Charlatan gets handed his head. Well, at least one of the charlatans.

The love child of Doctor Who and Marty Feldman


One of the things that got me a big ol' can o' smear from the blog Sunlit Uplands was continually calling "bullshit" to claims the blog made- or reprinted- that were demonstrably false, then demanding that the blog's owner prove his claims.


SU called me a lot of names, but never once showed any intellectual honesty by either defending the challenged information or admitting it was unverified crap.


Here's another example.


SU is a big British Royalist. It's hard to get gauzier than SU when it comes to the notion that being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club and ending up with a title makes one superior in all things.


So when SU has wanted to debunk climate change, who better to serve the purpose than Christopher, Viscount Monckton?


Monckton is widely known in the UK as a fabulist who has lied about being a member of the House of Lords and having won the Nobel Peace Price. One fellow climate skeptic has labeled him a "swivel-eyed maniac."

His tour of Australia cost his sponsors $100,000 Australian.


One post SU put up from another source was all but orgasmic:


"On Monday, October 12th, I was extremely privileged to spend time with Lord Christopher Monckton and his wife, Lady Juliet Monckton. You never know the unexpected ways in which God will bless you. In passing the evening with this exceptional couple, I was doubly blessed not only by the pleasure of their excellent company but also by their clear insight into matters of great import--matters that have the potential utterly to destroy the sovereignty of the United States. This entry recounts what Lord and Lady Monckton shared with myself and others over the course of a pre-lecture dinner conversation. His Lordship also worked a portion of this information into his talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison later that evening..."


At the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, Viscoumt Monckton- tribune of free scientific inquiry that he is- shut down questions by student activists about his views by comparing them to the Hitler youth.


So that's SU's climate change guru.


Now a US academic has taken one of Monckton's speeches and analyzed it. Line by line.


As The Guardian puts it, the results aren't pretty:

Now another fallen idol of climate change denial must be added to the list: Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.

As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn't mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton's lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton's claims were consistent with published scientific data.

One of the difficulties with tasks like this is that it takes only a minute to make a claim, but can take hours, even days, to investigate it. So if people are making lots of claims, exposing them requires a great deal of work. Judging by the outcome of all the investigations I've mentioned, the gurus of climate change denial appear to expect that no one will have the time and energy to question them.

The results of Abraham's investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton's assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.

The lecture, like all those Monckton gives, looked and sounded like science: lots of charts and graphs, plenty of numbers and citations, all delivered with an air of authority and finality. Abraham's hard grind demonstrates that it was a long concatenation of nonsense.

Monckton has already been exposed for falsely claiming that he is a member of the House of Lords (the UK's upper legislative body). Now that his claims about the science have been exposed to such withering scrutiny, it's hard to see how he can bounce back in the eyes of anyone other than his ardent disciples. But among them, I doubt that this exposure will make a jot of difference.

Such is the strength of their belief, that if Monckton were to claim that he is in fact the risen Christ, some of them would still go along with it. Given his past pronouncements, it's probably only a matter of time, so we should soon be able to test this proposition. Even if he somehow managed to alienate his followers, they would simply move on to the next charlatan, as climate change denial groupies have done many times already.

Here's Professor Abraham's presentation.