Great Is Truth; and Mighty Above All Things
Great Is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things
Keynote address to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change
Environment > Climate: Realists
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Written By: Lord Christopher Monckton
Publication date: 03/12/2009
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, delivered the closing keynote address at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, praising those in attendance for holding fast to their scientific ethics and speaking truth to power.
Where are they all today, those bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency--those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds?
The main message of this conference to the bed-wetters is this. Stop telling lies. You are fooling fewer and fewer of us. However many lies are uttered, the scientific truth remains unalterable.
The Forces of Darkness, with their “global warming” chimera, came perilously close to ending the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. They almost ushered in a new Dark Age. Yet they have failed. Why? They have failed because you, here, have had the courage to face them down, to confront their falsehoods, and to nail their lies.
The Age of Light and Reason shall not die. Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle to that last goodnight: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” You have not raged in vain. The world is not cooking: It is cooling. Every opinion poll--even those conducted by the bed-wetters themselves--shows that global public opinion is cooling as fast as the global climate.
In one recent survey, “global warming” came at the very bottom of a list of political and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem. “Global warming” is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.
We, the people, are no longer afraid of “global warming.” We are fed up to the back teeth of hearing about it. We are bored by it. And the bed-wetters know it. Their ever-more-outlandish predictions are a measure of their blind panic. The Dr. Strangelove of NASA, in the latest of a series of ever-more-desperate attempts to flog the dead horse of climatic apocalypse, recently wrote that sea level is about to rise by 246 feet, “und anyvun zat disagrees viz me vill be arrested und put on trial for high crimes against humanidy und nature.”
When Hansen’s political ally and financial beneficiary Al Gore had only predicted one-twelfth that amount of imminent sea-level rise, Mr. Justice Burton said in the London High Court, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.” But then, Al Gore knew that all along. In 2005, the year he said sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet, he bought a $4 million condo in the St. Regis tower, San Francisco--just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf. The only danger to sea level is from all those bed-wetters.
Now, if we’re going to exaggerate, let’s exaggerate properly. Sea level is going to rise not by Gore’s 20 feet, not by Hansen’s 246 feet, but by 2,640 feet. Half a mile. You heard it here first. There goes Andy Revkin of The New York Times, dashing to the telephone to tell them to hold the front page.
All lands not submerged beneath the inexorably rising waves will bake and wither under permanent year-‘round drought. Yea, and the very same lands will smother and drown under permanent year-‘round floods. And plagues of locusts. And pestilences. And famines. And brimstone and fire. And boils and pustules, yea, verily, and other things that pullulate and fester and sound nasty enough to get big headlines and bigger research grants. (I see now why these bed-wetters exaggerate on such an outrageous scale. It’s a lot of fun.)
Dr. Strangelove has published a peer-reviewed paper--so it must be true--saying 60 percent of all species will soon be flung into extinction. It won’t be 60 percent. It will be 326 percent. Whaddaya mean, we can’t extinguish more than 100 percent? You heard the U.S. President. Yes We Can. How do we know we can? Because the IPCC says.
“Because the IPCC says.” That pathetic phrase is nothing less than an instrument of political abdication on the part of our democratically elected leaders. There was once an androgynous crooner who called himself “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.” In Britain, Her Majesty’s Opposition, “The Party Formerly Known As Conservative,” has stated, in the person of its chief of policy: “We cannot question what the scientists say.” Yes we can.
When the Founding Fathers of this great nation met in that hot summer long ago in the City of Brotherly Love to craft the noble Constitution of the United States, they were building their great nation upon the solid foundation of your Declaration of Independence. Independence! This winter, if the United States signs up to the Treaty of Copenhagen, her independence--and our freedom--will be gone forever. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would be turning in his grave.
Last year the President of the Czech Republic told this Conference, “It’s not about climatology--it’s about freedom.” This year the President of the European Union told us the same. Two statesmen with one message.
Let me ask you this question--and it is not a rhetorical question, I want to hear your answer loud and clear. Do we want to be governed not by representatives whom we elect and hold to account, but by the technocratic-centralist wannabe-world-government of the IPCC?
Do we want to pay a single red cent more of our taxes to fund the “global warming” boondoggle?
Are we terrified by the spectre of sea level rising 246 feet?
Do we expect sea level to rise this century by more than about 1 foot?
Do we want to see the bed-wetting liars, hucksters, shysters, fraudsters, and racketeers ever-more-extravagantly rewarded with honors and prizes for their ever-more-extravagant falsehoods, fables, and fictions?
Do we want cap-‘n’-trade?
Do we need carbon taxes?
Do we want to let Joe Bast get away with not organizing another Heartland Conference next year?
You, in this room, have bravely upheld the truth and the scientific method against all manner of lies, threats, sanctions, personal attacks, and entertaining revisions to your CreepyMedia biographies. Because you have not failed or faltered, the Forces of Darkness are now scuttling back into their lairs, there to snivel in the eternal darkness of utter oblivion and CNN.
Divine Providence, unlike the bed-wetters, has a sense of humour. Governor Schwarzenegger--now, there’s an oxymoron for you, or “moron” for short. As soon as Governor Schwarzenegger announced that the science was settled--and how the hell would he know?--two-thirds of California’s citrus crop was destroyed. Were all those oranges and lemons wiped out by drought? Or by forest fires? No, by an exceptionally bitter frost.
