Press Release from CFACT: “Last year Lord Monckton gave a presentation on global warming [for the Minnesota Free Market Institute] in St. Paul, Minnesota that became a sensation on YouTube. This inspired Prof. John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas to attack his presentation in a lengthy video. Lord Monckton has refuted Prof. Abraham using his own medium. The first of a series of videos setting the record straight are being released today [August 12, 2010] and we invite you to view them.”
Click here to see Lord Monckton’s response.
RE: Lord Monckton:
Anyone who has lived on this plant for more than 50 years on this planet has a “historical memory” and can tell that the climate is changing. That change has accelerated in the last five years. Anyone who denies it is clearly deluded, including the Viscount. Carbon molecules from different sources each carry a “marker” and can be measured in the atmosphere. The “solar cycle” which deniers claim is responsible for warming only lasts for eleven year. All OTHER possible sources for warming have been “screened out” by climatologists, and only one remains. Man-made C02. It will be far more cost-effective to take preliminary measures to deal with this now, than at a later date (2030 or so) when the costs of warming mitigation will be TEN TIMES what they in the present day.
Yes, the climate is changing. It has been doing that for 4567 million years. The mere fact of climate change does not tell us its cause. The change has indeed accelerated in the five years since Al Gore made his sci-fi comedy horror movie – there has been a sharp fall in global temperatures over the period.
Yes, we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, but in the 55 years 1950-2005 the warming we’d expect to have occurred on the basis of the IPCC’s methods is 2.7 F, but only 1.2 F actually occurred. The IPCC is exaggerating the amount of warming to be expected, and the discrepancy between prediction and outturn grows with every year that passes.
No, all other possible sources of warming have not been “screened out by climatologists”: it is known, for instance, that a naturally-occurring decrease in global cloud cover, particularly at low latitudes and altitudes, caused all the rapid warming in the 18 years 1983-2001. When the cloud cover came back again late in 2001 (see the ISCCP data), almost a decade of global cooling occurred.
No, it is not cost-effective to try to cut CO2 emissions. The warming forestalled would be negligible, and the costs would be enormous. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective to wait and adapt as and where necessary, and if necessary. See issues of World Economics, passim.
Bottom line: any measure that is effective in stopping “global warming” (on the assumption that such warming will occur at the rate predicted by the IPCC, which it has failed to do for 60 years) will be unaffordable: any measure that is affordable will be ineffective. Adapt, don’t try to prevent.
Above all, science is not a belief system: it is a rigorous process of enquiry. Use of terms like “deluded” of those with whom one disagrees smacks more of religious zealotry, if not bigotry, than of rationality. It is precisely that sort of language on the part of true-believers in the New Religion of Canutism that has frightened off the general public, who can see through extremism and hysteria to the painful lack of scientific or economic substance beneath. There’s no manmade climate problem: get used to it.