Monckton - The Movie

Embargoed until 31 June 2013

Paraquat Films in association with Portcullis Production proudly announce that the film "Monckton - The Movie" has begun shooting on location in the House of Lords.  The film, due for release 30 February 2014, is the story of a plucky English underdog played by Rowan Atkinson ("Mr Bean's Computer Models" and "Johnny English Recalculated From Cherry Picked Date") standing up to the multitrillion dollar budget of the shadowy organisation known only as the Climate Scientists.

Key characters from the life of Christopher Monckton, 3rd something or other of place no one's heard of, will be featured, including Dame Helen Mirren (we know she usually plays the Queen but Meryl Streep was booked) as Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Russell Crowe as the minion Anthony Watts who, being American, thinks anyone called Lord must be totally wonderful, and Beaker from The Muppets as James Oxford Gaduate Delingpole.

The evil baddies in the film, Michael Mann (played by Bruce Willis - "Die Hard With A Hockey Stick") and Phil Jones, head of the even more sinister organisation, the CRU Crew (played by Alan Rickman ("Robin Emails", "Harry Potter & The Hyped Up Scandal of Climategate"), are in aplot to take over the world and run in with a single new world government, powered by evil wind turbines and absolutely no fossil fuels.  Monckton, while selling expensive puzzles and shirts in London, learns of this and blows the whistle.

With only some powerful relatives (Lord Nigel Lawson, played by Terry Jones, famous for "Monty Python's Meaning Of Data") and fighting the House of Lords authorities, Monckton takes his PowerPoint lectures on tours of Australia where he locks horns with scientists who actually know what they're talking about but still includes the errors.

The conclusion of the film occurs on an Italian mountain road when his tour bus skids and ends up teetering on the brink of falling over the edge and into the valley. Monckton and his denialist friends can only watch helplessly as a pile of cherry picked spaghetti plots slides towards the back of the bus while Monckton utters the words that will go own in cinema history: "Hang on lads, I've got a great idea for a post at Watts Up With That."

The soundtrack will include such famous songs as Here Comes The Sun, Blowing In The Wind and Let It Snow.  All by the original artists (except the Beatles and Dylan tracks, they asked for too much).

Is it time to prosecute Lord Monckton for fraud?

Yawn.

Lord Christopher Monckton is at it again.  He wants (I don't think he really wants but he keeps saying he wants) the IPCC prosecuted for fraud. 

He says it here and here and here and here and here.

Fraud is a serious accusation.  It is not one to be bandied about lightly.  According to wikipedia:

In criminal law, fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent, and verb is defraud. Fraud is a crime and a civil law violation, though the specific criminal law definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud.

 So if that is the case, the IPCC can rest easily in its bed tonight knowing that any case the good Lord tries to bring is unlikely to get anywhere near a court.  For a case to be brought, Monckton would have to demonstrate intentional deception (which I would wager to be virtually impossible for him to do), show that it was for personal gain or damage to an individual (the individual, I suspect, is Monckton) and do it n such a way that a jury could keep a straight face.  It an't gonna happen.

Though Monckton persists is his empty threat:

If the IPCC were answerable to the British courts, I should invite the police to prosecute and then, if they did not act, I should go before the magistrates myself. I have done it before. If the case is sound, a summons will be issued against the accused. I once hauled the British Secret Police (delicately called the “Crime Agency”) before the beaks, got a summons, and forced these thugs into a humiliating climbdown. But that is another story.

Headline reads "Ministers escort spy out"

I am sure if Lord Monckton wants to know anything much about secret police, he can ask his brother, Anthony, famously outed as an MI6 agent one it would seem with the same bungling ability as Johnny English and his elder brother. But we shouldn't link family members like this and say there is something rotten (although Lord Monckton's sister, Rosa, is married to Dominic Lawson, son of Nigel Lawson, climate science denier and a sitting member of the house of Lords).

Back to fake fraud.  Lord Monckton should be careful what he wishes for.  Some misdemeanours he himself has perpetrated might get the interest of Inspector Knacker of the Yard.

Have a look at this.  One relevant section of a whiny letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the Victoria University of Wellington:

I have not met Professor Renwick. I do not think he has attended any of my lectures or read any of my published papers on climate change. In saying I have “no training” he has lied. I have a Cambridge degree in Classical Architecture. The course included instruction in mathematics. I was last year’s Nerenberg Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario.

Well, I have emboldened two claims that may or may not be true.  Perhaps he did a degree on classical architecture, since this doesn't argue that he didn't. Does he have a degre in classics, as most sources indicate, or classical architecture, which is different?  Very different.  But Monckton's point that training in classical architecture makes him qualified in anything but classical architecture isn't really valid.  He might have done some maths.  But I would agree that he has no training in climate science based on what Monckton himself says.  I don't.  I studied biology but that is at least slightly more relevant to climate science than is architecture.  And if he didn't actually have a degree in classical architecture, then isn't his claim on the edge of fraud?

As for Nerenberd Lecturer in Mathematics, it seems it is true.  But perhaps not so exciting as it might at first seem as the invite came from a known climate science denier and Monckton wasn't the first such denier to speak at these events.  Looks like they don't have as much to do with maths on the whole either.  For Monckton it seems to have been a platform for self promotion.

We won't mention the more famous claims: science adviser to Margaret Thatcher (no evidence other than his own words), sitting member of the House Of Lords (denied by the Lords authorities themselves), sitting at the desk of a sovereign country at a climate conference (on video, m'lud)...

