Despite Monckton's climate denial, the world is still burning

Viscount Christopher Monckton has become notorious for his climate change denial, despite scientific evidence proving him wrong time and again. Steve Bishop writes.

CLIMBERS ON Scotland’s Ben Nevis this summer may come across the tragic figure of a man labelled as one of the world’s most notorious climate science deniers searching for signs of a non-existent glacier.

In September 2014 and again in October 2017, Viscount Christopher Monckton claimed on Nights With Steve Price:

“In Ben Nevis now we have a glacier beginning to form for the first time in 9,000 years.”

Despite scientific measurements demonstrating record heating, Monckton had alleged in 2014 that there had been “18 years without any global warming at all” and had said in evidence to the UK Parliament's Energy and Climate Change Committee in 2013:

‘...global cooling is more likely than warming in the next five to ten years.’

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Viscount Christopher Monckton, who describes climate science as a ‘monstrous hoax’, has taken his bandwagon of lies around the world on lecture tours.

So climate scientists could have been forgiven a sense of unbridled schadenfreude when in 2017, global warming resulted in Ben Nevis being completely free of snow and ice even as Monckton made his glacier assertion.

This year, I couldn’t resist emailing him to point out that in the summers of 2018, 21, 22 and 23, soaring temperatures had again resulted in all snow and ice on Ben Nevis melting and asking him if he still maintained a glacier was forming.

Instead of admitting the obvious, the Viscount said:

‘I shall next visit the summit of Beinn Nibheis [sic] this summer and will see whether there is any sign of it.’

It’s not just the Viscount who clings to such climate idiocy.

Tellingly, the Heartland Institute, named by The Economist in 2012 as‘the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change...’, clings to Monckton as a policy advisor.

This is despite Monckton making false statements about climate change such as in the following examples.

In a 2009 lecture about the need for truth in the climate change debate, he told the audience he would present only “facts” and “settled science” before alleging the Himalayan glaciers were “showing no particular change in 200 years”.

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But satellite images prove this is completely untrue.

And a World Wide Fund for Nature project found:

‘Sixty-seven per cent of glaciers are retreating at a startling rate in the Himalayas...’

A Yale study reports:

‘New research suggests that the area of Himalayan glaciers has shrunk by 40 per cent since the Little Ice Age maximum between 400-700 years ago...’

Another report says melting has doubled since the turn of the century, with more than a quarter of all ice lost over the last four decades.

In 2013, Monckton asked:

‘If you happen to know of a small Pacific Island that’s getting worried by the propaganda, tell them the good news [that there’s no warming].’

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The Viscount would not be welcomed with his “good news” on the islands of Tegua, Tebunginako and Serua which are among many islands that are disappearing.

Monckton alleged the threat of damage to the Great Barrier Reef was imaginary and that:

“The Barrier Reef Authority has established that sea temperatures in the region of the Reef have not changed at all over the last 30 years.”

In fact, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority reports:

‘...the Great Barrier Reef warming by 0.8 degrees Celsius [since 1910].’

In New Zealand, Monckton claimed:

“In Greenland, the ice did not melt 8,000 years ago and it isn't melting today.”

Not only is it melting but a study published in Nature shows the rate is unmatched in the last 12,000 years and is accelerating. Satellite images emphasise the predicament.

In an address to the U.S. Congress, Monckton alleged:

“The Sahara is greening.”

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In fact, evidence demonstrates the Sahara is expanding at a great rate.

Despite these and many more such claims, the Institute, which for years has created many of the world’s anti-climate science myths, is still featuring Monckton as a climate expert.

In December 2021, the Institute featured him talking down to Prince Charles and “warning” him to stop talking about the climate crisis and telling the future king:

“...you lack either the intellect or the ability to be dispassionate [about the topic].”

It even used him to deliver his eccentric views as a keynote speaker at its international conference on climate change last year.

In this speech, Monckton referred to predictions by scientists of increases in extreme weather leading to more severe wildfires.

But, he said:

“They are not a problem.”

However, Carbonbrief.org reports that in North America:

‘Today, wildfires are burning more than twice the area than in the 1980s and 1990s.’

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In extolling the Viscount on its website, the Institute tells how:

‘A speech by Lord Monckton to 1,000 citizens of St Paul Minnesota in October 2009, in which he drew public attention to a then little-known draft plan by the U.N. to establish an unelected world government at the (now-failed) climate summit at Copenhagen in December 2009, received 1,000,000 YouTube hits in a week — thought to be the fastest-ever YouTube platinum for a political speech.’

What the Heartland Institute fails to admit is that the draft treaty made no mention of an “unelected world government”.

And it ignores Monckton's unequivocal claim:

“They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.”

Readers may have noticed that 15 years later, we do not have a communist world government.

Despite its shortcomings, the institute has a revenue of about US$4 million (AU$6.9 million) a year.

In 2012, documents acquired from the Heartland Institute revealed climate science denier Professor Bob Carter was paid a monthly fee of US$1,667 (AU$2,537) as part of a program to pay ‘high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message’.

The Institute pays authors and contributors thousands of dollars for their contributions to its Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) conference reports.

Viscount Monckton has been a keynote speaker at several NIPCC conferences.

I asked him:

‘Are you, or have you been, in receipt of payments or other benefits from the Heartland Institute, fossil fuel companies, think tanks or any organisation that receives funding from fossil fuel interests or from such organisations that might hide such donations by refusing to reveal the sources of their funding?’

He did not respond.

You be the judge of how wrong the Viscount and the Institute are.