Justin Pulliam is the Northeast Regional Field Coordinator for CampusReform.org. He graduated Cum Laude with University Honors from Texas A&M University in December 2011, where he led the local Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow Chapter. He can be reached at justinpulliam@gmail.com.
[/media-credit]Lord Monckton addresses the issue of global warming in an event sponsored by CFACT and the College Republicans on Monday, March 5.
The news that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled.
Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.
Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour of the US and Canada, I was looking forward to documenting the Schenectady showdown. [pullquote]I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.[/pullquote]
The Union Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) sponsored the lecture, which was video streamed by CampusReform.org (where a video recording is available). The afternoon of the event, Lord Monckton appeared on the CFACT leaders’ hour-long weekly show on the Union College radio station. As a result, that evening 200 people packed a campus lecture theater to hear Lord Monckton speak.
As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.
“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy? From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.
Lord Monckton was shown a graph demonstrating a superficially close correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature over the past 150,000 years. Mildly, he asked, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it CO2 concentration that changed first, or temperature that changed first, driving the changes in CO2 concentration?”
The student clutching the graph mumbled that it was impossible to tell, and nobody really knew. At Lord Monckton’s elbow, an elderly lady – presumably on faculty at Union College – said, “Perhaps I can help. It was temperature that changed first.”
“Exactly,” said Lord Monckton.
“However,” she continued, “CO2 then acted as a feedback, amplifying the temperature change. That’s one way we know CO2 is a problem today. And what,” she said, turning noticeably acerbic in a twinkling of Lord Monckton’s eye, “caused the changes in temperature?”
“Well,” said Lord Monckton, “we don’t know for certain, but one plausible explanation …”
“… is the Milankovich cycles!” burst in the venerable PhD, anxious not to have her punch-line stolen.
“Yes,” Monckton agreed imperturbably, “the precession of the equinoxes, and variations in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and in the obliquity of its axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic.
Actually, it is arguable that the cycles were first posited by an autodidact university janitor, a Mr. Croll.” The yakking crowd of environmentalists grew more thoughtful. Their propaganda had made him out to be an ignorant nincompoop, and they had begun to realize they had made the mistake of believing it.
Lord Monckton moved into the auditorium and began with his now-famous, exuberantly verbose parody of how the IPCC might describe a spade. This elegantly hilarious gem, delivered from memory, is rumored to be longer than the Gettysburg Address. Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.
The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).
You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.
Lord Monckton then startled his audience by saying it was settled science that there is a greenhouse effect, that CO2 adds to it, that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, that we are largely to blame, and that some warming can be expected to result. But these facts had been established by easily-replicable and frequently-replicated measurements first performed by John Tyndall in 1859 at the Royal Institution in London, “just down the road from m’ club, don’t y’ know” (laughter). Therefore, these conclusions did not need to be sanctified by consensus.
The audience were startled again when Lord Monckton showed a slide indicating that the rate of warming since 1950 was equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century, while the rate of warming the IPCC predicts for the 21st century is three times greater. His slide described this difference as the “IPCC credibility gap.”
Next, Lord Monckton baffled his audience, including the professors and PhDs (whose faces were a picture) by displaying a series of equations and graphs demonstrating that, while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° of warming in the absence of temperature feedbacks, the real scientific dispute between the skeptics and the believers was that the believers thought that feedbacks triggered by the original warming would triple it to 3.3 C°, while the skeptics thought the warming would stay at around 1 C°. He moved on to show that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC “gospels” were questionable at best and downright fraudulent at worst.
The 2007 gospel had concluded that the rate of warming was itself accelerating and that we were to blame, but this conclusion had been reached by a bogus statistical technique. By applying the same technique to a sine-wave (which the audience had agreed exhibits a zero trend), it is possible to show either a rapidly accelerating uptrend or a rapidly plummeting downtrend, depending on the choice of endpoints for the trend-lines on the data.
The 2001 IPCC gospel had abolished the medieval warm period by another piece of dubious statistical prestidigitation that was now under investigation by the Attorney-General of Virginia under the Fraud against Taxpayers Act 2000 (gasps of gaping astonishment from some of the environmentalists, who seemed not to have been told this before).
The 1995 gospel had been rewritten by just one man, to replace the scientists’ five-times-expressed conclusion that no human influence on global climate was discernible with a single statement flatly (and incorrectly) to the contrary.
