Chief and others,
I became a Monckton hobbyist after he visited my home town and gratuitously fibbed to my state legislators and reporters. He then tried to engage in a conversation with some local scientists. I decided to follow up on some of his claims–e.g., he liked to use graphs that seemed to show that IPCC temperature and CO2 projections were already way off the mark, and I was able to show that 1) he had miscopied (faked?) the CO2 numbers, 2) which he then fed into an equation for equilibrium (not transient) climate sensitivity to get his (fake) IPCC temperature projections. In other words, he fed fake data into the wrong equation to get fake temperature projections that magically didn’t match well with real temperature data. You can find sources for all these claims here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/08/monckton-makes-it-up/
So the idea that I’m just “executing the messenger,” or engaging in simple ad hominem, is laughable. But with all this damning evidence, why do I bother pointing out Monckton’s oddities–like pretending to be a member of Parliament (!!!) and claiming to have invented a miracle cure-all (!!!)?
I soon discovered that the people who listen to Monckton 1) usually don’t have the skills to check for themselves whether he’s telling the truth, and/or 2) don’t give a rat’s posterior whether he’s telling the truth. I emphasize his wackiness for the benefit of those who simply don’t have the skills, but no matter what anyone points out about Monckton or his claims, some will defend him to the death. But this is useful too, because it is a great way to show reporters that a large swath of the climate contrarian community is impenetrably stupid.
Consider how Monckton countered the charge that he had faked the IPCC temperature. Here’s what he said on WUWT:
“Some have said that the IPCC projection zone on our graphs should show exactly the values that the IPCC actually projects for the A2 scenario. However, as will soon become apparent, the IPCC’s “global-warming” projections for the early part of the present century appear to have been, in effect, artificially detuned to conform more closely to observation.”
In other words, right there on Watts’s blog, Monckton came right out and admitted that what he was calling the IPCC’s projections were not actually the IPCC’s projections! And yet, he still defended himself for representing them as IPCC projections because his fake projections were (according to his fevered imaginings) what the IPCC really should have projected!
Detailed analysis and sources here:
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/the-monckton-files-a-bold-monckton-prediction/
Did this cause any of the WUWT faithful to reconsider their loyalty to Monckton? Not that I could tell. Drop in a few Latin phrases, and that crowd is fully satisfied that all His Lordship’s foes have been vanquished.
So by all means, keep defending Monckton, and keep defending Watts for unfailingly publishing whatever nonsense Monckton’s addled brain can produce. He’s God’s gift to climate realists, because in the eyes of people who aren’t scientists, but also aren’t complete rubes, he discredits quite a lot of people.