Open Letter Challenge to Greenhouse Gas Promoter Lord Monckton

Dear Chris,

Principia Scientific International salutes your tireless efforts in recent years in opposing the nonsense of man-made global warming. But to those of us who carefully study the history of climate alarmism you are the veritable “poacher turned gatekeeper.”

Lord Monckton

You have carefully styled yourself as “science adviser” to Margaret Thatcher during her tenure as British Prime Minister in the 1980’s. As the records show, back then the “Iron Lady” became the first world leader to promote what we now know as the man-made global warming scam. At that time you boasted you used “the first computer they had ever seen in Downing Street,” to perform “radiative-transfer calculations that indicated climate scientists were right to say some ‘global warming’ would arise as CO2 [carbon dioxide] concentration continued to climb.”

But as an armchair scientist you have been proved wrong. As the decades passed and CO2 levels rose by 40 percent we have seen global temperatures flatline for 16 years. Greenhouse gas predictions (and thus the science) are shown to be wrong.

If you are a true skeptic of climate alarm it surely is past time for you to admit that the gambit to spend billions on junk climate science alarm for the past generation has failed to show any warming link between carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate. Even your own paper admits the tell tale GHE “hot spot” in the atmosphere isn’t there. Belatedly, we know that Baroness Thatcher issued her own mea culpa for engendering that greenhouse gas alarm. But when can we expect to see yours?

Spencer and Lindzen: mutually contradictory 

In correspondence between us you have glibly cited as your preferred climatology experts Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, both of whom still insist CO2 will cause “some” warming. But you seem blissfully unaware that Spencer and Lindzen contradict each other – Spencer says the GHE operates from the surface upwards while Lindzen says the GHE must operate from the atmosphere to the ground. So which is it, Chris? 

It is due to the lamentable record of such guesswork climatologists that Principia Scientific International (PSI) rose to the challenge. We are now coming to the fore thanks to experts we recruited mainly from the “hard” and applied sciences such as engineering better equipped to put the claims of climatologists under the microscope. As even the government-endorsed Oxburgh Report on Climategate showed (2010), the limitations of climatologists are that they are almost all “Earth Science” academics with little or no higher-level training in thermodynamics. Moreover, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand those who have actually published papers on any “hard” sciences rather than the cozy cabal of the “pal review” system of tainted climate journals.

Indeed, as respected skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball has frequently conceded, our highly complex climate system cannot be properly understood without involving specialists from other sciences outside climatology. But as the climate science ivory tower crumbles under the weight of failed predictions Monckton and other prominent skeptics still rely on the flawed reasoning of Lindzen and Spencer. But these are men who have built their careers on acceptance of the “greenhouse effect.” To denounce it now would undermine their status and academic legacy. But history will see that neither Spencer nor Lindzen were ever qualified in higher thermodynamics, unlike PSI’s pool of experts. So why do many skeptics still believe them?

Greenhouse Belief and that Fake Experiment

We say it is time that taxpayers and policymakers had the opinion of those better trained in the “hard” sciences. They have no vested interest in sustaining belief in the perils of CO2 as a heat trapping gas, which you and your friends say creates a “ blanket effect” over our planet, but which PSI shows to be wrong.

As to that well-worn “blanket” analogy here is what Dr. Charles Anderson (a highly respected industrial physicist, not academic) stated recently:

The reality is that the infra-red active gases act more like an umbrella providing the Earth’s surface with shade to keep it cool than like a greenhouse to keep it warmer. It is a much more realistic description of the infra-red active gases to call them shade gases, rather than greenhouse gases.”

Yes, Dr. Anderson’s characterization better fits the real world evidence and it is now time to throw out your shredded “blanket effect” and accept that in the real world of applied science and engineering CO2 is one of nature’s best coolants. Anderson joins many others at PSI showing there is no way CO2 can “trap” heat or act like a “blanket” in our atmosphere: measured energy out equals energy in.

Indeed, if it were true that CO2 did contribute to a supposed “blanket effect” surely after 30 years and hundreds of billions spent on climate research the UN’s IPCC would be able to demonstrate it.  But no experiment has ever been able to. Therefore your beliefs in a “greenhouse gas effect” are scientifically unfounded.

In fact, didn’t you, like many skeptics, revel in the story of Al Gore’s calamitous “experiment” on his 24 hour TV extravaganza where he attempted to “prove” the GHE? Within days the “Gore-athon” performance was exposed as fakery on the worlds’ leading science blog, WUWT. Did that not prompt you to ask the question: why would it be necessary for anyone, let alone the former U.S. Vice President, to fake such an experiment if the science was “real”?