I am sure there is more.  Others with the time and the inclination have shown that Monckton is not that faithful a servant to the truth.   Perhaps the good Lord should be careful what he wishes for - his supposed conspiracy might come back to haunt him (and if he reads this and thinks it is a threat - get real).

WUWT - an apology [not really]

Mouse finding holes in Bob's post

No sooner do I comment on WUWT's egregious comment about on-line peer review than a post by the ever entertaining (I didn't say correct, did I?) Bob Tisdale is shown to be fuller of holes than a Swiss cheese:














Three updates.  Blimey.  They might even say it's plain wrong in a minute. 

57 varieties, it says so on the label

What anti-science folks of all their amazing Heinz 57 varieties misunderstand about peer review is this: it is not about keeping weird and unusual science out of the journals.  It is about keeping poor and wrong science out, and making sure what is published is at least scientific, fits in with the well established bits of science and doesn't make such outrageous claims that it teeters on the edge of pseudoscience.

Peer review would, of course, have saved the embarrassment of three corrections within a handful of hours of posting.  Those would have been smoothed out at the review stage.

So add this to the list of posts that are showing increasing desperation, are churned out like cornflakes in a never mind the quality, feel the width style climate denier factory.  If they are so sure that AGW is wrong, then they have to take the time, the effort and the intellectual capacity and use it to really find out what is wrong.  But what does go down at WUWT is grandstanding - trying to see who can hit the top of the tiles in the gents.  It's not adult and it's not funny.

An intellectual disagreement from WUWT

Actually, Watts is not interested in really changing the post or actually reviewing what gets put on his site by the looks of things.  He's interested in a fight.  He makes fun and then lets his honchos do the actual beating.  Sounds like bullying to me.  And there's some people at WUWT for whom this is their sole form of entertainment, it seems.  So Watts types this:

Anthony Watts says:

June 28, 2013 at 4:44 am

Thanks Bob. My point in publishing the “angry” Australian claim by Karoly was that given the broad reach of WUWT, somebody would see what a load of codswallop it was and write a rebuttal, and I was right.
UPDATE: I see Nick is here working on an angle to defend the Karoly and Lewis govsci effort, so I’m even more sure it’s codswallop.

A considered piece of writing, I don't think.

Luckily there are some people who actually do know what they are talking about and that, after a bit of a barney, forces update 3:

Nick Stokes says:

June 28, 2013 at 8:03 am

Bob,
“I present data, Nick.”
You’ve presented reanalysis data, which the authors say is not suitable for validating models because of biases.
“While that would impact the summer model-data comparison, it doesn’t impact the overall comparisons shown in Figures 5 and 6.”
But it does affect your claim that
“the data I had downloaded indicated Australia summertime temperatures in 2013 weren’t remarkable “ and “not so angry after all”.
Fig 6 does not use GHCN/CAMS, so yes, it is unaffected. I think it is likely that the CMIP 5 average will show a higher trend for annual temperature than measured for Australia in this period. How significant this is, I don’t know.

Not the Nick Stokes but another one who also stands for truth and honesty

Followed by:

Steven Mosher says:

June 28, 2013 at 8:30 am

Once again we see folks here using re analysis data without fully disclosing that the data they use is modelled.
Now, If I used re analysis data without disclosing it people would scream bloody murder.
Further, Bob has used RCP 8.5. You all realize that RCP 8.5 is the projection at the highest end of the scenarios, ie Bob has compared re analysis data to the highest projections.
And to make matters worse he has used re analysis data against the authors advice.
When the NAS said that bristlecones should be avoided, we screamed when mann used bristlecones. Here the authors tell us that the data should not be used for model validation.
Yet bob ignores that.
If you want an estmate for australia that uses the exact dimensions of the country
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/australia

which leads to this:

Not the actual Bob blushing

Bob Tisdale says:

June 28, 2013 at 8:53 am

Nick Stokes and Steve Mosher: See Update 3.
Thanks, Nick.

Should be embarrassing.  Not a bit of it. There follows this straight after:

Not the actual Bob throwing teddy out of pram

Bob Tisdale says:

June 28, 2013 at 9:48 am

Steven Mosher says: “Now, If I used re analysis data without disclosing it people would scream bloody murder.”
And you, Steven, are screaming bloody murder and being quite obnoxious about it. See update 3.

So we have a pretty reasonable post from Steven Mosher followed by an angry one from Bob Tisdale.  Just been called out for being wrong - don't like it, na, na, ne, na, nah.  Ya, boo, sucks.

Not the actual Bob being juvenile

 More from Tisdale's reply to Steven Mosher - the raspberry send off:

In closing this comment, Steven, I await your presentation of my Figures 7 & 8 using the RCP6.0-based model mean. If I have to do it, I won’t be as pleasant in my reply to you as I was with this one.
When I make mistakes, Steven, I correct them. Do you?

  I sense some issues.  Know what I mean?

But this isn't what peer reviewing actually is.  This is an argument on your front lawn about what colour the grass is, with someone denying it is green and others, who have training in grass colourology, showing what the reality is.  Real scientists interested in the real world and understanding it would have not got it wrong in the first place because they would have spent ages (20 hours - pah) going through the work with care, passing it by colleagues who would have checked the results and made suggestions on how to improve it, before it ever got near a journal editor.

Somebody not called Bob heading for one of Bob's holes

Fake scientists are sitting at their laptops and churning this stuff out by the yard.  Real scientists are cautious little animals who know that if they put out material with holes this big, they would soon not have a career.  Simples.