Christopher Monckton issues point-by-point rebuttal to media hit piece on him: ‘How climate-Communist pseudo-journalists corrupt the truth’

Special to Climate Depot

By Lord Christopher Monckton – The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Independent Australia, an Australian Communist propaganda blog, has just published a particularly dishonest and mendacious hit-piece directed at me. Just for once, rather than ignoring the hate-filled twaddle, I am going to answer it point by point. I do this so that everyone can see just how craftily a trained climate Communist neglects and distorts the truth. Here, you will learn some of the tricks they use. This will be a lengthy piece, so get your popcorn, throw a rug over your knees, sit back and enjoy.

The blog describes itself as “a progressive journal, supporting freedom and justice for individuals, and getting to the truth. IA opposes governments of the country beholden to vested interests.”

Since the time of the fanatically racialist anti-Semite Karl Marx, “progressive”, “liberal” and “socialist” are antonyms Communists use of themselves. The proper words are “regressive”, “repressive”, and “Communist”.

The end and object of “socialism” is Communism. The end and object of Communism is mass death. The Communism that Independent Australia so chillingly espouses has slaughtered between 100 million and 300 million people in the century since Ulyanov and his vicious cabal of thugs, goons and crooks overthrew the democratic government of Kerensky in Russia in 1917.

Communism, then, is a thanatist cult – a cult of crude, brutal, despotic, freedom-hating, murder-loving tyranny that is currently slaughtering women and children in Ukraine by indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets. In just a century, Communism has murdered more people than all other forms of government added together throughout human history. 

Yet Independent Australia cloyingly and misleadingly says of itself, ‘Finally, news has a conscience’. Conscience, schmonscience.

Recently a particularly repellent Communist, one Bishop, who by his manner and conduct appears to be a loutish, ill-brought-up teenager, decided to publish at this ghastly propaganda freak-show a strikingly mendacious hit-piece directed at me, and describing me as a liar, because I dare to question the Communist Party Line on the climate question.

That Party Line came to be established in the years following a meeting of the Disinformation Directorate of the Kamitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti in Moscow in the summer of 1985. At the meeting, it was decided that the leadership of the environmental movement would be captured and turned against the Western economies.

Following that meeting, by December of 1985 the Communists had already captured Greenpeace – to name but one – and had driven out its genuinely environmentally-minded leadership, including Patrick Moore, with whom I have discussed the Communist entryism that repurposed Greenpeace and so many other originally environmental groups. 

Ever since 1985, Greenpeace has been nothing more than a Communist front group dedicated – like almost all environmental lobby groups worldwide – to the destruction of the hated free West.

Why did Bishop bother to write a hit-piece directed at me? Why do hate-filled Communists like him see me as such a threat to the Party Line on climate change which they so naively and unquestioningly espouse, and by which they hope to continue inducing the hated democratic West to throw away its democracy, its prosperity and its freedom in the specious name of Saving The Planet?

Why, given that Bishop first began bothering me by email four and a half years ago, has the Politburo suddenly decided that his hit-piece should be published in one of the many blogs it controls and directs? One suspects that it is because a lecture by me at Oxford University exposing the climate-change scam has just reached 200,000 hits despite the heavy censorship exercised by YouTube. Just put “Monckton Mises” in the YouTube search engine to find the talk.

The Politburo seems to have decided that I am a danger to the climate-change project. It thinks that because, despite the worst efforts of the Marxstream media so readily persuaded by its agents of influence, it has failed to prevent the increasingly widespread circulation of news of my scientific team’s research showing that the notion of global warming large enough to be catastrophic as opposed to small enough to be handsomely net-beneficial arose from a strikingly elementary error of physics, universal in climatology.

By that error, climate “scientists” forgot the Sun was shining and misattributed much of its warming to our emissions. Sure enough, though Bishop knew of our result, he deliberately failed to mention it in his hit-piece. Leaving stuff out is a regular Communist technique.

I am not going to dignify Bishop by bothering to describe him as a liar. For like all but the most senior totalitarians – Fascist, Communist, Socialist, Islamist – he has become incapable of telling the difference between that which is true and that which is not. The Party Line is all.

From the following information, gentle reader, deduce for yourself whether or not Bishop may legitimately be described as in any degree honest, competent, decent or well-intentioned.

Bishop originally wrote me a more than somewhat offensive email as far back as in February 2021, suggesting that I had originally refused to accept that our sins of emission would influence the climate in some degree. Yet he knew that I had been the first person on British television to describe the greenhouse effect. I had done so on a popular BBC talk-show, in which I had appeared alongside Anita Roddick and Jonathon Porritt, two noted environmentalists. 