Last summer, just as the President of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, was telling us, “Global warming is happening now,” global temperatures had already been plunging for nearly seven years, at a rate equivalent to almost 4 Fahrenheit degrees per century. Has your favourite news medium reported that? Probably not. Maybe that’s why the President of the Royal Society didn’t know. He doesn’t get his science from the learned journals. He gets it from the media.
Just as Tony Bliar was announcing on his blog that “global warming is getting worse,” just as Al Gore was testifying before the Senate--during an ice-storm--that we face a “climate crisis,” global temperatures plummeted still more. They have been plummeting at a rate equivalent to 11 Fahrenheit degrees per century throughout the four years since Gore launched his mawkish, sci-fi comedy horror B-movie. At this rate, by mid-century we shall roasting in a new Ice Age.
Gore no longer dares to publish his supposed “evidence” for “climate crisis,” because he is rightly terrified that we here will pounce on it at once and demonstrate that it is materially, serially, seriously inaccurate--demonstrate its falsity by the dull, outmoded method of reference to the facts, the science, and the data.
When Gore appeared before the Senate a few weeks ago, the hearing was supposed to be public. For it is one of the most ancient and settled principles of parliamentary democracy that the deliberations of those whom we elect, and the testimony that their committees hear, shall be open and visible to all. Yet, with the furtive connivance of Senator Boxer and her politicized snivel servants, the science slides Gore showed to the Senators were kept secret. I and others have asked for them. They are “not available at this time.” And the Senate is “exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.”
Why are those slides “not available at this time”? Because Gore is running scared. Rightly scared. Scared of prosecution for peddling a false prospectus in Generation Investment Management. Neither Gore nor any bed-wetter will any longer dare to debate the science of climate with us or anyone in the light of day. Gore’s speaking contract stipulates that he will not debate, he will not answer unscripted questions, and he will not be interviewed except by journalists acceptable to him. Which journalists are they? The dim ones that don’t know any science, and the prejudiced ones that don’t care. Just about all of them.
Recently four of us in this room were invited to a meeting of Government and opposition leaders and policymakers in Madrid, to debate the science and economics of climate against Al Gore (not a climate scientist); Railroad Engineer Pachauri, the head of the U.N.’s climate science working group (not a climate scientist); Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of the U.K. Socialist Government’s joke report on the economics of climate change (not a climate scientist); and the Environment Minister of Spain (not a climate scientist).
All four of us--three climate scientists and I (not a climate scientist) accepted the invitation to debate. All four of them refused. They said they would only come if they could speak on their own, without facing any challenge, any debate, any question, any fact, any inconvenient truth. Not one of them dared to face us. They did not have what in English we should call the cojones.
There was no climate crisis. There is no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis. “Global warming” is not a global crisis. It is a global scientific fraud.
Without you, that blunt truth might have taken far longer to emerge than it has. And delay is fatal. Though lies cannot alter or harm the truth, they can kill our fellow men. The environmental movement is out of control. It is now humankind’s deadliest enemy. In the name of humanity, it must be outlawed. Thirty years ago, the soi-disant “Greens” agitated for DDT to be banned. They killed 40 million people of malaria, most of them children. Eventually, after a third of a century, the WHO at last caved in to humanitarian pressure from me and others and reversed the ban. Dr. Arata Kochi, announcing the end of that murderous ban, said, “Usually in this field politics comes first and science second. Now we must take a stand on the science and the data.” That is what you in this room have so gallantly done. You have taken a stand on the science and the data.
Now the very same soi-disant “Greens” are killing millions by starvation in a dozen of the world’s poorest regions. Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent “global warming” bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama’s stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves.
The prosperity of the West is not only our sustenance. It is also the very lifeblood of the struggling nations of the Third World. If our economies fail, we are inconvenienced, but they die.
In the past year there have been food riots in a dozen major regions, in protest at the doubling of the price of staple food which the World Bank blames almost entirely on the biofuel scam. Has your favourite news medium reported the riots and the mass starvation? Probably not. Has it given our starving fellow-men--our brothers and sisters--the same attention and prominence and column inches and frequency of coverage as it has given to every icicle putatively dribbling in Greenland? Certainly not.
Those who are dying are only black people, poor people, in far-away countries of which we know little, with no voice and no vote. Why should we care? Well, we should care. And we--you and I--we do care. In this debate it is we who hold the moral high ground.
There is no incompatibility between science and religion, as long as religion does not attempt to usurp the realm of science, and as long as science does not become a religion. So I hope that this scientific conference will forgive a Christian if, in a Christian country founded by Christians, he does his duty as the valedictorian by sending you away from this great gathering with a blessing--a blessing that has been spoken in the stone-built village churches of England for longer than anyone can remember. Let it be a tribute to your steadfast courage.
“Go forth into the world in peace;
“Be of good courage;
“Hold fast to that which is good;
“Render to no man evil for evil;
“Strengthen the faint-hearted;
“Support the weak;
“Help the afflicted;
“Honour all men;
“Love and serve the Lord,
“Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Ghost;
“And the blessing of God Almighty,
“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
“Be upon you and remain with you always. Amen.”
Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute. He has held positions with the British press and in government, as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy advisor. Monckton advised Thatcher on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics, psephological modeling; embryological research, hydrogeology, public-service investment analysis, public welfare modeling, and epidemiological analysis. He currently is a consultant giving technical advice to corporations and governments. He has been active in the debate over global warming, publishing articles critical of prevailing climate change opinions and chastising U.S. Senators John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe when they wrote a letter to the chief executive officer of ExxonMobil asking him to stop funding scientists who reject global warming, In February 2007, he published an analysis and summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’s Fourth Assessment Report.