Monckton KO’d in Recent Debate
Update (July 18, 2011): Monckton told he’s not member of House of Lords. Clerk of parliaments publishes letter on Lords’ site saying peer is not and has ‘never been a member of the House of Lords’.
In a recent debate at The Philosophical Society (Debating Club) for University College Cork, Ireland, on October 4, 2010, Lord Christopher Monckton was defeated by Graham Parkes by a vote of 100 – 3.
Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the School of Sociology and Philosophy for University College Cork, Ireland. The text below is by Graham Parkes and he has given his approval to repost here. The paranthetical links were added by me.
I was unsure whether I should appear before you this evening, having received the invitation to speak just a few days ago and then come down with a nasty cold. [Cough]Also, as a student of philosophy, I have virtually no experience of debating, but in the interests of full disclosure, I should begin by outlining that minimal background. Here’s what happened when I tried to get onto the debating team at a school in Glasgow, some time in the early nineteen-sixties. The schoolmaster in charge asked me: ‘Now, young Parkes, do you think that rampant capitalism benefits everyone in the long run?’ I replied: ‘Well no Sir, I don’t actually.’ ‘That’s just grand!’ he replied; ‘So you’ll be arguing that it does.’
He went on to explain that the truth, or the actual facts of the situation, is irrelevant: what matters in debating is the power of one’s rhetoric, which one ought to be able to deploy even to convince the audience of things that are false. Well, obviously not cut out for a career in politics or law, I failed to make it onto the team. I was relieved to discover later on that a different profession, namely philosophy, developed in the western tradition by positioning itself against the methods of debating, when Socrates distinguished himself from the Sophists. Whereas the Sophists charged exorbitant fees to the rich young men of Athens for teaching them how to succeed in politics by training them in fallacious argumentation, Socratic philosophy tried through careful questioning to ascertain the true nature of things.
What made me decide, then, to speak this evening was a concern that, if I didn’t, sophistry and misinformation might carry the day — on a topic of crucial importance.
As you know, there has been an enormous amount of controversy over what is happening with the earth’s climate, and why; but it so happens that one of the most important documents for making sense of the confusion was published just the other day. Here’s the background to it first. In May of this year, the Chief Policy Advisor of the Science and Public Policy Institute testified before the Select Committee on Global Warming in the United States Congress. He begins by saying that the conclusion by ‘various scientific bodies [that] the global climate has warmed … requires heavy qualification’, and that their view that ‘Human activities account for most of the warming since the mid-20th century’ is ‘wrong’. His conclusion is this:
There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress. … Yet … on any view, ‘global warming’ is not one of them.
You can imagine how delighted the Republican members of the Committee must have been to hear those glad tidings.
The ‘important document’ I just mentioned is titled ‘Climate Scientists Respond’, and it’s a detailed response to this testimony by 21 leading climate scientists from institutes and universities such as Stanford, Columbia, the University of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Laurence Livermore National Laboratory.1 These scientists distinguish nine main assertions made by the policy advisor, and go on to refute each and every one of them. His claims, they demonstrate, are (and I quote)
‘extremely superficial’, ‘profoundly wrong’, and they ‘totally misinterpret the physics’. The arguments are based on premises that are ‘simply false’, contain ‘reasoning and calculation [that is] simply incorrect’ and numerous statements that are ‘misleading’, and they make frequent ‘illogical leaps’.
One would have thought that the policy advisor in question would have vowed there and then never again to even utter the phrase ‘global warming’. But no, quite the opposite — as demonstrated by the fact that he is here with us right now, ready and eager to oppose this evening’s motion: ‘that manmade global warming is a global crisis’. I hope this means that Mr Monckton now accepts that the current global warming is mostly manmade, and that he’s going to discuss the politics of the problem, about which he surely knows more than he does about the science. But just in case he does talk about the science, I trust that you will hear whatever he says in the context of the recent exposure of the weakness of his arguments in that area.