We had each been asked to choose one environmental issue. I was the only one to choose global warming, which at that time I thought might be a problem. However, when I realized I was wrong, I wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph in 2006, explaining that while some warming was likely it was not going to be sufficient to cause net harm. The article received hundreds of thousands of hits in two hours following its publication at midnight on a Saturday night – so many, in fact, that the Telegraph’s website crashed. 

Yet here is what the poisonous Bishop wrote in his first email to me: 

“I note that although you now accept that there is anthropogenic global warming you believe it is not as great as projected by most scientists.”

Note those words “you now accept that there is anthropogenic global warming”. Bishop knew perfectly well that I had accepted from the get-go that we cause some warming. I opened my reply to his original email thus: “One of the nasty tactics used by climate Communists is that skeptics have changed their stance from scepticism to acceptance of the Party Line. I once had to have a journalist fired from a national newspaper for writing a silly piece suggesting what you are now unpleasantly and inaccurately suggesting.”

Since then, Bishop has written to me on numerous occasions, always in a malevolent, patronizing tone. A dozen times I replied to him politely and provided a considerable body of information. However, he paid little or no attention to any of the information I gave him. In the end, I or my staff simply deleted his emails, for it was clear to us that he had not the slightest intention of reporting accurately or fairly.

Here is some of the information generously supplied to Bishop before we got on with other things. He deliberately left out just about all of this information from his hit-piece:

• That there had been no global warming for almost 19 years to 2015. 
• That my team has published a series of peer-reviewed papers on global warming.
• That it was the BBC that had reported the formation of a glacier on Ben Nevis.
• That the world has more than 160,000 glaciers, nearly all in Antarctica.
• That nearly all the 160,000 glaciers had never been measured by Man.
• That not one of the 40 “reference glaciers” used by climatologists to measure the supposed worldwide retreat of glaciers is in Antarctica.
• That the Antarctic had been cooling for three decades.
• That melting of glaciers in the Alps had revealed mountain passes and even an entire forest buried under ice since the Medieval Warm Period.
• That at that time the tree-line in Europe and elsewhere had been considerably higher than at any time since then.
• That Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey had told me that the advance and retreat of Himalayan Glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj first began keeping records – records that Professor Bhat, as a geologist, had carefully studied.
• That some glaciers were advancing while others retreated.
• That many glaciers that were said to be retreating were doing so for reasons of local geology rather than global warming.
• That IPCC’s absurd claim that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035 had been founded on a report by a Communist journalist with little in the way of scientific qualifications.
• That as a result of that incident the Inter-Academy Council had put in place an error-reporting protocol for IPCC, which IPCC no longer bothers to follow.
• That even if the whole world went to net zero by 2050 (which it won’t, because the Communist-led giants of the East are paying no attention to the nonsense that their agents of influence in the West so sedulously promote, and are vastly expanding their coal-fired and oil-fired output) the world would be less than 0.1 degree cooler than if we carried on as usual.
• That if the UK alone went to net zero by 2050 (which it won’t) the warming prevented by then would be less than one thousandth of a degree.
• That each $1 billion spent on trying, Canute-like, to prevent global warming would reduce global warming by less than one ten-millionth of a degree (actually, it is more like one 20-millionth).
• That, therefore, efforts at preventing global warming would be no more likely to make any discernible difference than King Canute’s attempt to stop sea-level rise: “If even I, the divinely-anointed King, cannot command these little waves to stay back, remember that you too, my servants, are not all-powerful. Therefore, give praise not to me but to Him Who made the world and alone commands the waves.”
• That once the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power in a national grid exceeds the total hourly demand on that grid, as it now does in may Western countries, adding any further wind and solar installations will greatly increase the cost of electricity but will not reduce CO2 emissions at all (though it will make each wind and solar installation very much less profitable).
• That global land area devoted to cereal crops has barely changed in the past 60 years of global warming, but the yield per acre has tripled.
• That CO2 fertilization, according to chlorophyll fluorescence measured from space, has increased the net primary productivity of plants and trees – their total green biomass – by 15-30% in the past quarter of a century.
• That the global land area under drought has declined by some 30% in recent decades.
• That deaths from famine have reached record lows worldwide during the recent decades of global warming.
• That deaths from extreme weather of all kinds have declined (in fact, they have now declined by 99% in 100 years, despite a quadrupling of global population over the same period).
• That climatologists have long predicted, and continue to predict, about twice to thrice as much global warming every ten years than the rate that has been observed since they made their original predictions more than a third of a century ago.
• That IPCC predicts warming at 2 to 5 degrees per century, equivalent to 0.2 to 0.5 degrees per decade, but that in the third of a century since its first report in 1990 the measured warming rate has been only 0.15 to 0.2 degrees per decade.
• That the CMIP6 generation of climate models (the most recent) predict 4 K warming by doubled CO2 at midrange, which is plainly excessive.
• That about a quarter of the actual warming is of natural origin.
• That very nearly all of the “environmental” organizations in the West are Communist-led (though most of the members of these groups are merely what Ulyanov described as “useful idiots” who, however much they care about the environment, are naively unaware that the organizations to which they subscribe are Communist front groups).
• That in the 40 years 1694-1733 the Central England Temperature Record had shown warming equivalent to 4.33 degrees per century. No subsequent period of 40 years has shown such rapid warming in that dataset, which has proven to be quite a good proxy for global temperature because England is at the right latitude.
• That the recent spike in global temperature was plainly caused not by global warming but by the peak of the natural el Nino southern oscillation, and perhaps by the ejection of water vapor, a greenhouse gas, into the stratosphere by the eruption of the subsea Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano.
• That one should not seize upon single climatic events and try to draw catastrophic conclusions therefrom.
• That 750 million years ago the CO2 concentration was 7500 ppmv (it is only 425 today), and yet the planet did not fry.
• That few if any sources on which Bishop sought to rely were peer-reviewed.
• That my team has contributed some two dozen papers to the peer-reviewed literature on climate sensitivity and mitigation economics.
• That I get my science from measurements; from observations; from applying established theory to those measurements and observations; from reports by other scientists who have applied established theory from measurements and observations; from thinking hard about measurements, observations, theory and reports; from and discussing all of the above with others who are interested.
• That the Communist-led giants of the East are very greatly increasing their use of coal and oil, and hence their CO2 emissions.
• That sunshine-driven emission temperature accounts for some 90% of global temperature and is thus the chief driver thereof.
• That CO2 is a driver, but not the driver, and not the most important driver either, not by a long chalk.
• That Bishop should “think again, and think more carefully and more dispassionately”.

