Lord Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, has sent an open letter to Senators Rockefeller (D-WV) and Snowe (R-Maine) in response to their recent open letter telling the CEO of ExxonMobil to cease funding climate-skeptic scientists.
Lord Monckton, former policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, writes: "You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to 'senior elected and appointed government officials' who disagree with your opinion."
In what The Charleston (WV) Daily Mail has called "an intemperate attempt to squelch debate with a hint of political consequences," Senators Rockefeller and Snowe released an open letter dated October 30 to ExxonMobil CEO, Rex Tillerson, insisting he end Exxon's funding of a "climate change denial campaign." The Senators labeled scientists with whom they disagree as "deniers," a term usually directed at "Holocaust deniers." Some voices on the political left have called for the arrest and prosecution of skeptical scientists. The British Foreign Secretary has said skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and must be denied access to the media.
Responds Lord Monckton, "Sceptics and those who have the courage to support them are actually helpful in getting the science right. They do not, as you improperly suggest, 'obfuscate' the issue: they assist in clarifying it by challenging weaknesses in the 'consensus' argument and they compel necessary corrections ... "
Lord Monckton's Churchillian reproof continues, "You acknowledge the effectiveness of the climate sceptics. In so doing, you pay a compliment to the courage of those free-thinking scientists who continue to research climate change independently despite the likelihood of refusal of publication in journals that have taken preconceived positions; the hate mail and vilification from ignorant environmentalists; and the threat of loss of tenure in institutions of learning which no longer make any pretence to uphold or cherish academic freedom."
Let's hear it for Lord Monckton. It is sort of sad when sitting U.S. Senators have to be taught a lesson in fundamental freedoms by the nobility of the nation we fought for our own freedoms. It amazes me that sitting Senators can engage in not so veiled campaigns of political intimidation and no one says a thing.
There are many people who think that just because what they think might happen in the future is bad, no one is allowed to gainsay them in any fashion whatsoever. Science doesn't work that way. It also doesn't work by consensus either. Just because you can get a quorum of scientists to claim "X" is the gospel truth, it doesn't follow that people shouldn't be allowed to question "X". Science is the committment to follow a method. Therefore it is NOT acceptable to dismiss someone's work on the basis that it was funded by this or that organization. That is irrelevant to the soundness of the research IN EVERY CASE. For example, the problem with the tobacco research of the 60's and 70's was the lousy scientific standards employed and NOT the fact that Phillip Morris helped pay for it.
The truth is the scientific consensus of just 18 months ago has been shown to be wrong. (From Lord Monckton's letter):
The UN will also reduce its high-end estimate of sea-level rise to 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches. Morner (2004), a lifelong student of sea level changes, says: “There is a total absence of any recent‘acceleration in sea level rise’ as often claimed by IPCC and related groups. … our best estimate of possible future sea-level changes is +10 +/- 10cm in a century, or, maybe, even +5 +/- 15cm.” that is a maximum of 8 inches in 100 years.
When you consider that the average rate of sea level rise for the last 15,000 years has been 7 inches a century, it turns out that the skeptics had it right 18 months ago and the "consensus" had it wrong.
That is one of the reasons you allow unpopular speech in the first place. It allows for unpopular (but right and beneficial) thoughts to win folks over in the long run. Stifiling expression for whatever reason works against societies. Did all of these people get through college without reading J.S. Mill's "On Liberty"???
Monckton's letter has a few other tidbit I found fascinating. Especially this:
An unusual heatwave in France a couple of years ago killed 3,000 old people. As is now customary, global warming was blamed, though the real cause was a naturally occurring “blocking high”. Last winter’s cold snap in the UK killed 25,000. The former event attracted many times more publicity than the latter.
Was this really not reported? I certainly hadn't heard about it and I live with about as big an anglophile there is, and watch BBC World news a couple times a week. It doesn't fit in with the espoused orthodoxy so we just pretend it didn't happen?
I'm sure that is exactly how Newton and Einstein operated.
(Thanks to Jim Rose for pointing to this.)
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