The 1990 gospel had claimed to be able to predict temperature changes for 100 years into the future. Yet an entire generation had passed since then, and the warming over that generation had turned out to be below the lowest estimate in the IPCC’s 1990 gospel and well below its central estimate. For eight years, sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century. Worldwide hurricane activity is almost at its least in the 30-year satellite record. Global sea-ice extent has scarcely declined in that time. Here, the message was blunt: “It. Isn’t. Happening.”
Next, Lord Monckton turned to climate economics and demonstrated that the cost of acting to prevent global warming is many times greater than the cost of inaction. The example of Australia’s carbon dioxide tax showed why this was so. Australia accounts for only 1.2% of global CO2 emissions, and the government’s policy was to reduce this percentage by 5% over the ten-year life of the tax. On the generous assumption that the entire reduction would be achieved from year 1 onward, the fraction of global emissions abated would be just 0.06%. Because this fraction was so small, the projected CO2 concentration of 412 ppmv that would otherwise obtain in the atmosphere by 2020 would fall to 411.987 ppmv. Because this reduction in CO2 concentration was so small, the warming abated over the 10-year period of the tax would be just 0.000085 C°, at a discounted cost of $130 billion over the ten-year term.
Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world’s population. On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.
Australia’s carbon dioxide tax is typical of the climate-mitigation measures now being proposed or implemented. All such measures are extravagantly cost-ineffective. No policy to abate global warming by controlling CO2 emissions would prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit from climate mitigation. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable would be ineffective; strategies costly enough to be effective would be unaffordable. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such future global warming as might arise would be many times more cost-effective than doing anything now. “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure,” Monckton advised.
In any event, Lord Monckton explained that the West is no longer the problem. Its emissions have been rising very slowly, but emissions in the emerging economies are rising many times faster. China, in particular, was opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week. She was right to do so. The most efficient way to stabilize a growing population was to raise its standard of living above the poverty line, and the cheapest way to do that was to give the population electricity generated by burning fossil fuels.
Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.
Both in the Q&A session that followed Monckton’s address and in the counter-meeting held by the environmentalists (in which Lord Monckton sat in the front row taking notes), the questions flew thick and fast. Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources? He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC— which he had cited frequently— was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.
Why had Lord Monckton said that from 1695-1735 the temperature in central England had risen by 2.2 degrees (implying 0.55 degrees of warming per decade) when he had gone on to say that the warming rate per decade was 0.4 degrees? He explained that the warming rate was correctly calculated on the basis of the least-squares linear-regression trend, giving 0.39 degrees, which he had rounded for convenience.Did Lord Monckton not accept that we could quantify the CO2 feedback? This point came from the professor.
“Well,” replied Lord Monckton in one of his most crushing responses, “perhaps the professor can quantify it, but the IPCC can’t: its 2007 gospel gives an exceptionally wide range of answers, from 25 to 225 parts per million by volume per Kelvin— in short, they don’t know.”
Why had Lord Monckton said that we could learn about temperatures in the medieval warm period from the foraminifera on the ocean floor, when the resolution was surely too poor? Read Pudsey (2006), said Lord Monckton: the paper showed that the Larsen B ice-shelf, which had disintegrated a few years ago and provided a poster-child for global warming in Al Gore’s movie, had not been present during the medieval warm period, indicating that those who said the warm period applied only to the North Atlantic might not be right. He added that Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of peer-reviewed papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries establishing that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was at least as warm as the present and was probably warmer.
What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.
What about peak fossil fuels? Should we not start cutting back now? No, said Lord Monckton. The recent discovery of vast and now-recoverable reserves of shale gas meant that we had several hundred years’ supply of fossil fuel. The professor agreed that shale gas had a contribution to make: it produced more energy per ton of CO2 emitted than oil or coal.
Why had Lord Monckton cherry-picked the Australian carbon dioxide tax as his economic example? He said that in a short lecture he could only take one example, so he had taken the Australian case because all other mitigation policies were quite similar to it. It was between 10 and 100 times more costly to try to make global warming go away today than to let the warming occur – even if the warming were at the rate predicted by the IPCC, and even if the cost of inaction was as high as the Stern Report had imagined – and to concentrate on focused adaptation when and where and only if and only to the extent that might be necessary.
Was not dendrochronology now so sophisticated that we could distinguish between the broadening of annual tree-rings caused by warmer weather and the broadening caused either by wetter weather or by more CO2 in the air? The Professor said this was now indeed possible. Lord Monckton replied that it was not possible. From 1960 onwards, the tree-ring series, even after all the complex adjustments made by the dendrochronastrologists, had showed global temperatures plummeting, while the thermometers had showed them soaring. That was why the Climategate emailers had spent so much time discussing how to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring predictions of temperature change from 1960 onward.