Well, that is just some of the information that I gave to Bishop in reply to his patronizing and ignorant emails over four years. But practically none of it found its way into his hit-piece.

Let us now turn to what he does say. Decide for yourself whether it is in any way an adequate, truthful and fair reflection of the information which I can prove was available to Bishop.

Bishop starts by saying that I had been wrong to say a glacier had been forming on Ben Nevis (or, in its Gaelic form, Beinn Nibheis). No: I was not wrong, though the proto-glacier has since disappeared. The fact that it appeared at all after a century of global warming shows how variable the climate is.

Bishop says I had alleged in 2014 that there had been 18 years without any global warming at all. Indeed there had not been any. In fact, the pause in global warming would eventually endure for almost 19 years, and even IPCC’s then chairman ended up admitting it.

Bishop says I had stated (or in his word “alleged”) that the Himalayan glaciers were “showing no particular change in 200 years”. Well, that is Professor Bhat’s view, after careful study of the records kept over that period by the British Raj and, since then, by the Government of India.

And does Bishop rely on peer-reviewed science to refute Professor Bhat. First, he fails to mention Professor Bhat at all. Then his first source for the alleged unprecedented decline in Himalayan ice is a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature, an environmental lobby group.

Next, he cites a study from Yale University which “suggests that the area of Himalayan glaciers has shrunk by 40% since the Little Ice Age maximum” up to 700 years ago.

Well, of course, the glaciers have shrunk since the end of the Medieval Warm Period; but even Bishop must surely have realized that citing a 700-year record as showing glacial recession since the blessed warm period during which the great cathedrals of Europe were built does not refute Professor Bhat’s 200-year record showing little in the way of unprecedented change. This timescale distortion is a frequent climate-Communist trick.

Then Bishop uses a favorite Communist tactic: he quotes me as saying in 2013, “If you happen to know of a small Pacific island that’s getting worried by the propaganda, tell them the good news …” Then Bishop adds, in square brackets, “[that there’s no warming]”. 

But I do not say there is no warming. I do say, following detailed discussions with the late Professor Niklas Moerner and the late Tom Wysmuller, that the warming is not enough to cause sea-level rise, and that corals are more than capable of growing to match the slow, small, harmless rate of sea-level rise, well within natural variability, that is actually occurring.

