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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Bio: Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Date:  December 3, 2011
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Topic category:  Climate/Climate Change/Weather

It.  Isn't.  Happening.

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. Shale gas? That would solve everything. Hundreds of years’ global supply. No more peak oil. Low carbon footprint. Ban it quick.

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. Shale gas? That would solve everything. Hundreds of years’ global supply. No more peak oil. Low carbon footprint. Ban it quick.

I find myself with CFACT in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. At a recent dinner for the inconvenient economist Bjorn Lomborg in London, I first uttered the three fateful words that now fill the hearts of the world’s governing climate racketeers with dread.

“It. Isn’t. Happening.”

When I plopped these three plump pebbles into the conversation, there was a ripple of aghast silence. It was as though I’d perpetrated what the Professor of Greek at Cambridge used to call a “gaseous halation” in front of the Queen.

Most of the diners were climate skeptics. But they were making a bundle out of it. The skeptics had almost as much of a direct, cash vested interest in flogging the long-dead horse of climatic apocalypse as the prophets and profiteers of climate doom.

It just wasn’t the done thing to poop on the party by pointing out that every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit, when the BBC’s chief environmental campaigner – er, “correspondent” – put to him a question I’d drafted – that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. Oops! The UN’s models had not predicted that.

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year, when Al Gore launched his Titanic “Climate Unreality” project. The ice did not oblige. Gore hit a berg that somehow hadn’t melted. His project sank. Even his fellow fortune-hunters in the Green[back] movement now disown his bleating attribution of every recent natural disaster to “global warming”.

Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. The fossils on the Supreme Court said so (but they’ve been extinct for years). Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. Most of the summit glacier had gone by 1936, when Hemingway wrote The Snows. “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss: NASA says the region has been cooling for 30 years. The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. Gee wow golly gosh! Take to the boats!

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children.

The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace.

Lord Reith, the BBC’s first chairman, laying the foundation-stone of what is now the abomination of desolation called Harlow New Town, was heard to mutter, “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to have it!”

So it will be with the Marxists’ wet dream that is global totalitarian dictatorship. You’re not going to like it. But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

Lord Monckton in the countryside just outside Durban, South Africa.
Lord Monckton in the countryside just outside Durban, South Africa.

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

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Biography - Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Christopher, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986, and gave policy advice on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics (his work led to his appointment as the youngest Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic), psephological modeling (predicting the result of the 1983 General Election to within one seat), embryological research, hydrogeology (leading to the award of major financial assistance to a Commonwealth country for the construction of a very successful hydroelectric scheme), public-service investment analysis (leading to savings of tens of billions of pounds), public welfare modeling (his model of the UK tax and benefit system was, at the time, more detailed than the Treasury's economic model, and led to a major simplification of the housing benefit system), and epidemiological analysis.

On leaving 10 Downing Street, he established a successful specialist consultancy company, giving technical advice to corporations and governments. His two articles in the Sunday Telegraph late in 2006 debunking the climate-change "consensus" received more hits to the newspaper's website than any other in the paper's history: the volume of hits caused the link to crash.

His contribution to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 - the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise - earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.

He has lectured at university physics departments on the quantification of climate sensitivity, on which he is widely recognized as an expert, and his limpid analysis of the climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of Roger Pielke, Sr.

His lecture to undergraduates at the Cambridge Union Society on climate change has been released by http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ (SPPI) as Apocalypse? NO!, a full-length feature movie on high-definition DVD (available from http://www.greatswindle.com). Apocalypse? NO! been described by Professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, as the best film ever made on climate change.


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