Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Unraveling like a Monte Python sketch reworked by David Lynch, the ongoing descent into madness of Climate Denialists and their most famous advocate, His Serene and Exquisite Highness Lord Christopher Monckton – continues.  A recent radio interview from Australia is above. His Lordship would have you shut up and listen.

Now, in an unprecedented step, the UK House of Parliament has demanded publicly that His Magnificent and Benevolent Lordship stop referring to himself as a member of the House of Lords.

The Guardian:

The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a “cease and desist” letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party’s head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house.

The move follows a testy interview given by Monckton to an Australian radio station earlier this month in which he repeated his long-stated belief that he is a member of the House of Lords. When asked by ABC Sydney’s Adam Spencer if he was a member, he said: “Yes, but without the right to sit or vote … [The Lords] have not yet repealed by act of parliament the letters patent creating the peerage and until they do I am a member of the house, as my passport records. It says I am the Right Honourable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. So get used to it.”

The letter, sent by David Beamish, clerk of the parliaments, to Monckton last Friday and now published on the Lords’ website, states: “You are not and have never been a member of the House of Lords. Your assertion that you are a member, but without the right to sit or vote, is a contradiction in terms. No one denies that you are, by virtue of your letters patent, a peer. That is an entirely separate issue to membership of the House. This is borne out by the recent judgement in Baron Mereworth v Ministry of Justice (Crown Office).”

Readers of this blog will, of course, remember how His Beneficent and Undaunted Lordship has claimed to discover a cure for HIV, Muscular Sclerosis, and the Common Cold and flu.

That so many members of the public, as well as legislators, have been completely taken in by this mentally unbalanced, paranoid crackpot is yet another sign of how the right wing disinformation machine has made life in a separate reality a convenient and comfortable lifestyle.

In 2009, the Republican members of the US House of Representatives chose Monckton as the sole witness to present their case on climate change.   Since then, His Regal and Resplendent Lordship’s claims have been so thoroughly exposed and pounded, that the poor fellow has been driven even further around the bend. His Towering and Transcendent Magnificence has not been invited back to Congress, yet…but you can be sure they still hang on his every word.

The UK parliament, which knows an inbred Upper Class twit when it sees one, finished the letter with the following -

I must therefore again ask that you desist from claiming to be a Member of the House of Lords, either directly or by implication, and also that you desist from claiming to be a Member “without the right to sit or vote”.

I am publishing this letter on the parliamentary website so that anybody who wishes to check whether you are a Member of the House of Lords can view this official confirmation that you are not.

David Beamish
Clerk of the Parliaments

UPDATE: Joe Romm points out that I left out one of Monckton’s most prominent delusions – that he is a Nobel Prize winner.  In the radio interview, Monckton states that “no website that I control” makes such a claim.

However, on  Monckton’s own Science and Public Policy website, we read:

His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 – the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise – earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate