In a new low for the Australian media, today’s Syndey Morning Herald Online describes climate change skeptic/denier Christopher Monckton as a British Scientist. Christopher Monckton, also known as ‘Lord Monckton’ or ’3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley’ does not have any science qualifications, nor has he published in peer reviewed scientific journals. He is, however, British, one thing the SMH subeditors did get right.
As well as not believing climate change science, he also told a US audience that at Copenhagen the US government will sign a treaty (which he has read) that will create a world government and “at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so my friends who founded it left within a year, because they’d captured it; now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.”
While this makes for entertaining prose, this does not further anyone’s understanding of the climate debate, except to illustrate the lunacy of some of the opponents of action on climate change.
Monkton, who would be a nobody if he wasn’t such a lunatic, is getting a huge amount of media attention in the Australian media. At the same time, people who have expertise on climate change and its mitigation do not get a mention in the media. For example, Ross Garnaut, who put together a comprehensive report on climate policy for the Australian Government in 2008, gave a speech today. In it he made recommendations on what target the Australian Government should submit as part of the Copenhagen Accord, commented on the role of the UNFCCC, and described the proposal from the Greens for an interim carbon tax as a “politically practical way forward”. None of this has yet been mentioned in the Australian media, except for Carbon + Environment Daily, which is only available to people who pay $729 for an annual subscription.
Update: To its credit, The Sydney Morning Herald has since published Garnaut’s speech in its Tuesday edition. It has also updated the AAP article on Monckton with a more accurate headline (that no longer describes him as a scientist).
January 30, 2010 at 12:58 am
It appears to me as if one certain thing humanity cannot keep doing much longer is the very same thing we are so adamantly and foolishly doing now as the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us choose to recklessly speed up the ever increasing, seemingly endless growth of the global economy as well as to deceptively manipulate human beings into going along with a conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and unreserved overpopulation agenda.
If we keep doing what we are doing now and the human community keeps getting what it is getting now, I fear that sooner rather than later everything we are led to believe we are protecting and preserving will be ruined. In the not-too-distant future a distinct probability could exist that one of two colossal calamities will occur. The wanton dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort unless, of course, the world’s ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy (the modern “economic colossus”) continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point humanity’s runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Could we talk about the need for a new vision for life on Earth?
Months ago Andy Revkin of the NYTimes and the Dot Earth community asked the question, “What does humanity do when we grow up?” Dr. Joel Cohen has explained elsewhere how humanity is currently in an adolescent phase of its development and is moving toward maturity. Other experts have suggested that the behavior of people in many places is even more primitive, in the sense of being less grown-up than adolescents and more nearly infantile.
Perhaps another way of coming up with a new vision would be to ask the question, “What might a human world look like when full grown, mature human beings with feet of clay design, construct and organize a new world order in the future?”
February 6, 2010 at 6:30 pm
The ABC (and the Australian, of course) was also describing him as a ‘mathematician’. As far as I can tell, he has no mathematics qualifications.
It’s amazing how much coverage he’s getting…