This precipitate “decline” cast precisely the doubt upon the reliability of tree-ring temperature reconstructions that the IPCC had originally had in mind when it recommended against the use of tree-rings for reconstructing pre-instrumental temperatures. The professor had no answer to that.
The professor said he was emotional about the damage caused by global warming because in Peru and Ecuador he had seen the collapse in the water supply caused by the melting glaciers. Lord Monckton said that in nearly all parts of the world it was not the glaciers but the snow-melt that provided the water supply. Data from the Rutgers University Snow and Ice Lab showed no trend in northern-hemisphere snow cover in 40 years. He added that in the tropical Andes, according to Polissar et al. (2006), the normal state of all but the very highest peaks had been ice-free; therefore, it could not be said for certain that our influence on climate was causing any change that might not have occurred naturally anyway.
Why had Lord Monckton bothered to deal with the science at all, if the economic case against taking any action to address global warming was so overwhelming? Lord Monckton replied that it was necessary to understand that there was no scientific case for action either, and that it was necessary for policymakers and governments to realize that key elements in the IPCC’s scientific case – such as the supposedly “accelerating” warming that had been arrived at by the bogus statistical technique he had demonstrated with a sine-wave – were downright false.
The professor then asked the students in to raise their hands if they agreed with him that the IPCC’s use of the statistical technique questioned by Lord Monckton was correct. Dutifully, fearfully, about two-thirds of the hands in the room went up. Lord Monckton turned to the professor and told him he should not have done that. He then turned to the students who had raised their hands and asked them how many of them were statisticians. Just one student began to raise his hand and then – apparently realizing that admitting he was a statistician was to admit he had knowingly raised his hand to endorse a manifest statistical falsehood – slowly lowered it again, blushing furiously.
Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere, whether Lord Monckton was a statistician. No, he said, and that was why he had taken care to anonymize the data and send them to a statistician, who had confirmed the obvious: since the same technique, applied to the same data, could produce precisely opposite results depending upon a careful choice of the endpoints for the multiple trend-lines that the IPCC’s bureaucrats had superimposed on the perfectly correct graph of 150 years of temperature changes that the scientists had submitted, the technique must be defective and any results obtained by its use must be meaningless.
Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”
That pin, if you had dropped it, could have been heard again. Many young heads were hung in shame. Even their professor looked just a little less arrogant than he had done throughout the proceedings. Quietly they shuffled out into the darkness.
That night, the Gore Effect worked overtime. Temperatures plummeted to 14° F. The following morning, as we drove through the snowy landscape of upstate New York towards the next venue the following morning, I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.
Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”
Loading ...
There were several points in this where I actually burst out laughing. Why would you write this with such heavy and dramatic wording? This is an editorial, not a screenplay.
I sense that more sparks are about to fly…
The original audience for this column was for people across the country who are not able to see Lord Monckton in person. The dramatic wording and screenplay like feel allow others to fully understand all of the dynamics at play during the event.
And as any good screenwriter knows, scene dynamics and their interpretations are highly subjective. Did you ever think that “heads were hung in shame” not because people were actually ashamed of themselves, but disgusted because Lord Monckton is unwilling to allow science to critique his work? Or that peoples’ faces were red because they were frustrated, rather than embarrassed?
Perhaps you should give up your medical ambitions and pick up a professional career in writing? You seem to be good at setting dramatic scenes…
Justin,
Thank you for your moving piece of yellow journalism. in fact, the baffled looks and quiet moments in “Lord” Chris Monckton’s speech were not, AS YOU COMPLETELY FABRICATE, the sounds of people with no answer. The only emotion that you correctly identified was that of horror, horror that “environmentalists” were likened to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the outbreak of not one but TWO World Wars, and the racial cleansing of eugenics. Again, the only point that made even an iota of sense was the mention of the ban on DDT, which is regrettable but necessary as the chemical was actually meant for neutralizing the enemy in WWII and was being sprayed in suburban neighborhoods with no warning of its effects (Silent Spring by Rachel Carson).
You wrote:
“You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.”
I can tell you right now, I was not silent because I agreed with what this moron was saying. I was silent because I was trying to comprehend what level of stupidity and baseness had led this apparently educated person to group every single person who believes that the world in is some kind of turmoil, whether it be climate or energy-based, and brand them as mass murderers. Does that make sense now? Oh, and thank for asking my opinion. Let me now guess what you are thinking right now… glee?