Bishop says the islands of Tegua, Tebuninako and Serua are “among the many islands that are disappearing”. Let’s look at the two islands that are really disappearing. One is Lobnachara, driven beneath the waves not by rising sea level driven by global warming, but rather by tectonic subduction as the Indian plate is driven downward beneath the Himalayan plate (which is why the summit of Everest, originally measured at exactly 29,000 feet, is now 29,032 feet above sea level.

Then there are the Cartaret Islands, which are sinking because the subsea volcanic rock on which the corals are built is collapsing, and because the locals have been dynamiting the reefs to get at the fish. Again, nothing to do with sea level rise.

In other places, removal of corals, or of natural barriers against the sea, has allowed ingress of water. Professor Moerner, visiting Bangladesh, found that sea level had fallen somewhat, but that the establishment of prawn-farms had led to removal of the mangroves that had lined the coastal margin, keeping the sea at bay.

Worldwide, sea level is rising, albeit very slowly. After allowing for local variations in the isostatic rebound since the last Ice Age, sea level is rising everywhere at about 1 cm/decade, or 4 inches per century, according to research by Tom Wysmuller. 

That is not enough to drive islands underwater, except where those islands are only a few inches above sea level (in which case every passing storm will swamp them anyway) or where local tectonic variability has lowered the seabed, as at Lobnachara.

Overall, numerous studies show that nearly all the Pacific atolls have actually been growing, not declining, since corals are well able to keep pace with 4 inches per century of mean sea level rise.

Next, Bishop messes about with timescales, and this time also switches the subject matter of the datasets. He quoted me as saying, “The Barrier Reef Authority has established that sea levels in the region of the Reef have not changed at all over the last 30 years.” That, indeed, is what the Authority’s own sea-level graph shows.

So Bishop quotes the Authority as talking of “the Great Barrier Reef warming by 0.8 degrees Cewlsius [since 1910]”. But 124 years have passed since 1910, and I was talking only of the past 30 years. And, above all, I was talking not of temperatures but of sea levels.

Next, Bishop says that in a talk in New Zealand I had said that in Greenland the ice did not melt 8000 years ago and it isn’t melting today.”

In fact, the coastal margins have shown some ice-melt, and yet whaling records show that there was less ice on the coast in earlier times than there is today. And the Viking burial-ground near Hvalsey is under permafrost today, but it was certainly not under permafrost in the Middle Ages, when the Vikings buried their dead there.

And, as Niklas Moerner explained to me on many occasions, the vast bulk of the ice in Greenland is on the high plateau, held in place by a ring of mountains. On the plateau, the ice is visibly thickening: so much so that the old DEW-line radar early-warning stations (now replaced by satellites to detect intercontinental missiles) are 20-30 feet below the present surface, which has grown around them as snow accumulates, packs down, forms firn and eventually becomes ice.

Next, Bishop says I told the U.S. Congress that the Sahara is greening. He may care to read Nicholson et al. (1981), who reported that the margin of the Sahara has retreated by 600,000 square kilometres, giving place to vegetation, and that nomadic tribes had been able to return to settle in places that had not seen human settlement within living memory. I cited Nicholson explicitly in my talk, but Bishop – of course – deliberately failed to cite the reference.

Next, Bishop says that in a speech to a recent Heartland conference I had mentioned “predictions by scientists of increases in extreme weather leading to more severe wildfires”. 

This paraphrase is grossly inaccurate and not in context. What I had said was that, despite the predictions of gloom, there were fewer wildfires today than in the 1920s and 1930s, and I showed a graph demonstrating this fact.

Again, Bishop uses the timescale technique, citing “CarbonBrief”, another Communist-led front group, as saying that “today, wildfires are burning more than twice the area than in the 1980s and 1990s”. 

Setting aside the awful grammar characteristic of totalitarians, I had shown that wildfires were indeed less today than in the 1920s and 1930s. On any view, citing a Communist document based on data since the 1980s and 1990s is hardly an effective refutation of a point made based on the spike in wildfires during the Grapes of Wrath dustbowl years of the 1920s-1930s, when North America (to name but one region) was warmer than today.

Nest, Bishop says I had once said “They [the UN] are about to impose a communist world government on the world.”

Here, in full, is what I said. It was at a meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, shortly before the UN climate conference in 2009: 

“At Copenhagen this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it. I have read that treaty, and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’ – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. And we’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. 

“How many of you think the world ‘election’, or ‘democracy’ or ‘vote’, or ‘ballot’ occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right: it doesn’t appear once. So at last the Communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they’d captured it – now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a Communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathy with these points of view and he’ll sign. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel peace laureate. Of course, he will. And the trouble is this: if that treaty is signed your constitution says it takes precedence over your constitution and you can’t resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other state parties. And because you’ll be the biggest paying country they’ll not let you out.

