Year 4, Month 4, Day 1: A Fool

The Otago Daily Times (NZ) notes the arrival of noted upper-class twit Lord Monckton…only they refer to him as a “skeptic,” which is a leftover bit of stupid that’s grown enough mold to solve mazes on its own.

A leading global warming skeptic, Lord Christopher Monckton, will speak in Dunedin next month. His visit is part of a national ”Climate Freedom Tour” and will include a lunch and an evening function on April 23.

Lord Monckton is a British politician, public speaker, hereditary peer and former newspaper editor.

Formerly a member of the Conservative Party, he worked for Margaret Thatcher’s Number 10 Policy Unit during the 1980s.

In recent years, he has received publicity for holding sceptical views about man-made climate change and has authored more than 100 papers on the climate issue. Dunedin organiser Jock Allison, of the New Zealand Science Coalition, said Lord Monckton was an entertaining speaker with different views from the mainstream on climate change.

Entertaining. March 20:

Lord Christopher Monckton is many things, as evidenced by his description in your recent article as “British politician, public speaker, hereditary peer and former newspaper editor” — but one thing he is not is a climate scientist. None of those four identifying phrases give his opinions on the phenomena of global climate change any credibility whatsoever. While his abilities as an “entertaining speaker” offer a feeble rationale for inviting him to speak under the auspices of the New Zealand Science Coalition, from the perspective of anyone who is sensitive to questions of scientific truth, his presence is an affront to genuine scientists and genuine science.

Would a proponent of the medieval theory of “humours” be asked to speak to a medical association, and described as an “infection skeptic”? Would a flat-Earther get an invitation to address a geological society and be billed as a “spherical skeptic”? Mr. Monckton’s assertions about global climate change have been repeatedly debunked; put simply, he’s an unscientific fraud, and describing him as a “skeptic” is doing a disservice to skeptics everywhere.

Warren Senders