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty damn sure that I’m not a 21st century Hitler. Please feel free to comment. I am trying to make humanity more sustainable by facilitating a switch to renewable energy sources. One of my friends is going to be an “environmentalist” doctor. Each of us is different, so don’t throw us all into one bin and take us out to the garbage heap, thank you very much.
Just one more thing before I continue living my life and murdering innocent people because I believe in an overwhelming consensus…
At the end of your piece you wrote:
“That pin, if you had dropped it, could have been heard again. Many young heads were hung in shame. Even their professor looked just a little less arrogant than he had done throughout the proceedings. Quietly they shuffled out into the darkness.”
Actually, most of us had quite enough of his long-winded and babbling “Lordship” and decided that the Q&A was over. I’m not sure whose heads were hung in shame, but I didn’t see a single one. In fact, we were all very excited that we had our chance to refute Mr. Monckton.
You are a great writer of fiction, my friend, so I strongly suggest that you get your head out of the “darkness” from whence it came and go write some novels. Make up all the fake characters and story lines you want; please leave the rest of us real people alone.
When you mention the “slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape” you fail to bring up the many professionally printed graphs that were hanging up as well. There are so many other things in this article I could pick apart but I won’t, it’s actually not worth the time seeing as this piece is based on no facts at all and completely one sided.
Thank you for singling out one of our students. Nice.
I was at “Lord” Monckton’s talk as well as the Q&A that the environmentalists put on afterward and for some reason I do not remember it going down like you have described. I do however remember a very arrogant Englishman avoiding questions and interrupting people who were speaking in opposition. If the intended audience is for people across the country you can continue to stream Monckton’s talks online so they too can see “The Show,” but It is not necessary to call out a student (at the school in which you were a guest) to make the talk more dramatic.
This article “stinks and I don’t like the smell of it.”
Let’s recap here.
If anyone was actually there, they would have seen that any of the “blushing” and the “hanging of heads” were either out of context or never happened at all.
The blushing was from blood rushing through their faces. This was accompanied with anger and/or frustration. This was from the interruption and blatant disregard of my colleagues and the condescending tones.
The hanging of heads was not from shame. This is a human response to a slideshow showing the most morbid events during our history that claimed lives of millions and then shafting us into the same category.
But I’m not a doctor (yet).
The environmentalist community came there not to start a revolt, but to hear the other side. There is a difference between being hostile and being passionate. Or is anyone who is not afraid to voice their opinion “a quavering bossy woman”?
As SCIENTISTS who have dedicated our life to determining the CAUSE and EFFECT of CLIMATE CHANGE, we figured, “Hey, let’s be nice and let this guy who has absolutely no training in the field whatsoever give his professional opinion about this topic.”
We came there to be respectful. We listened quietly throughout his lecture and when he asked for questions, you can imagine we gave him some questions.
I’m not going to go any further because I’ll start getting all “shrill environmental extremist” voiced, but as a student who is an Environmental Science major AND Pre-Med, I suggest that we just take his advice then. Let’s just continue on with depleting the Earth of it’s natural resources and polluting everything. Let’s just save our money and find no other renewable resources.Then we can see how happens to OUR HEALTH as the atmosphere becomes thick with smog and the 1% of water that is actually drinkable runs out or becomes polluted. Let’s just wait until we have nothing left to burn or drill for. After that we can all just fly to England and knock on the lordship’s door and ask:
“Now what?”
Word
Who are the majority of the people here to say that these weren’t the events that happened? Have you not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?
What a load of garbage. Please stop writing for the Concordy, Justin.
Well this is certainly a personal attack on those who have made Union one of the greenest campuses in the country. A point the college is particularly proud of, in fact. Further, the portrayal of the lecture is hilarious and fabricated, more focused on the supposed reactions of the audience than the idiocy of the presentation. Unless qualified, please refrain from preaching nonsense to people who know better. Thanks. I believe the biased point of view present in this article, as well as a few other recent articles, are unfortunate for readers hoping to be solely informed on an issue as opposed to being convinced to take a specific point of view. I will not waste any more of my ‘shrill environmental extremist’ voice on this argument.