It’s important to understand in this context that scientists have traditionally been conservative types who avoid making definitive statements for fear of being proved wrong. And if we expand our focus beyond the twenty-one climate scientists who refuted Mr Monckton to the professional organisations to which they belong, we find those scientific bodies to be even more cautious than their individual members. In general, the more prestigious the organisation, the more trustworthy the statements it issues, because such professional bodies have an enormous stake in upholding their reputations, and take great pains to avoid saying anything that could possibly make them look stupid in retrospect. Among the most respected such organisations in the world are The National Academy of Sciences, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in the U.K. the Royal Society2—all of which have become so bold as to issue statements warning of the critical dangers of global warming.
Indeed, the National Academies of Sciences of thirteen nations took the unprecedented step last year of issuing a Joint Statement on Climate Change. We’re talking here about the premiere scientific organizations of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. (Can you imagine Britain and France agreeing on anything? or China and Japan? Russia and the United States?!) The members of these thirteen academies, having considered a vast amount of mass of scientific evidence (which I can’t describe in detail this evening, but it’s available to anyone in the peer-reviewed scientific literature), agreed to issue the following warning:
Climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated; global CO2 emissions since 2000 have been higher than even the highest predictions, Arctic sea ice has been melting at rates much faster than predicted, and the rise in the sea level has become more rapid. Feedbacks in the climate system might lead to much more rapid climate changes. The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.3
Sounds a lot like ‘a global crisis’ to me.
So, on one side we have Mr Monckton, who has no professional qualifications in any of the relevant sciences, along with a few other politicians and the occasional dissenting geologist, and on the other the overwhelming majority of the world’s most distinguished experts on the climate sciences.
But if Mr Monckton’s scientific arguments are so specious, why has anyone ever taken them seriously? One important reason is mentioned in the ‘Climate Scientists Respond’ document (and I quote):
For those having little or no acquaintance with climate science [that means the vast majority of people], Monckton’s assertions may sound scientifically credible. But in fact his argument is not only seriously in error but is also profoundly misleading and irresponsible.
That’s the first explanation: the climate sciences involve vast amounts of complex data and so constitute a field in which it’s easy (in the words of another author of ‘Climate Scientists Respond’) ‘to cherry-pick low and high points in the record which are not representative of the bigger picture’ — and to get away with it, at least for a while.
Next, we have to look at the vested interests that are behind the whole controversy. On the side of the leading climate scientists, there’s no personal advantage to producing research that shows that human-caused global warming is a crisis. Their funding isn’t dependent on their producing such results, and I doubt whether clean energy companies are making sufficient profits yet to be paying these scientists off. On the other hand, our current fossil fuel infrastructure — from those reliable BP oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to pipelines and supertankers, coal mines and power plants — has apparently cost us over 10 trillion dollars. That infrastructure is going to be around for up to fifty more years before the capital costs will be paid off, and if we shut it down early, merely to prevent ourselves from frying the planet, many investors are going to lose vast sums of money.4
The oil and coal companies therefore funnel large amounts of money to politicians in the U.S. Congress to get them to oppose any legislation that threatens to render that 10 trillion dollar infrastructure redundant. One company in particular, Koch Industries, has funded groups opposed to taking action on global warming to the tune of 48 million dollars — ‘thinktanks’ like the Mercatus Center at George Washington University, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, where less than scrupulous scholars and scientists are well paid to promote the comfortable view that global warming is nothing to worry about.5 In short, opposing reductions of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning can be an extremely lucrative line of business.
A third factor here is the strange change that has recently taken place with respect to the status of natural scientists, who not long ago were trusted and respected by the general public. But then waves of postmodernism and deconstruction and relativism washed through the universities, and the public, tired of being dictated to by the elite, concluded that science must be merely one narrative among many competing accounts of what’s going on in the world. Here is where the honesty of most scientists, who admit that the sciences can never attain certainty, backfires — since it gives the public a reason not to trust what they say. And of course certainty is far less attainable in the field of climate sciences. To insist that we have to ‘wait for certainty’ is to say we have to wait for the impossible to happen; and to pay no heed to what are demonstrably dangerous trends is sheer stupidity.
