Q&A: "Btw, do you know who is funding the Monckton-Plimer road-show?"

Interesting question.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/high-priest-of-the-sceptics-lured-to-tour/story-e6frg6n6-1225821410477

http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2010/01/lord-moncktons-australian-lecture-tour-dates

If I were Smit & Smeed I would not want Monckton's visit to be seen as a dog & pony show put on by corporates, so I'd go to some trouble to hide any donations from them. And if it is corporate dog and pony show they have been successful so far, because it sure doesn't look like it.

To me the most interesting titbit from those links is Monckton is charging them $20K for the four weeks of his time - above and beyond expenses of course. I wondered what he did for a living, and I guess that goes some way to answering the question. As Hamilton pointed out in his Crikey article, Monckton makes a habit of taking contrarian positions on contentious topics. I guess if your main talent is public speaking this is one way of getting paid for it.

Q%A and Jedimaster, google "Funding Monckton Australia",(tricky query there, how did you both miss that, or did you not try?) you will get the press release with the names of the 2 retired gentlemen who have put up the funding.

Ozandy will now try to link them to the fossil fuel industry, another conspiracy theorist.

They are

Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
Noosaville Qld. 4566
07 5473 0475
case.smit@gmail.com

John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ
Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
07 5474 8928
johnsmeed@adna.com.au

They put up some money and the rest is to come from donations, not Big Oil, not evil corporations, just some concerned citizens who are skeptical and decided to do something about it.

Like the academics who got Al Gore out to speak at their funfest in Melbourne last year (who funded that eh, must have cost a bomb, Al is not cheap! Was big green involved, which eco clubs funded it, I heard some big doners got to meet the man himself! They had an AGW clinic and workshop, clearly conspiring to deliver the world to a UN overlord - you guys crack me up with your conspiracies and I can only laugh when I see you all try to justify the way you behave)

Geoff, Q&A makes a number of allegations, none of which are borne out by the material that we have. Nowhere in the court documents is Carter quoted as saying that global warming stopped in 1998. All of that is a red-herring.

The court documents refer to Carter's critique of the Stern Report, and it is the President of the Tribunal who makes the comments about the temperature increases, which he bases on IPCC4, not Carter.

Now I accept that Q&A has no expertise in law or science so it's possible that he made his claim innocently. However, it stops being innocent if when his error is pointed out he fails to admit it.

Can you point me to the place where Carter says that global warming stopped in 1998? My understanding of his case is that climate changes and that current climate fluctuations are well within what we might expect from the historical record.

He appears to be well-aware of the dangers of cherry-picking as you can see if you look at this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI. In fact, I'd say that he would claim that you are cherry-picking.

Are you going to retract your claim that "Either he's incompetent, or he's blinded by his cause, or he's flat-out dishonest. Sorry, but that's the straightforward conclusion," or do you have a evidence to support your claims of fact?

Amicus
Thank you for that information re Monckton’s sponsors. I am interested to note that you have more confidence in Google than you do in Wikipedia. They seem to have made a profitable investment- if they are profit sharing.

Monckton’s fees seem to be quite modest by today’s standards for entertainment celebrities. Most scientists are lucky if they can get their airfares paid to international conferences if they are keynote speakers.

I am also pleased that the Editor got onto the earlier version of your blog pretty quickly- before I could respond to your offensive smears. I would assess that it was very close to the legal edge. It adds one more data point to my previous analysis of this debate- this time I saw the cherry before Graham picked it.

As for my “motives”- nothing sinister, as you seem to suggest. From more than forty five years of wide experience, I have seen it all come and go many times. I simply make decisions based on the probable risk/return ratios derived from the data- sometimes with a moral bias from my Judeo-Christian heritage. In this case the data indicates that AGW is more probable than any other explanation. No amount of personal abuse adds any useful data to either side of what seems, probably, a very important debate

Apologies all.

Whilst Bob Carter has claimed to be an expert witness, he was not called in the Xstrata case (although his graph appears to have been used).

His claim that global warming stopped in 1998 is well documented - just google:

"bob carter" + "global warming stopped in 1998"

Graham is half right, I have no expertise in law.

_______

Thanks rstuart and Amicus (no, I didn't bother) re: funding the road show. I wonder if Gina in WA is contributing too?

The simple fact is that global warming stopped in 1998 after which temperatures plateaued until 2001. Cooling started in 2002.

It is no wonder that it is so difficult to get facts straight on this topic, with the unrelenting efforts of the IPCC, and the Hadley gang working to present lies, and to obscure the truth.

Sites like Wikipedia will not allow a truthful article on global warming to remain for more than a few minutes. It still has an entry on Naiomi Oreskes ridiculous finding on the non existent "consensus".

I outlined the difficulties faced by anyone seeking the truth here:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9947#160487

Carter is one of the few honest sources in this sorry mess, and he is targeted by people, many of whom are innocently manipulated by those seeking to commit the greatest fraud in history, the IPCC and Al Gore.

Even Google was manipulated in the immediate aftermath of the release of the Hadley emails. I could not believe my eyes when, on googling “climategate” the top result was the Realclimate, run by one of the Hadley perpetrators, Mann, of “hockey stick” infamy. Nothing on the Realclimate site gives genuine truthful information about climate or the emails.

The journalist who brought about correction of this travesty, was unable to obtain any information from Google, about how such an interference with the search parameters came about, or even an admission that it had happened.

The terrifying part is the reach of these miscreants, particularly the interference with the data from the sattelites, so that the drop in global temperature, at the time when greatest human output of emissions is alleged, is obscured, and a false warming, for some of the years, subsequent to 1998, is shown.