Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:11:41 +1000WeeblyMon, 28 Oct 2024 01:01:12 GMThttp://www.stevebishop.net/how-wrong-can-viscount-monckton-and-the-heartland-institute-be/viscount-monckton-the-donald-trump-of-climate-science-denialismNotorious climate science denier Viscount Christopher Monckton couldn't help himself.

While boasting on a website recently that a lecture he gave at Oxford University had been viewed 200,000 times he told a Trumpian lie - that the world is cooler today than temperatures recorded in the USA and elsewhere about a century ago.

As with Trump, a multitude of people believe his lies, to the detriment of support for policies to reach net zero in order to stop the planet roasting.

It is important to expose Monckton as a fraud because he has fooled many institutions into listening to his lies. They include, he says, testifying "four times before the U.S. Congress and has spoken at United Nations conferences in Bali, Bonn, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Rio, and Qatar."

And he claims he briefed Tony Abbott when he was Opposition Leader.

In an attempt to counter scientific measurements that show man-made climate change is responsible for record high temperatures this century, this Lord of the Lies alleged in a recent article in Climate Depot, an American rightwing, climate science-denying website, that the USA was warmer about a century ago.

He referred in the article to the "...dustbowl years of the 1920s-1930s, when North America (to name but one region) was warmer than today."

Is there any evidence to support such an absurd claim?

United States’ climate records are kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) through climate.gov, which show the frightening pace of global heating, demonstrated by the fact that 43 of the 48 USA contiguous states have all had their hottest 12-month periods in the 17 years since since 2007.

Only Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming had their hottest 12-month periods in the last century, all in the 1930s, which doesn't mean much because Nebraska also had its coldest year two years after its hottest. New Hampshire also had its coldest year in the "dustbowl years".

So what does Monckton base his furphy on?

He may have believed a Sky News lie that the USA's hottest years were in the 1930s.

Or he may have been parrotting an article in a major purveyor of climate fiction, the Heartland Institute which claims "The Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s retain the title of hottest decade in recorded history..."

Monckton is a policy advisor to the institute.

There is no doubt that a 1936 North American heat wave was spectacular. And Skeptical Science reports: "1934 used to be the hottest year on record in the USA." But accoring to the Staista website, even in the USA it's now an "also ran" in 10th place.

The only set of statistics which bear any resemblance to Monckton's fake news is for one-off freak temperature extremes in some states.

In other words, these high temperatures do not refer to the hottest years in states, nor months nor even weeks but merely to one temperature recorded at just one weather station in each state on one day at a certain time.

As the NOAA website makes clear, “The records are for single-station or single-point phenomena (i.e., not regional or statewide averages).”

These freak peaks occurred in 25 of the states between 1925 and 1936, with 11 of them being in the July 1936 heat wave.

But 10 states had their coldest days on record in the 30s - California, Idaho (-60F first recorded in 1933), Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming.
Just one state, Idaho (1934), had its hottest year on record in the same year in which its highest temperature was recorded.

The official statistics for each state’s hottest years are plainly available on the NOAA website.

​How ludicrous is Monckton's claim?

It is a very simple task to check the facts. NOAA boasts: "Both the temperature data record and NOAA’s analyses of the temperature data have been peer-reviewed by other, independent teams of scientists in the U.S. and internationally. No reasons have been found to question the integrity or the quality of the GHCN [Global Historical Climatology Network] dataset."

2012 became the hottest year recorded in the contiguous USA, beating the previous hottest, 1998. 2015 became the second hottest in the US, beaten then by 2016. By 2021 official statistics revealed: "The six warmest years on record have all occurred since 2012."

And on a global basis, Monckton is hopelessly wrong in claiming North America was warmer about 100 years ago.

climate.gov reports: "The 10 warmest years in the 174-year record have all occurred during the last decade (2014–2023). Of note, the year 2005, which was the first year to set a new global temperature record in the 21st century, is now the 12th-warmest year on record."

If Monckton had any climate credibility he would have performed what he himself has described as checking "meticulously and boringly", which is exactly what I did. Failing to do so, Monckton said, is propaganda.

So here is the result of the maths to calculate the average temperatures of the 1920s and 30s in the USA compared with the last full decade, using the Statista website which has the average temperature for all of the years involved.

Average temperature for the 1920s in the USA was 51.78F, for the 1930s it was 52.64F. The decade to 2023 was 53.9F - plainly hotter now than in the 20s and 30s.

Another quote from Monckton: "Just plucking figures out of the air...is contemptible."

Using Monckton's own assessments, it would seem legitimate, on the basis of the evidence, to label his dustbowl claim "contemptible propaganda".

]]>Thu, 01 Aug 2024 03:06:42 GMThttp://www.stevebishop.net/how-wrong-can-viscount-monckton-and-the-heartland-institute-be/how-wrong-can-viscount-monckton-and-the-heartland-institute-be​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" on Australia’s Macquarie Media: “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 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."

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 follwing 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".

But satellite images prove this is completely untrue. And a World Wide Fund for Nature project found: " Sixty-seven percent 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 percent since the Little Ice Age maximum between 400-700 years ago."

And 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].”

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 US Congress, Monckton alleged: "The Sahara is greening." 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 Decembeer 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".

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 uneqivocal 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$4million 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 "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 which receive funding from fossil fuel interests.or from such organisations which 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.

*Monckton's claim is at 11.56 into interview.]]>