More Greenhouse Gaffes and Cranks

This leads us to question why you appear so shy of debating us. Perhaps a clue is how we showed up your armchair science gaffe on Jo Nova’s blog where you crassly asserted the oxymoron that blackbodies have albedo. 

Of course, when you and I last spoke you made reference to my colleagues and I being “cranks” for daring to question the GHE. While it is true PSI members are more likely to be engineers than academics we are far from being “cranks.” While the climatist academics perform “thought experiments” and play with their problematic computer models real scientists enjoy successful careers devising and honing technology that actually works in the “real world.”

Indeed, some of our members made their names working on the Apollo space mission; others design and build multi-million dollar orbiting satellites for a living. Dare we say it: rocket science trumps Earth science?

All we ask is you and your climatologist advisers apply critical rationalism as per Popperian principles and true skepticism and accept that carbon dioxide does the opposite of what is claimed. CO2 sheds heat so superbly well this outstanding infrared absorbing/emitting gas was rightly used for decades in manufacturing industry as the preferred coolant.

The 1980’s: Greenhouse Alarm Gets Political

You see, like me you are merely an arts graduate. But worse, you helped your boss, Prime Minister Thatcher spin the CO2 alarm. As history shows, her keynote speech to the Royal Society about the perils of rising atmospheric CO2 in 1988 took place a mere three months after NASA’s James Hansen gave a similar theatrical performance before a U.S. Congressional committee. [1]

Perhaps it embarrasses you that Thatcher performed the U-turn and you didn’t. But if you are not for turning then please educate us by pointing to one scientific discovery that led climatologists in the ‘80’s to perform a U-turn on the role of CO2 in the atmosphere universally “abandoned” before 1950 (see below).

Check your history and you will learn that not until 1981, when NASA’s James Hansen angled for the political stage, were scientists seriously considering CO2’s impact on climate. The highly revealing CIA climate report of 1974 affirms this (see below). Indeed, in the 1980’s Hansen only began to win acceptance for his “theory” by performing a sleight of hand by tagging the trace gas CO2 along with the remarkably unique properties of latent heat to “prove” human emissions were “dangerous.” But just a few short years earlier (1974) a thoroughly researched climate report by the CIA, engaging America’s top climate experts, made NOT ONE mention of any greenhouse gas effect. Why is that?

But during the 80’s Hansen’s version of the greenhouse effect came to the fore cunningly dressed to pass muster as being the “greenhouse effect of gases and clouds.”  And in the shorthand speak of common parlance too often politicians speak of CO2 as simply “carbon,” such was how Hansen’s “greenhouse effect of gases and clouds”  became truncated to be simply the GHE. Moreover, if I am wrong I challenge you to ask Lindzen or Spencer to point to a single scientific discovery between the 1950’s and 1988 to warrant mainstream science adopting Hansen’s greenhouse effect of “gases and clouds.” 

I wager they can’t identify even one.That is because there is no actual scientific reason – and this leads us to infer it is politically driven and enforced by the not coincidental fact that the infant field of “climate science” began to be lavishly funded from 1988 thanks to Thatcher and a converted US government. What you and they are doing is crassly attributing the heat trapping properties of latent heat to a trace gas that is a perfect energy emitter!

Sadly, so many otherwise smart and honorable people have been duped. They now implicitly go along with the notion that the undisputed heat trapping property of latent heat via the water cycle is  the “greenhouse gas effect.” It isn’t. Latent heat has nothing to do with CO2. Even hurricanes are more powerful drivers of climate. As PSI researchers have shown, you have been misled by Hansen’s fraudulent smoke and mirrors gambit first set out in his landmark paper of 1981 and on which hundreds of subsequent papers rely. [3]

Mainstream Science Rejected Carbon Warming

But if we look at what the American Meteorological Society (AMS) admitted in 1951 we see that the idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.” [id.]

It is very sad that rather than debate us on these points so-called leading skeptics like you, Chris Monckton, prefers to shy away and call us “cranks.” But surely an adept public debater shouldn’t run if he believes he can make short work of us; at least, Chris, you could perform a service for the public good rather than allow PSI to bring such “disrepute” on all skeptics? <sarc>

Our newly elected Chairman, Imperial College’s John Sanderson, immediate past president of the Royal College of Science Association would be bemused if you looked him in the eye and called him a crank. So, Chris, instead of name calling perhaps you and your advisers should meet with us, either privately or in public debate, so we can better avail you of this paradigm shift in the science.

[1] Thatcher, M., Speech to the Royal Society (27 September 1988), Public Statement, Speech ArchiveMargaret Thatcher Foundation

[2] Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association. 

[3] Hansen, J., et al, ‘Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,’ Science, Vol. 213 no. 4511 pp. 957-966, August, 28, 1981.

Share via