A final, more general factor is the all-too-human desire to avoid facing unpleasant facts: why not just bury one’s head in the sand of wishful thinking and hope that they’ll go away? How delighted the Republicans must have been when Mr Monckton concluded his 2009 testimony to Congress with these stirring words:
There is no ‘climate crisis’. The correct policy response to the nonproblem of ‘global warming’ is not to cap or tax carbon dioxide emissions. It is to have the courage to do nothing.
That last line deserves to become a classic of Orwellian Newspeak. It sounds pretty good — at least until you think about it. I mean, just how much courage does it take to go on living a life of comfortable convenience, while people in the developing countries are already suffering the effects of global warming for which we are mainly responsible?
As for this evening’s motion: assuming that we have a bad case of humancaused global warming, does it constitute a global crisis? Well, the effects that we’re seeing already should be making us uneasy, since climate scientists believe they are connected with global warming, and they are already devastating human livelihoods in many places in the world. Several island nations in the south Pacific are already beginning to go under, and their populations will eventually have to make a home in some other country. And when refugees from flooded Bangladesh and drought-stricken sub-Saharan Africa start emigrating in the millions, and eco-terrorists are setting off bombs in crowded cities with the aim of attracting the attention of the governments of the richer nations, the crisis will be palpably manifest on a global level.
The root of the word ‘crisis’ is the Greek krinein, meaning ‘to decide’. And since we are now faced with making a decision on the basis of uncertainty, we need to be asking, ‘What’s the most prudent course of action, given the uncertainties and the risks?’ Shall we have ‘the courage to do nothing’ and risk all kinds of environmental, social, political, economic, and public health disasters, or shall we have the wisdom to change our ways, and take advantage of the many opportunities that are implicated in the crisis?
The motion was carried, with only three votes for Monckton and over 100 against.
___________________________
NOTES
1 ‘Climate Scientists Respond’ (September 2010), http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-scientists-respond-to-Moncktons-misinformation.html
2 ‘Climate Change: A summary of the science’, http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/
3 ‘G8+5 Academies’ Joint Statement: Climate change and the transformation of energy technologies for a low-carbon future’ (May 2009), http://royalsociety.org/Joint-Academies-statement-Climate-changeand-the-transformation-of-energy-technologies-for-a-low-carbon-future/
4 Bill McKibben, Eaarth, p. 55.
5 US oil company donated millions to climate sceptic groups, says Greenpeace. Report identifies Koch Industries giving $73m to climate sceptic groups ‘spreading inaccurate and misleading information’ John Vidal, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 March 2010.
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Tweets that mention Monckton KO’d in Recent Debate « Global Warming: Man or Myth? -- Topsy.com
October 26, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Wow.
Thank you, Professors Mandia and Parkes.
Mark Shapiro
October 26, 2010 at 3:20 pm
The funny part is that in his delirium he won’t notice that he was knocked out and will smile and tootle along his merry way espousing about the substance of his ether.
John P. Reisman (OSS Foundation)
October 26, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Nicely done – thanks for sharing, Scott!
climatesight
October 26, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Brilliant!
But has the good Lord Monckton claimed victory?
Watching the Deniers
October 26, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Thank you for posting this speech. Graham Parkes is to be congratulated on a magnificent piece of work. The power of money to corrupt, dissemble and deceive is nowhere more evident than in the campaign to frustrate action on this issue.
Philip
October 27, 2010 at 3:40 am
Yes he does! *clap, clap*
Monkton is far too charismatic with too many followers. I predict he will shake off the loss, insist it is a win and go on about his business. He needs to be challenged at every turn.
gwen
November 9, 2010 at 2:17 am
Off-topic, as usual.
Re sea level rise:
Ohio State Glaciologist Jason Box is quoted as saying, re a newly-released Arctic Ice Report Card: “sea level projections will need to rised upward.”
As mere generalist, I increasingly feel that sea level rise is going to be much faster and much higher than now thought. Am I alone in this hunch?