Sorry for the typo, the biased point of view *is unfortunate for readers
As an English major and an Anthropology major, I walked into “Lord” Monckton’s lecture with very little scientific background. Most of what I do know on the subject is due to my friendships with many environmentalists on this campus. My main objective in attending this lecture was to watch these friends, as well as the professors who were in attendance, rip Monckton apart. I can absolutely agree with Mr. Pulliam that at various points throughout Monckton’s presentation I dropped my head and blushed. However, this was most certainly not from shame. Instead, it was from my attempts to keep from laughing out loud. Beginning with Monckton’s “elegantly hilarious gem,” continuing through his tendency to place an image of a crown on all of his slides, his personal challenge to Al Gore (is Monckton aware that Gore was not present?), his sweeping generalizations concerning environmentalists, and, oh, yes, his statement that America’s attempts to combat global climate change mean that we are not interested in supporting the starving children in Africa, I had many close calls. However, “the quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair” had asked all of us to be respectful, so, yes, I bit my lip, ducked my head, and turned bright red from holding in my spasms of laughter.
Beyond the lack of reality reported in this article, the writing itself was atrocious. Every sentence was an exercise in hyperbole, with an effusion of over excited and energetic adjectives applied to both “Lord” Monckton and his lecture that I reached the end wondering if Mr. Pulliam was attempting to convince the reader of Monckton’s superior knowledge concerning climate change or that they should adopt Monckton as their new God. Given that Mr. Pulliam works for “His Lordship,” it is unsurprising that he wrote about Monckton’s interaction with Union’s environmentalists in the same way that Monckton speaks about climate change – with very little basis in fact and a great deal of pomposity. However, I must say that I am extremely disappointed by the Concordy’s decision to print this article.
I have been told many times that the Concordy prints articles with varying viewpoints because as a news outlet they have a responsibility to show all sides of the story. However, such a biased, inaccurate, and slanderous piece of writing, even if it is an opinion piece, belongs in the tabloids. I could easily go to any event on campus and make my own decisions concerning everyone there, but as an Anthropology minor who has studied research techniques, I can tell you that anything I reported based on this type of “observations” would be considered a worthless account that would most likely be damaging to the society that I was writing about. This is far from the first time that I have been disappointed by the Editors’ decisions to print controversial articles with little basis in fact or reality. I am forced to believe by the continuing lowering of standards that it is an attempt to increase readership. Personally, I find it offensive and deplorable that the Editors are willing to print articles with no news value that slander a large part of our community, including professors. I understand that all of us who have responded are, unfortunately, giving the Editors exactly what they want by allowing more of Mr. Pulliam’s sparks to fly. However, I’m sick of being respectful to “Lord” Monckton and his minion who have shown nothing but contempt for so many members of our campus community. I find it extremely unfortunate that the Concordy chose to give them another outlet for this disrespect.
An “exercise in hyperbole” is the perfect way to describe this trash.
Seems to me that Monkton made quite a lot of scientific and economic points and was able to answer questions on several sides of the climate question authoritatively. He quoted the science, the data, and the literature a lot. Interesting that not one of the rent-a-comments above really challenges even one of these scientific and economic points. One of Aristotles fallacies is the argument ad hom, attacking the man and not what he said. Thats what these comments look like – ad hom after ad hom. Thats not science.
OK, so Saul Alinskys playbook says the capitalists have all the right arguments and all good marxists should attack their reputations rather than trying to argue on questions of fact. But for instance Monkton showed a temperature graph that the IPCC had tampered with to make it look like global warming was getting faster. He made it quite obvious that the graph had been faked up, but if Justins account is accurate around two thirds of the students in the counter meeting put their hands up when the prof asked them to support him saying the graph was true. Monkton had checked with a statistician who said the graph was bogus.
Looks like the prof and most of the students let political prejudice get in the way of science. If thats what happened then environmental science on campus is in big trouble and maybe, just maybe, Monktons right. Justins article has gone viral all over the web and that business of voting that the graph the statistician said was bogus was true is not going to make Union College look good IMHO. What was the prof thinking of and why did so many of his students go along with him when they knew they shouldnt??? Come on guys. If we dont stick to the truth what are we?
Suzy,
The honest truth is that neither Monckton nor Justin are scientists. Excuse me for questioning the validity of a presentation that is given by a British politician, and is then completely abused by his intern. When it comes to the “truth,” I prefer to listen to the people who have been studying it for a living. #SORRYIMNOTSORRY
Suzy, I am going to guess that you didn’t attend Christopher Monckton’s lecture or, at least the Q&A session that I co-hosted afterwards. Because if you did, you would know that the Monckton’s graph that supposedly shows evidence of tampering was not the one about which the audience voted. I was the professor who invited the audience to vote – but it was about Mr. Monckton’s unfounded assertion that the trend in global temperatures must be a sine curve.
