlett-packard-report-includes-planned-penal-colonies-for-climate-skeptics/comment-page-1/#comment-2713070
Hayek was a great man and a great thinker
Shortly after he was awarded the Nobel prize the Reform Club arranged a dinner in his honour. I invited several financial journalists, the Government Broker and a number of City economists to the dinner. After a fine meal with excellent wines we eagerly awaited the talk that we were about to hear. He rose to loud applause and then spent almost all of his speech describing his experiences, during the war, as the honorary librarian of the Club.
Hayek was greatly influenced by Von Mises. He was detested by Keynes, whose socialist-inspired theories he debunked, Margaret Thatcher was a great admirer and the Road to Serfdom certainly influenced her thinking.
Warren and Anthony: Thank you for publishing this – I hope one of the awake journalists (David Rose? Christopher Booker?) publishes that rebuttal in full in a mainstream media outlet.
Somebody paid off Google for 250k? Really??
No, they paid an SEO company to bury the link to the post.
The response: 20180327_docket-317-cv-06011_statement-1
Sad work, to my mind, but the response is necessary and well done.
Tom Anderson
Keynes was not a “colleague” of Hayek. He was a contemporary “public intellectual”. Hayek criticized him for writing his book about employment, before doing any in-depth study of economic theories or financial history.
However, his confected theories were used by ambitious governments to add to the power and wealth of the state.
Just as in climate, the state chose the theory that enhances its wealth and power.
As an aside, statists are hung up on the number “2”.
If the rate of CPI inflation is not kept above “2” something bad will happen.
It the Earth’s temperature rises “2” C above some arbitrary level, something bad will happen.
Bob Hoye
I use Epic for a browser, and yandex for a search engine. An unexpected side effect of Epic: when I play youtube clips, ads just don’t show. In Firefox, I tried to listen to a meditation clip (ah, rain sounds. . . ) and was interrupted every ten minutes or so by some ad; when they popped into the middle of discussion clips, I just hit “mute” until done. But youtube in Epic has been completely ad-free.
Epic boasts that it does not track you. As far as I can tell, it does not. Amazon no longer offers me suggestions based on pages they have no business knowing that I visited at all.
What kind of monitoring can “establish” the number of views a youtube video will eventually attract in the future?
A modelling excercise could take a stab at forecasting or predicting the final view count based on past trends for similar videos, but establihing the final number would be impossible, unless the number was fixed in advance as part of a premeditated sham.
Also, did the Lord make any effort to substantiate the Professor’s dubious claim, by say, attempting the search for himself?
e.g.:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+Obama+Poised+to+Cede+US+Sovereignty
Top 3 results:
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty? – YouTube
Oct 16, 2009 – Uploaded by mnmajoritydotorg
2,717,187 views
(v=PMe5dOgbu40)
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty – YouTube
Oct 18, 2009 – Uploaded by Ann Ubelis
5,382 views
(v=oz5Cid9pxTM)
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty? – YouTube
Oct 17, 2009 – Uploaded by ttj1776
4,861 views
(v=gUk-ULVGILM)