A former adviser to Margaret Thatcher is really peeved about how he was portrayed in a recent BBC program on global climate change. The BBC denies that “Earth: The Climate Wars” had an alarmist viewpoint. The show was billed as a look at both viewpoints on the issue.
Lord Monckton, 56, a former journalist and Cambridge graduate, says scientific data shows the world is cooler today than in the Middle Ages.
He appeared alongside other sceptics including distinguished Florida-based meteorologist Professor Fred Singer, John Christy, a climate change expert and adviser to the U.S. government and the climatologist Dr Patrick Michaels, of the University of Virginia.
All their interviews, he claims, were heavily cut so that they appeared as personal views.
‘We do not dispute that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we do dispute its effects’, he said. ‘The data shows that 2008 is the same temperature as 1980 and that the effects of these changes in the atmosphere are not negative but more likely to be beneficial.’Lord Monckton played a key role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court in October 2007 in an effort to prevent Al Gore’s film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, from being shown in English schools.
Lord Monckton is naive. He should know by now that scientists who conclude the jury is still out about man’s influence on climate change are routinely belittled. Just ask Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Spencer recently spoke to a John Locke Foundation luncheon audience on this very issue. You can watch his speech here.