But I won’t blame you for getting that fact wrong, because Mr. Pulliam’s article made no effort to accurately portray what happened in either venue. As he himself comments, it was a “screenplay” – in other words, a fiction. I guess that we should be grateful that, in addition to gifting Mr. Monckton with witty repartee and a logical argument, Mr. Pulliam didn’t also give Mr. Monckton the ability to leap tall building in a single bound.
As for the two graphs: Mr. Monckton’s claim that the IPCC has supressed the Midieval Warming Period is easily addressed: The IPCC updated their graphs between 1990 and 2001 in order to take into account more than a decade of new data. Would you have them do anything else? For a more complete rebuttal, I refer you to Slide 27 and following in http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/jpabraham/global_warming/Monckton/Monckton%20Presentation%20June%2022/index.htm.
The graph about which I invited the audience to vote was Mr. Monckton’s claim that the trend of global temperatures followed a sine curve. It was Mr. Monckton that offered no statistical evidence beyond, I assume, “what goes up must come down.” No, I wasn’t convinced, and neither was the audience.
I could not have been more proud of our students who put their considerable knowledge and abilities to think critically on display that night, and who were able to offer a substantive rebuttal to Mr. Monckton’s presentation. Mr. Pulliam’s account bears no resemblance to the night that I experienced.
Dear Jeffrey Corbin
So you think that the MWP did not exist, that CO2 and T has been flat for several thousand years, and only lately, post the beginning of the industrial age, have global temps climbed beyond what they have been for thousands of years. You think all of this based on one discredited hockey stick graph, and five or six subseqent papers published by the “team” of scientist who pal-review each others papers. (Read the Wegman report)
I will respond with several recent papers , all of which indicate numerous periods in the last four thosand years which were warmer then the current. But first let me show you what the authors of the climate reconstructions which you adore so highly, think of their own reconstuction work, which I assure you is not qualified to over turn hundreds of papers which show the MWP to be real, global, and as warm or warmer then current temperatures. From the climategate “FOIA” release…
Bradley:
“I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
“I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.”
================================================
Then Cook proposes a new climate reconstruction to sort out all the past one’s, a best effort if you will of the team..
with a tentative title: Cook writes…
================================================
“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are
The Greatest Uncertainties?”
Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D’Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones
(??), Mann (infinite?) – I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too
personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is
probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in – Bradley
hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they
can contribute without just defending their past work”
=========================================
Cook next (in seven steps) articulates what he thinks can be learned from this team effort after describing it in detail ending with step 7
===========================================================
Cook writes…
“…7. Publish, retire, and don’t leave a forwarding address
Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about 100 year variability was like with any certainty i.e. we know with certainty that we know snip-all.
Of course, none of what I have proposed has addressed the issue of seasonality of response. So what I am suggesting is strictly an empirical comparison of published 1000 year NH reconstructions because many of the same tree-ring proxies get used in both seasonal and annual recons anyway. So all I care about is how the recons
differ and where they differ most in frequency and time without any direct consideration of their TRUE association with observed temperatures.” (Cook’s caps, not mine)
================================================
Wow, now having trashed all the reconstructions as junk and agreeing with the skeptics, non publicly of course, Cook then desribes how to make them appear credible in the next IPCC report…
” I think this is exactly the kind of study that needs to be done before the next IPCC assessment. But to give it credibility, it has to have a reasonably broad spectrum of authors to avoid looking like a biased attack paper, i.e. like Soon and Balliunas.”
================================================================
Beyond the Wegman report and McIntyres work, I suggest you read the paper by McShane and Wyner in The Annals of Applied Statistics (Vol. 5, No. 1, p. 5-44). You can see in their study they found that random noise was as effective as the proxies processed by the Mann algorithm in predicting temperatures. As they put it “random series that are independent of global temperature are as effective or more effective than the proxies at predicting global annual temperatures in the instrumental period.
Dr. Jonathan Jones, Professor of Physics, Brasenose College, Oxford University made on the Bishop Hill blog ( http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/12/2/tim-barnett-on-the-hockey-stick.html ) at December 3, 2011 at 6:11 PM. Professor Jones makes an unequivocal condemnation of the “Hockey Stick” and much of climatology.
If the MWP was real this alone destroys your CO2 drives climate, as well as all the models as your team has flat lined CO2 during this period, Consider borehole temperature measurements at 6000 locations (Huang et al., 1997). As one of several dozen other studies I can find show the MWP was real, was global, and was as warm, or warmer then the current warm period.
