New Zealand’s top climate change scientists have rallied together to slam a visiting sceptic who is touring the country to proclaim global warming as a myth that should be ignored.
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Dr James Renwick, associate professor of physical geography at Victoria University, dismissed Lord Monckton’s views as “rubbish”.
“He’s a great showman and speaker, and climate change is a vehicle to self-publicise.
“But he has no training and has studiously avoided learning anything about science, I would say.”
Niwa principal scientist Brett Mullan said Lord Monckton’s views were “very damaging” for public perception.
Professor Dave Frame, director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University, described him as a “vaudeville act” to be ignored.
“Someone who goes around saying things we know are not true can actually be quite harmful.”
Lord Monckton has rejected the claims as ”hate speech”.
A week into his self-described “barnstorming” tour of New Zealand, arch-sceptic Christopher Monckton seems to be quietly licking his wounds after a string of farcical public and media appearances.
The armchair climate change expert has in the past managed to stimulate discussion of climate science on his tours of New Zealand and Australia, even if he has been criticized for manipulating and cherry-picking the science to suit his narrative on climate.
However, after his roasting in the media, his train wreck of a public discussion in Auckland and a falling out with one of his imagined allies, Monckton’s arguments against acting on climate change have received scant attention, overshadowed by his erratic behaviour.
The Weekend Herald lavished the full back page interview on Monckton last Saturday and in the process featured perhaps the best insight yet into the mind of Lord Monckton who abruptly ended the interview. Writes the Weekend Herald’s Michele Hewitson:
“It is very difficult to walk out on an interview when the only place you have to walk out of is the living room in the house where you are staying and into the kitchen where the person you are walking out on has to follow you to get to the front door. We stood about for a bit while he studiously ignored me and while I waited for him to laugh because it was so farcical.
“But he didn’t. He wouldn’t even say goodbye, which was quite some feat because it might have been the first time he had ever stopped talking.”On Friday morning, Monckton appeared on TV3′s Firstline programme, where he claimed to be in New Zealand as a guest of Federated Farmers. Monckton was still fuming about his treatment by the Herald:
“They made assumptions which were not correct, and one of the universities concerned is going to have the father and mother of all complaints later today, once the lies have been investigated,” he told Firstline.
But untruths were the subject of a press release issued later in the day about Monckton’s TV3 appearance, with Federated Farmers moving to distance themselves from the visiting sceptic:
In an interview on 3News Firstline this morning, in which Lord Christopher Monckton said his tour was being organised and supported by Federated Farmers of New Zealand, but this is incorrect.
Federated Farmers of New Zealand has not invited Lord Monckton to tour. Nor is Federated Farmers of New Zealand sponsoring or organising his tour either directly or indirectly.
Federated Farmers of New Zealand is aware our Marlborough province may be supporting the tour in some capacity and that some farmers may be involved, but the national body is not.
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Then came this morning’s account in the Northern Advocate of a meeting Monckton spoke at in the Whangarei library. Reporter Lindy Laird admitted she found it hard to take Monckton seriously:
It’s because he reminds me of Spike Milligan. Maybe it’s the eyes, the self-deprecating Englishness, or a delivery that turns a serious subject into the bizarre. I tell myself to get serious, be professional, I’m on a job.
This is not The Goon Show, and although the grass outside is frying in the blazing April sun and people mutter “driest in 70 years” no one looks likely to burst into ludicrous song at any moment. “Ning Nang Nong…”
At least Monckton may be able to drown out his detractors when he comes to Wellington. He is holding his public lecture there in the Bose audio store.
Monckton said did not claim to be a climatologist or an economist and hedged his arguments with a few choice words.
”I do not say that I am certain, I say I think it most unlikely.”I start from the assumption that except where absolute mathematical proof is available, which it very seldom is in the physical sciences and even less in the slippery subject such as climatology, minds must remain open – including mine.”
Monckton later spoke to students at Waikato University and while there were a handful of protestors to denounce him, the address largely passed without incident.
Monckton is on the record as saying that human-emitted carbon emissions were not warming the planet and that increased sun activity accounted for recent higher temperatures.
His beliefs are at odds with the majority of climate change scientists, but have attracted attention wherever he goes.
However, Monckton is planning to wind up his role of climate change speaker shortly.
Interestingly, a cached earlier version of this story includes finished with a different passage – “Lord Monckton said he would stop speaking as a climate sceptic speaker soon. “On this side of the case, there’s no money at all.”
Perhaps he’ll retire to focus on his cure for AIDS.
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