Hunt Janin
October 27, 2010 at 7:54 am
I hope so look up Nils Morner – clue he’s spent his life studying sea level.
Scouse Billy
October 27, 2010 at 8:04 am
And dowsing …
Anders Emretsson
October 27, 2010 at 1:11 pm
And that’s not his biggest problem…
Martin Vermeer
November 16, 2010 at 10:01 am
Hunt, I have not updated my reports lately but probably will this coming year. The general persepctive I get from the current analysis is that we have locked in 2 meters by 2100. The range is sort of looking like 2 to 5 meters.
But I must say there are still wild cards. My own dumb guess: I think a target of 4-5 meters on the mean est. with +/- 1 to 2 meters may be how the next round comes out once the slow feedbacks begin to enter the quantitative (this could take some time).
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise
John P. Reisman (OSS Foundation)
October 28, 2010 at 1:42 pm
That’s right remove dissent – your house of cards is falling around you.
Why do you think the Bilderburg Group had “Global Cooling” on its agenda at Sitges?
They decide – not you : talk about useful idiots, you’ve been had 😉
Scouse Billy
October 27, 2010 at 9:41 am
Do you have a link for the debate in its entirety?
Michael W
October 27, 2010 at 12:22 pm
@Watching the deniers: Cue Monty Python; Monckton as the black knight:
Rick
October 27, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Good folks, are there any further documentations of the event? Perhaps my Google skills are poor, but I can only find this citation when searching ‘Graham Parkes Monckton’.
Larry
October 27, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Dr. Parkes has told me that someone did videotape the event, but it was an independent film maker who is making a documentary. If that becomes available, I will post information here.
Scott Mandia
October 28, 2010 at 5:03 am
Two thoughts on above. Unsure why Hunt mention Jason Box’s arctic study, but Nils-Axel Morner was clipped (perhaps catty comment?). But Morner is ‘the’ guy on sea level rise.
With respect to John making a claim of 4+ meters for sea level rise, that’s intriguing inasmuch as the IPCC said only 3 feet in 1995, downgraded to 2’11” in 2001 and 1’5″ in 2007. Current rise is only 1 foot/century. Morner predicted 8″ and has been the closest to date.
As far as an arctic report card as shared by Hunt, let’s consider…
From the Danish Meteorological Institute: DMI 30% Arctic extent has reached its highest number for this date, exceeding 2006. “The refreeze has been very fast.” And… we learn, that Arctic 80N-90N temperatures in the melt season this year is colder than average. This was the case last year too, while earlier years in the DMI analysis period (1958-2010) hardly ever shows Arctic melt season temperatures this cold.
From JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency: Sea ice extent shows sharp growth, exceeding the 2009 rate, and almost as fast as 2005.
From the new peer-reviewed research “North American Summer Arctic front during 1948-2007.” International Journal of Climatology 30: 874-883. Based on their analysis, the two researchers report that “the position of the July Arctic front varies significantly through the period 1948-2007,” but they find that it does so “with a mean position similar to that found by Bryson (1966),” which “close similarity,” as they describe it, “is striking, given that the Bryson study was completed over 40 years ago.”
In other words, no real change for 40 years.
Recently, the University of Texas GRACE interpretations were shown to be wrong due to glacial rebound (isostasy.) A new study published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience suggested that the true melt rate might be much slower than that. A joint team of American and Dutch scientists took another look at the GRACE data and found that Greenland and West Antarctica may be melting just half as fast the earlier studies estimated. As researcher Bert Vermeersen, a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told the AFP, the earlier estimates failed to account for glacial isostatic adjustment—the rebounding of the Earth’s crust after the end of the last Ice Age. There is ‘some’ melting, but we are coming out of the Little Ice Age starting in the mid-1800s. We know that wind/currents are a significant determinant and further, recent research shows that more than half of any warming is easily chalked up to natural variability.
In April NOAA’s GIS research suggests that aerosols play a large role in Arctic warming and pointed to aerosols as the cause of recent anomalous arctic warming.