Here is another 2,000 yr reconstruction that decimates the Hockey stick papers.
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2010/sep/23sep2010a3.htmlthat
Here is a 4,000 year reconstruction of Greenland showing 72 decades were warmer then the current decade, all contradicting your CO2 flat line, http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2012/feb/14feb2012a1.html
Of course there is Loehle’s reconstruction 2007, based on all temperature proxies except tree rings. It used 18 proxies over a wide geographical range, including sediments, boreholes, pollen, oxygen-18, stalagmites, magnesium to calcium ratios, algae, and cave formation. First reconstruction in which every proxy was calibrated to temperature in a peer reviewed article; arguably about as good as it gets.
Let us progress from centuries and thousands of years to millions of years…
Recently Berner et al looked at carbon dioxide and temperature variations over the last 470 million years. An analysis of that paper shows…
“Assuming Berner’s figures are correct, then both CO2 and cosmic rays affect the temperature over the last 450 million years.
The correlation with log(CO2) alone is R^2 = 0.63.
Using log(cosmic rays) alone is R^2 = 0.42. (The log of both CO2 and cosmic rays give a much better fit to temperature than the data itself.)
Using a linear regression with both gives R^2 = 0.79.
A very interesting finding from this analysis is that the resulting climate sensitivity is 1.0 C +/- 0.2 (2 std. dev.) per doubling of CO2.”
Of course there are many other factors beside those mentioned would could affect T which are Right in line with Lindzen’s estimate here…http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060126/20060126_13.pdf
I have dozens more peer reviewed papers, some for century scales, some for thousands of years, some for millions, I am afraid sir that it is you who are “ignoring the peer reviewed literature” not Christopher Monckton
Dear Jeffrey Corbin
So you think that the MWP did not exist, that CO2 and T has been flat for several thousand years, and only lately, post the beginning of the industrial age, have global temps climbed beyond what they have been for thousands of years. You think all of this based on one discredited hockey stick graph, and five or six subseqent papers published by the “team” of scientist who pal-review each others papers. (Read the Wegman report)
I will respond with several recent papers , all of which indicate numerous periods in the last four thosand years which were warmer then the current. But first let me show you what the authors of the climate reconstructions which you adore so highly, think of their own reconstuction work, which I assure you is not qualified to over turn hundreds of papers which show the MWP to be real, global, and as warm or warmer then current temperatures. From the climategate “FOIA” release…
Bradley:
“I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
“I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.”
================================================
Then Cook proposes a new climate reconstruction to sort out all the past one’s, a best effort if you will of the team..
with a tentative title: Cook writes…
================================================
“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are
The Greatest Uncertainties?”
Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D’Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones
(??), Mann (infinite?) – I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too
personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is
probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in – Bradley
hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they
can contribute without just defending their past work”
=========================================
Cook next (in seven steps) articulates what he thinks can be learned from this team effort after describing it in detail ending with step 7
===========================================================
Cook writes…
“…7. Publish, retire, and don’t leave a forwarding address
Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about 100 year variability was like with any certainty i.e. we know with certainty that we know snip-all.
Of course, none of what I have proposed has addressed the issue of seasonality of response. So what I am suggesting is strictly an empirical comparison of published 1000 year NH reconstructions because many of the same tree-ring proxies get used in both seasonal and annual recons anyway. So all I care about is how the recons
differ and where they differ most in frequency and time without any direct consideration of their TRUE association with observed temperatures.” (Cook’s caps, not mine)
================================================
Wow, now having trashed all the reconstructions as junk and agreeing with the skeptics, non publicly of course, Cook then desribes how to make them appear credible in the next IPCC report…
” I think this is exactly the kind of study that needs to be done before the next IPCC assessment. But to give it credibility, it has to have a reasonably broad spectrum of authors to avoid looking like a biased attack paper, i.e. like Soon and Balliunas.”
My follow up will show the peer reviewed literature which does support the MWP.
Jeffrey Corbin says (March 13, 2012 at 9:30 am) :-
” The graph about which I invited the audience to vote was Mr. Monckton’s claim that the trend of global temperatures followed a sine curve. It was Mr. Monckton that offered no statistical evidence beyond, I assume, “what goes up must come down.” No, I wasn’t convinced, and neither was the audience. ”
Jeffrey, what utter nonsense. Monckton made no such assertion. One can only imagine you misunderstood, when he was using a sine wave to illustrate clearly, the effects of the endpoint fallacy, as exploited shamelessly, though not so transparently by the IPCC .
