04-12-2009, 03:56 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher..._Brenchley
In 1979 Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings.[2] Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups.[3] He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street.[2] Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982, where he worked until 1986 as a special advisor on economic matters....
Monckton is a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.
Monckton is critical of the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change and the stated scope of it, which he regards as a controversy catalyzed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round" following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.[8] He has expressed doubt about the reality of global warming in a number of newspaper articles and papers. He has been described in some quarters as a "former science adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a world-renowned scholar."[9] However, his credentials as a commentator on climate change have been questioned by some commentators. James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore note in their book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that Monckton has "no training whatsoever in science", and criticize his asserted credentials as "unfounded self-promotion."[10] The Daily Telegraph has described him as "a former economic adviser".[4]
In two Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton disputed whether global warming is man-made, suggested that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticized the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, he has criticized the IPCC's interpretation of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the science in the IPCC reports has misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming. In an apparent reference to claims made by Gavin Menzies, he further stated "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."[11]
The British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has criticized Monckton's arguments, labelling them "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish."[12] In response, Monckton argued that he "got the science right", claiming that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics".[13]
In response to the U.K. government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he has argued that the review's recommendation to invest 1% of global GDP in climate change mitigation would be ineffective, as would the introduction of carbon taxes and emissions trading as a means of curbing carbon emissions. He has proposed instead that the best solution should be to "go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation."[14]
In February 2007, he published a critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change.[15] His calculations of climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been published in the Quarterly Economic Bulletin.[16]
Monckton played a key role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense" and had played a direct role in the litigation against the British government.[17] He was also reported to have funded the distribution to schools of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film.[18]
In March 2007, Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President did not respond.[8][19] The Science and Public Policy Institute provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, titled Apocalypse?, No!, described as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science."[18] The film includes footage of Monckton giving a Gore-style presentation given on 8 October 2007 at the Cambridge Union in which he asserted that Gore and the IPCC had systematically falsified and exaggerated the evidence for global warming.[18][20]
During the autumn of 2009, Monckton embarked on a tour of North America to campaign against the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. His warning that US President Barack Obama intended to sign a treaty at the conference which would "impose a communist world government on the world" was picked up by numerous commentators on the American right and "rocketed around the fringe" of right-wing websites, prompting Glenn Beck to invite him on his radio show again. Writing in Salon, Alex Koppelman criticized Monckton's assertions about the conference's framework for negotiation as being "woefully inaccurate. And that's a nice way of putting it." [21][22] The St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact.com described his assertions as "not only unsupported but preposterous" and awarded him a special rating of "britches on fire".[23] Ethan Baron of the Canadian newspaper The Province criticized Monckton's assertions as the product of a "whacked-out, far-right ideology, combined with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet."[24]
In 1979 Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings.[2] Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups.[3] He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street.[2] Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982, where he worked until 1986 as a special advisor on economic matters....
Monckton is a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.
Monckton is critical of the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change and the stated scope of it, which he regards as a controversy catalyzed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round" following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.[8] He has expressed doubt about the reality of global warming in a number of newspaper articles and papers. He has been described in some quarters as a "former science adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a world-renowned scholar."[9] However, his credentials as a commentator on climate change have been questioned by some commentators. James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore note in their book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that Monckton has "no training whatsoever in science", and criticize his asserted credentials as "unfounded self-promotion."[10] The Daily Telegraph has described him as "a former economic adviser".[4]
In two Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton disputed whether global warming is man-made, suggested that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticized the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, he has criticized the IPCC's interpretation of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the science in the IPCC reports has misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming. In an apparent reference to claims made by Gavin Menzies, he further stated "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."[11]
The British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has criticized Monckton's arguments, labelling them "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish."[12] In response, Monckton argued that he "got the science right", claiming that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics".[13]
In response to the U.K. government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he has argued that the review's recommendation to invest 1% of global GDP in climate change mitigation would be ineffective, as would the introduction of carbon taxes and emissions trading as a means of curbing carbon emissions. He has proposed instead that the best solution should be to "go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation."[14]
In February 2007, he published a critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change.[15] His calculations of climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been published in the Quarterly Economic Bulletin.[16]
Monckton played a key role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense" and had played a direct role in the litigation against the British government.[17] He was also reported to have funded the distribution to schools of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film.[18]
In March 2007, Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President did not respond.[8][19] The Science and Public Policy Institute provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, titled Apocalypse?, No!, described as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science."[18] The film includes footage of Monckton giving a Gore-style presentation given on 8 October 2007 at the Cambridge Union in which he asserted that Gore and the IPCC had systematically falsified and exaggerated the evidence for global warming.[18][20]
During the autumn of 2009, Monckton embarked on a tour of North America to campaign against the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. His warning that US President Barack Obama intended to sign a treaty at the conference which would "impose a communist world government on the world" was picked up by numerous commentators on the American right and "rocketed around the fringe" of right-wing websites, prompting Glenn Beck to invite him on his radio show again. Writing in Salon, Alex Koppelman criticized Monckton's assertions about the conference's framework for negotiation as being "woefully inaccurate. And that's a nice way of putting it." [21][22] The St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact.com described his assertions as "not only unsupported but preposterous" and awarded him a special rating of "britches on fire".[23] Ethan Baron of the Canadian newspaper The Province criticized Monckton's assertions as the product of a "whacked-out, far-right ideology, combined with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet."[24]
"History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." --James Madison