In the last two weeks, Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine, released research saying that even at concentrations below five parts per billion—aerosols, such as soot triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming versus CO2/warming causes.
Larry
October 28, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Larry,
Facts out of context don’t support your argument. First, which anyone that knows anything about climate knows is that short term fluctuations are in the bounds of natural variation and not part of the long term climate signal.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/weather-v.-climate
1. I did not make a claim. I made a dumb guess. But that dumb guess is not as dumb as you might wish to think as it contains a rounded view of the mechanisms in play that provide a tacit understanding that is hard to achieve. I’m looking at things you don’t see and therefore are not in your matrix of understanding.
2. The IPCC is probably the most conservative reporting mechanism ever created. YOu try to get 2000 scientists into consensus and you end up with he most conservative estimate.
3. Danish Met? JAXA? Ice extent is not Ice volume. Check current conditions:
http://www.ossfoundation.us/the-leading-edge/projects/environment/global-warming/current-climate-conditions/arctic
4. I googled [North American Summer Arctic front during 1948-2007.” International Journal of Climatology 30: 874-883] Could not find anything in the peer reviewed literature though? DO you have an actual ‘scientific’ cite for that. And please remember icecap.us is not a scientific body. The ice is dropping fast in the arctic, wishful thinking won’t bring it back
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/arctic-ice-melt
5. GRACE I was happy they figured that out but getting your info filtered through denialist sites won’t change the ‘actual’ melt rates and acceleration of rate. Try to get familiar with Arctic Amplification.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/arctic-polar-amplification-effect
6. NOAA? Please provide link. I’d like to look at the context vs. your interpretation.
7. Chalrlie Zender? Please provide link. Again, info filtered through denialst memes has what relevance?
Please provide links for your statements so the source can be checked and the background on the material.
Discussion: Balancing Economies
October Leading Edge: The Cuccinelli ‘Witch Hunt”
—
Fee & Dividend: Our best chance – Learn the Issue – Sign the Petition
A Climate Minute: Natural Cycle – Greenhouse Effect – Climate Science History – Arctic Ice Melt
John P. Reisman (OSS Foundation)
October 29, 2010 at 3:29 am
See:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/can-we-talk/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/history-of-arctic-and-antarctic-sea-ice-part-1/
Scott Mandia
October 29, 2010 at 5:00 am
This is not a paper, it’s just a neat piece of artwork from accumulated surveys of the Antarctic – the Wilkins Ice shelf. Look at the 50 year difference 1947-97, then the 12 year difference, 1997-2009.
I don’t know just how many glaciers feed in to this area, but if this retreat continues at the current accelerating rate, a whole heap of landbased ice is going to get a much faster smoother path to the sea.
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/02/graph-of-day-ice-shelf-retreat-in.html
As for the Arctic, I think the old ideas about soot, air temperature, albedo and the rest are going to be overwhelmed by the evidence about heated ocean waters. Not looking forward to the next big el Nino, the flush of much warmer water from the Pacific into the Arctic basin a few months later will just wash away the last pathetic remnants of summer ice.
adelady
November 10, 2010 at 1:25 am
Walt’s analysis is great. He was the review scientist on my Arctic video and I think that sums up the difference between ice extent and ice volume very well
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/arctic-ice-melt
John P. Reisman (OSS Foundation)
October 29, 2010 at 6:06 am
[…] Breathtaking stuff. Manages to ignore the evidence, downplay the danger, and blame the Russians, all in one sentence. It’s the sort of claim Monckton can make in a debate, leaving his opponents wondering whether they should unpack the falsehoods or ignore them. But such sophistry didn’t work for the prolix peer when he took part in a debate with Graham Parkes, professor of philosophy and head of the school of sociology and philosophy for University College Cork, at the beginning of October. Scott Mandia has Parkes’ full speech here. […]
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October 29, 2010 at 6:24 pm
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Is it on You Tube? I WANT to SEE this!! It is about time someone handed him his ass!
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November 9, 2010 at 2:13 am
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