As an alumnus of Union, I was delighted to see that the college hosted an address by Lord Monckton. Ignoring its emotional appeal to the credulous, the hypothesis of catastrophic anthorpogenic global warming lacks only a minor item: the application of scientific method.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
-Carl Sagan
Alumnus Garrett,
Had you been at the lecture, you would have seen a student completely stump Monckton on a point you so aptly made. Monckton ceaselessly espouses the scientific method, claiming that science by consensus is meaningless. Well, at its most fundamental and basic level, the scientific method leads to consensus. Thus, using fairly basic LSAT logic, Monckton contradicts two of his most fundamental points.
Wilma, what do you mean by consensous? How was Monckton “stumped”, as your post does not explain this assertion. Climate science is “post normal science” quitre divorced from the scientific method. See my response to Jeffrey above.
My sources on AGW are worldwide, (not outside of mainstream science) and from far more PHD scientists then represented by the IPCC, which in the end (those who write the summaries at least) is a political body with many of the valid fallacies constructed by the critics of religion, equally present in this UN organization. I could quote from among peer reviewed literature, papers by Lindzen, Pielke, Christy, Spencer, Eschenbach, Scafetta, Myhre, Akasofu, Douglass, McIntyre and many others, all of whom have robustly challenged the dogma of a few cloistered warmists. These are not “big oil shills” as some try to claim, nor are they nutters. They are all eminent climate scientists who are showing that observations do not support the hypothesis that CO2 is significantly warming the planet, a hypothesis that is predicated on the false premise that historical climate has remained fixed for millennia, which is in contradiction of overwhelming evidence that temperatures were warmer than today a thousand years ago. I could point to 100 more papers that show that the medieval warm period was real, global, and warmer than today – a mountain of evidence against the warmists broken hockey stick. Additionally these scientist are unafraid to reveal their methodology and data, unlike many deacons high in the AGW hierarchy. The fact that climate alarmists reject the Scientific Method means that they are political advocates first, and mendacious scientists second.
Many supporters of CAGW listen to the self-reinforcing echo chamber realclimate. Realclimate and their elk are the real contrarians. They refuse to engage in any neutral, moderated debate, and they censor opposing points of view. That’s not science, that is political activism. The fact that the planet is falsifying their CAGW alarmism is enough for many. The claim that “mainstream” scientists have reached a consensus is also completely wrong. For one example, more than 31,000 U.S. scientists have already signed the OISM Petition, which states:
The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
Dr Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote the petition’s cover letter. You can not get more ‘mainstream’ than Dr Seitz. Yet many alarmist futilely attempt to marginalize the tens of thousands of scientists who signed that statement. Compare that number with the fewer than a hundred political appointees who put together the UN/IPCC’s Assessment Reports, and you will begin to understand that there is no “scientific“ consensus.
Jeffrey Corbin,
It is medieval, not midieval. Are you sure you’re a professor?
And the sine wave example was about cherry-picking start and end points. It could show rapid acceleration or deceleration trends based on the selected timeframe. Are you sure you’re a professor?
Again, are you sure you’re a professor?
Wilma says, “Monckton ceaselessly espouses the scientific method, claiming that science by consensus is meaningless. Well, at its most fundamental and basic level, the scientific method leads to consensus. Thus, using fairly basic LSAT logic, Monckton contradicts two of his most fundamental points.”
My gosh, since you will not respond to my post I will lead you along to show you the errors of your thinking. Monckton does not make the claim you state.
His statement that, using the claimed “consensus” as a scientific argument is not scientific, is not the same thing as saying that rationally held scientific perspectives can not cause rational scientific people to have the same view. It is saying that those same people cannot use the “consensus arguement” against someone who is articulating an alternative view of the same observations. If for instance you think the Hockey stick reconstuctions of past climate are in fact correct, (and that they are the consensus) and there was no global MWP, and CO2 was flatlined for this entire period, and I show you seven new peer revied studies from the last two years, and dozens of older papers, all supporting my assertion, you cannot logically look at me and state, “you are wrong because there is a consensus” BTW, this in not a hypothetical and is a part of Christopher Monckton’s presentation, which you do try to discredit in exactly the manner I desribed.
Back to basic LSAT logic for Orwellian Wilma.
If Monckton looked stumped, which I doubt, it was because all the logic receptors in his brain were rebelling at the naclav logic contained within the question. “naclav”, is of course “vulcan” spelled backwards, and has the implied conotation. (-;