The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

H/T to Climate Depot for reporting that Lord Monckton has issued an extensive rebuttal as well as threatening legal action against a libelous article calling him a “liar” multiple times. The entire document is enjoyable to read, given his English fluency and writing style. In this post I will focus on several substantial points regarding climate science, whereby consensus suppositions are falsified in the response.
The rebuttal is Letter before claim in libel

Overview

From Monckton to the defendants’ editor: (in italics with my bolds)

Sir, – I have received two offensive emails – dated 3 April and 27 May 2021 – from one S. Bishop, who says he is writing an article, inferentially about global warming and my research interest therein. Bishop appears intent on seeking to maintain that I have changed my position from skepticism of global warming to acceptance of it, even though I have expressly told that it is the other way about.

The tactic of falsely alleging that those who had disagreed with the orthodoxy have come to agree with it after all (when in my case precisely the reverse is true) is one that I have seen before. The last time this happened, a silly article was published in a national newspaper. I complained. The “journalist” in question – actually a far-Left activist – was deservedly dismissed.

Therefore, I thought it fair to alert you at once to Bishop’s dishonest attempt to deploy the same technique of artful but wilful misrepresentation, inferentially as part of a doomed attempt to convey the false impression that there is no legitimate scientific debate about the extent of the anthropogenic contribution to global warming, or about the expected impacts of warmer weather worldwide.

Discussion

There follows description of instances where S. Bishop made statements that misrepresent what he himself knew contrary to what he wrote. Then Monckton copies his response to S. Bishop’s memo:

One of the nasty tactics used by climate Communists is the attempt to suggest that skeptics have changed their stance from skepticism to acceptance of the Party Line. I once had to have a journalist fired from a national newspaper for writing a silly piece suggesting what you are now unpleasantly and inaccurately suggesting.

In my case, it is precisely the other way about. At first I went along with the Party Line: but then, in 2006, the CEO of a boutique hedge-fund in London asked me to investigate the global warming question. When I did so, I found that the world had been misled. I reported accordingly, and a summary of my 80-page report eventually appeared in a national newspaper, drawing hundreds of thousands of hits in just two hours (after which the newspaper’s website crashed). That report, and all subsequent articles, papers and speeches by me, acknowledged what is self-evident – namely, that returning to the atmosphere some of the CO2 that was formerly present there (7000 ppmv in the Neoproterozoic, 420 ppmv today) might be expected to cause some warming, if one waited long enough. The question is not whether or not there has been or will be warming: there has been, and there will be. The question is how much – or, rather, how little.

Monckton then dismisses item by item the assertions of lies. Many of them are rhetorical tricks, such as taking statements out of the historical context, or hiding remarks made to audiences; some so-called “lies” involve changing the wording of what Monckton wrote or said.

The Essential Dichotomies: Facts on the Ground which Climatists Deny

Polar Bears Are Thriving

In 2016 Monckton had told a Montana audience: ‘So you don’t have to worry about the cuddly polar bears. They are going to be just fine.”

I had made my remarks in the context of Al Gore’s movie, in which he had said polar bears were drowning due to loss of ice in the Beaufort Sea. However, in the period immediately before he began making his movie – the period during which he said polar bears had died – sea-ice concentration in the Beaufort Sea had increased (above).

Greenland Ice Sheet is Not Melting

In New Zealand, Monckton claimed: “In Greenland, the ice did not melt 8000 years ago and it isn’t melting today.”

From 1991-2003, above 1500 the ice in Greenland had thickened by 2 feet. There had been little change below 1500 m (above).

Over the past 8000 years, temperature at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet has fallen by 1.5 degrees, notwithstanding CO2 concentration increasing from 260 ppmv to 420 ppmv today. Once again the defendants have sought to use evidence, from one side of the debate only, some of it unavailable at the time when I spoke.

Temperature Trends Have Been Inflated by Adjustments to the Terrestrial Temperature Dataset

The above graph shows how many times the GISS global mean surface temperature anomaly for January 1910 and January 2000 were altered between May 2008 and May 2021, with the overall effect of making it appear that the warming between the two dates was close to 50% greater than the original measurements had suggested.

Great Barrier Reef Not Threatened by Global Warming

The graph above shows the sea surface temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef. It shows no trend for almost 30 years – the period before I made the speech in question. I cannot fairly be accused of lying about trends that may have occurred after I spoke.

Extreme Heat Was a Problem Back in the 1920s and 30s

Hansen Wildly Exaggerated Future Warming in His 1988 US Senate Testimony

Hansen’s graph was indeed exaggerated (see above). In 1988, in now-notorious testimony before the U.S. Senate, he predicted global warming at a rate equivalent to 3.2 C° per century (broadly equivalent to equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2) on a business-as-usual emissions scenario (and it is the business-as-usual emissions scenario that has happened since). However, anthropogenic warming has proven to be little more than a third of his predicted business-as-usual rate (red curve and trend above). Indeed, it is below even the unrealized scenario (green) in which the world was supposed to cease all emissions of CO2 from 2000 onwards (it did no such thing). The trend in observed warming is overlaid on Hansen’s red, yellow and green scenarios in blue. The anthropogenic 70% fraction (Wu et al., 2019) of the observed warming is shown in purple.

Today is Not Warmer than Medieval Times

Temperatures in the mediaeval climate optimum were at least as warm as, and usually warmer than, the present. The fact that grapes now grow in very small quantities in lowland Scotland and in the Hebrides, influenced by the Gulf Stream, merely emphasize that temperatures are beginning to recover towards those attained in the mediaeval climate optimum, when grapes were even grown in the Great Glen, a part of the Highlands where it would be very difficult to grow grapes in today’s colder conditions.

Globe No Longer Warming

There has now been no global warming for about six years. The short bursts of warming that occur every five and a half years or so are associated with the naturally-occurring positive cycles of the el Nino Southern Oscillation, which appears to be driven chiefly by crustal deformation in the tropical Eastern Pacific, where the tectonic subduction rate is noticeably greater than anywhere else. The deformation is caused by local solar-system celestial mechanics, and the resultant warming comes from below, through subocean volcanism along the subduction line. It is then distributed worldwide via the thermohaline circulation, which, contrary to some silly reports, cannot cease to operate while the wind blows and the Earth rotates.

My image and comment:

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles.

via Science Matters

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June 13, 2021