“So, thank you America. You were the beacon of freedom. It is a privilege to merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect would have any power whatsoever to take it back again. 

“That is how serious it is. I have read the treaty. I have the seen the stuff about government, climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or no.

“But I think it is here – here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty, for there is no problem with the climate and, even if there were, economically speaking, there’s nothing we can do about it. 

“So I end by saying to you the words Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow: ‘Sail on, O ship of state. Sail on, O union strong and great. Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate.’ Thank you.” 

The draft Copenhagen treaty indeed proposed to establish a world “government” (the word appeared explicitly, in that context, in the draft). The “government” was to be given overriding, pre-emptive powers of enforcement, and even of taxation, to settle the West’s supposed “climate debt” and to Save The Planet from catastrophic global warming.

However, Willie Soon, who reads everything, had spotted the draft treaty, buried in plain sight on an obscure part of the UN website. He contacted me at once and told me about it. I was in Canada at the time, and was about to address a meeting of some of North America’s leading oil executives. 

During my speech, I mentioned the draft Copenhagen treaty. A journalist at the meeting came up to me and scornfully said, “I thought better of you than this. Of course they’re not proposing to set up a world government.”

I replied, “I have three words for you: Read. The. Bloody. Treaty. Actually, that’s four words, but you deserved the extra word.”

He said, “What? You mean, there really is a draft treaty?” 

I told him to go away and read it. A day later, he telephoned and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I said I rather thought I had.

He said, “But it’s far worse than you said. They really are proposing to set up a global government, and, exactly as you say, there’s no mention of electing it.”

He spent a week checking very carefully, and then ran a front-page story in Canada’s national newspaper, the Morning Post, revealing the existence of the treaty draft.

The overwhelmingly negative publicity was part of the reason why the Copenhagen conference did not adopt the treaty draft. China, in particular, vetoed it because it did not want a global government interfering in its internal affairs, and it wanted to go on building more and more coal-fired power stations, even while its agents of influence in the West promote the climate nonsense, driving up our electricity costs so that they are now seven times those in China or Russia, India or Pakistan.

That is the reason why Communist agents of influence in the West are so actively promoting the Party Line on climate change. The consequent destruction of the Western economies gives the Communist East a priceless terms-of-trade advantage: for it is in the West, almost alone, that we are wreaking needless destruction on our economies by ending the free market in static and locomotive energy supply.

Next, Bishop tries to smear me by suggesting that I am paid to promote climate scepticism. Instead of saying outright that I am paid, it said that the late Bob Carter used to be paid a monthly fee, and that I have spoken at Heartland conferences. Well, so I have, but I take no fee for my appearances. My expenses are paid, and that’s that. No one pays me. But who are the financial backers behind the blog for which Bishop writes? I think we should be told. How much was he paid to write his putrid and woefully inaccurate hate-speech?

I hope you have found this long article interesting. It has revealed something of the artifices and techniques by which the climate Communists seek to silence all debate on the climate question by endlessly blackening the reputations of those whom they deem to be a threat to the Party Line, and hence to the Communism that they so foolishly espouse.

And lest you should think that I have overused the word “Communist” in this article, know this. The late Ion Mihai Pacepa, who founded the disinformation directorate of the KGB and came out to the West in 1978 and told us everything, continued to provide us with priceless information on what the Russian Communists were and are doing, right i[ until his death three years ago. Aside from his family, there were only two others at his virtual memorial service. One was the director of the CIA who had been his handler. The other was me. 

I shall say no more than that, in the intelligence community, there is a rule of thumb that any sudden and obviously nonsensical societal change arises not accidentally but deliberately. The rapid promotion, adoption and lazy acceptance of the laughable global warming nonsense was and is indeed actively driven by Communists, among whom the Russian regime (which is the KGB old guard rebranded, with 6000 former KGB operatives in positions of power throughout Russia) has recently been joined by the Chinese regime.

Climate Communism is a strategic threat to the West. Real economic damage is being done, and the free market on which Western prosperity and democracy were built is being rapidly dismantled. 

I end by saying of the West what the Portuguese-American philosopher said of the British Empire: “The world never had sweeter masters”. The world will long regret the passing of Western hegemony, and historians will be baffled at the ease with which entire populations in the once-free world were swayed by swallowing the egregious absurdities peddled for pay by the likes of the contemptible Bishop.