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Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a former British journalist.

LIBEL WARNING. Attempts are being made by Misplaced Pages or by people editing this page to repeat serious libels for which a UK national newspaper had to publish the correction which appears in the paragraphs below. If any further attempts are made to repeat the libels, either by way of a link to the tainted article in that newspaper or by way of pejorative comments in what is supposed to be a straightforward biographical record, I may without further notice issue proceedings for libel against the Wikimedia Foundation and against at least one named individual whose malicious activities I have been able to trace. An image of this page has been retained and will be produced as evidence in court if necessary.

At least he spelt my name right

IT’S A SHAME that George Monbiot didn’t check his facts with me before using yesterday’s column to describe my two recent Sunday Telegraph articles on climate change as “nonsense from start to finish”. He implies that a classically-trained Peer ought not to express scientific opinions. It’s still a free country, George. And at least I got the science right. George says my physics is “bafflingly bad” and contains “downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish”. Yet he himself nonsensically refers to “lambda” as a “constant” in the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation. Lambda is not a constant, and it’s not a term in the equation. He wrongly states that the equation only describes “blackbodies” that absorb all radiant energy reaching them. No qualified physicist would make such a schoolboy howler. Of course the equation isn’t limited to blackbodies. Its emissivity variable runs from 0 for whitebodies to 1 for blackbodies. The Earth/troposphere system is a rather badly-behaved greybody with emissivity about 0.6. He prays in aid one Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA, but doesn’t admit that his verbatim quote is not from Schmidt himself. It’s from a tendentious blog run by Schmidt and two authors of the UN’s now-discredited graph purporting to abolish the mediaeval warm period – a graph whose defects I’d pointed out in my articles. Check your sources, George. He says I was wrong to reinstate the mediaeval warm period cited by the UN in 1990 but abolished by it in 2001. A growing body of scientific papers, some of which I cited, shows that the warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Check them out, George. He says I shouldn’t have said the Viking presence in the middle ages shows Greenland was warmer then than now. Many Viking farmsteads in Greenland are now under permafrost, and you can’t farm permafrost. He says I was wrong to say James Hansen told Congress in 1988 that world temperature would rise 0.3C by 2000. Hansen projected 0.25 and 0.45C, averaging 0.35C. Outturn was 0.05C. I fairly said 0.3C and 0.1C. He says my source was a work of fiction by Michael Crichton. It wasn’t: it was Hansen’s graph. He says I overlooked the difference between the immediate and delayed temperature response to changing conditions. In fact I expressly addressed it, citing evidence on both sides of the theory that the delayed air-temperature response arises from warming of the oceans. He says I said the warming effects of carbon dioxide had been “made up”. I didn’t. I said all were agreed that there was more CO2 around and that we could expect some warming. But there’s no consensus on how much. He says I claimed to know better than the UN’s scientists. I’m arrogant, George, but not that arrogant: I said the contrarians were probably a lot closer to the truth than the UN. He implies I claimed that a supporting discussion amounted to a “scientific paper”. I didn’t. He makes much of a couple of small errors in my first article, but doesn’t say I apologized for them in the second. Too many facts wrong. Too much argument ad hominem instead of ad rem. Too much ignorance of the elementary physics of radiative transfer and equilibrium temperature.Still, gie the puir numpty a cigar – at least he spelled my name right.

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The eldest son of the 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Monckton was educated at Harrow School, Churchill College, Cambridge and University College, Cardiff. He joined the Yorkshire Post in 1974 and then worked as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office from 1977–79. In 1979, he became the editor of the Catholic newspaper, The Universe, and then as managing editor of The Sunday Telegraph's Magazine in 1981.

In 1983 he returned to the Conservative offices again, this time as Margaret Thatcher's policy advisor. Three years later, he became assistant editor of the newly-formed newspaper, Today. His final job in journalism was as a consulting editor of the Evening Standard from 1987–92.

Monckton was a director of the international consultancy company, Christopher Monckton Ltd, since its founding in 1987. He is also a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

In 1999, he created the Eternity Puzzle, a geometric puzzle which involved tiling a dodecagon with 209 irregularly shaped polygons called polydrafters. A £1m prize was won after 18 months. By that time, 500,000 puzzles had been sold. A second puzzle, Eternity II, is to be launched in July 2007, with a prize of $2 million.

Upon the death of his father in 2006, Monckton inherited his title.

Monckton has been in the news in recent months due to his climate change researches. In November 2006, he published in the The Daily Telegraph a widely-cited article critical of extremist climate change opinions. After U.S. Senators Rockefeller and Snowe wrote a letter to the Chief Executive Officer of ExxonMobil asking him to stop funding scientists who reject global warming, Lord Monckton wrote a letter to the senators reminding them of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and calling on them to reverse their position or resign. In February 2007, he published an analysis and summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change.

Monckton's researches about climate change have been challenged by climate scientists, but, unlike his calculations, the challenges have not been subjected to peer review. For instance Gavin Schmidt of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a noted climate alarmist, having incorrectly suggested that Monckton's calculations had treated the Earth as a blackbody, failed to correct his mistake when it was drawn to his attention, and Dr. Stephen Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter and Senior Research Associate at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, made similar elementary errors that would not have survived peer review.

In March 2007 Monckton challenged Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. Al Gore has not dared to take up the challenge . In May 2007 Monckton circulated among climate scientists calculations based on data and methods in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, demonstrating that the IPCC had overstated the temperature effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere by a factor of two. The calculations were peer-reviewed by one of the IPCC's own reviewers, and are in line with results by other climate researchers.

External links

• IPCC Fourth Assessment Report 2007 Analysis and Summary
• Apocalypse Cancelled
• Climate Chaos? Don't believe it, The Daily Telegraph, Nov 5th 2006.
• Uphold Free Speech or Resign

• 1952 births
• Alumni of Cardiff University
• Alumni of Churchill College, Cambridge
• British journalists
• British newspaper editors
• British Roman Catholics
• Knights of Malta
• Living people
• Officers of St John
• Old Harrovians
• Viscounts in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
• Officers of the Order of St John