Monday 16 April 2007

Who's Christopher Monckton?

For those who don't know the chap who wants to debate Al Gore (about which debate I've blogged here and here), Lubos Motl has chapter, verse, and links to most of Christopher Monckton's writing on the subject, which is superb -- as Free Radical readers will already know.
[Monckton, left] has ... decided to dedicate a lot of time to a widely discussed "scientific problem" and to look at the evidence behind the popular theory of the so-called "global warming" a bit more carefully... His conclusions more or less mimic the conclusions of a vast majority of those people whom I know and whose IQ exceeds 120, who are able to think critically and apolitically, and who have looked at the technical aspects of this whole set of ideas: the "global warming" paradigm is based on roughly 10 hypotheses about the climate and its interaction with the humankind. For the policies derived from these hypotheses to be wise, more or less all of these hypotheses must be simultaneously satisfied.

However, one half of these hypotheses are almost certainly untrue, one third of them is very unlikely, and the rest is unproven.
Read on for a good summary by Lubos, and if you haven't seen them before, some links to some excellent debunking of the warmist litany by Christopher Monckton.

1 comment:

Matt Burgess said...

Monckton has written some interesting stuff. I browsed through a response to him by Al Gore, who rather hilariously (and smugly) accuses Monckton of inaccuracies and misrepresentation in a newspaper column by Monckton. Pot. Kettle. Black. Monckton counters fairly convincingly, though I would like to go to the sources to see who is doing the most spinning in citing authoritative sources.

At one point Monckton pulls out an equation by Boltzmann to walk us through the relationship between energy received per square meter and atmospheric temperature. At that point my "creationist radar" came on - possibly a false alarm - meaning it all looked a bit simple and obvious to have been mis-specified by scientists. Monckton is saying pro-warming scientists have tripled the temperate change for any given change in forcing, which seems a bit obvious. So I am suspicious, but will keep reading.