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Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

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Revision as of 00:47, 27 December 2009 by Kittybrewster (talk | contribs) (reinsert authorised pic)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) Not to be confused with Christopher J. Monckton. 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Christopher Walter Monckton
3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Viscount Monckton in Copenhagen,
December 2009
Names
Christopher Walter Monckton
OccupationBusiness consultant, inventor, journalist

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a British politician, business consultant, policy adviser, writer, columnist, inventor and hereditary peer. He served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher's policy unit in the 1980s and invented the Eternity puzzle at the end of the 1990s. More recently, he has attracted attention for his public opposition to the notion that anthropogenic climate change may prove catastrophic. He also invented a sequel to his original puzzle called Eternity II in 2007, which is still unsolved.

Biography

Monckton was born on 14 February 1952, the eldest son of the late Major-General 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, CB, OBE, MC, MA, DL and Marianna Letitia (nee Bower), former High Sheriff of Kent and a Dame of Malta. He was educated at Harrow School, Churchill College, Cambridge BA (Honours) classical archaeology and architecture 1973, MA 1974 and University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in Journalism Studies. In 1990, he married Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen. He inherited his father's peerage upon his father's death in 2006.

Career

Media and politics

Monckton joined the Yorkshire Post in 1974 at the age of 22, where he worked as a reporter and leader-writer, the youngest on a major newspaper at the time. From 1977 to 1978, he worked at Conservative Central Office as a press officer, becoming the editor of the Roman Catholic newspaper The Universe in 1979, then managing editor of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 1981. He joined the London Evening Standard newspaper as a leader-writer in 1982.

In 1979 Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings. Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups. He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street. Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982, where he worked until 1986 as a special advisor on home affairs, including science, economics and housing.

He left the Policy Unit to become assistant editor of the newspaper Today. He was consulting editor for the Evening Standard from 1987 to 1992 and was its chief leader-writer from 1990 to 1992.

Monckton is a hereditary peer, one of those who as a result of recent Labour legislation no longer have voting rights in the House of Lords. Monckton was a candidate for a seat in the House of Lords in a March 2007 by-election caused by the death of Lord Mowbray and Stourton. He received no votes in the election. He was highly critical of the way that the Lords had been reformed, describing the by-election procedure, with 43 candidates and 47 electors, as "a bizarre constitutional abortion."

Associations

Monckton is a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.

Political views

Climate change

Monckton is critical of the theory that anthropogenic climate change may prove significant enough to be catastrophic. He regards "global warming" as a controversy catalysed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989". He has expressed doubt about the magnitude and significance of anthropogenic global warming in a number of newspaper articles and papers. "Global warming" PR men James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore claim in their book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that Monckton has "no training whatsoever in science": however, in his first year as an undergraduate at Cambridge he contributed to the mathematicians' journal Eureka; he advised Margaret Thatcher on scientific matters from warship hydrodynamics to epidemiology and psephology, and Peter Taylor, in his book "Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory", describes him as "a certain dogged, scientifically literate member of the English House of Lords" who had tracked down the basic physics of the equations used by the atmosphere model. Also, to be fair, he has as much scientific background as Al Gore, or Caroline Lucas, the UK's sole Green MEP. The Daily Telegraph has described him as "a former economic adviser".

In two Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton said that the man-made component in "global warming" was small, suggested that it was unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticised the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, he has criticised the IPCC's attempted abolition of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the science in the IPCC reports has misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming.

The British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, a zoologist with no qualifications in climate science, has criticised Monckton's arguments, labelling them "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish." In response, Monckton argued that he "got the science right", claiming that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics"..

In response to the U.K. government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he has argued that the review's recommendation to invest 1% of global GDP in climate change mitigation would be ineffective, as would the introduction of carbon taxes and emissions trading as a means of curbing carbon emissions. He has proposed instead that the best solution should be to "go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation."

In February 2007, he published a critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change. His calculations of climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been published in the Quarterly Economic Bulletin.

Monckton was an expert witness for the claimant in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense" and had drafted the scientific testimony for the litigation against the British government. He was also incorrectly reported to have funded the distribution to schools of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film. No such distribution to schools has in fact occurred.

In March 2007, Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President did not respond. The Science and Public Policy Institute provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, titled Apocalypse?, No!, described in a student newspaper as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science." The film includes footage of Monckton giving a Gore-style presentation given on 8 October 2007 at the Cambridge Union in which he asserted that Gore and the IPCC had systematically falsified and exaggerated the evidence for global warming.. However, Dr. Laurence Gould, Professor of Physics at Hartford University, has described Monckton's full-length feature movie as "scientifically masterful, brilliantly composed, and emotionally moving - one of the best presentations on climate change that I have seen".

During the autumn of 2009, Monckton embarked on a tour of North America at the invitation of various groups, to explain why the science of "global warming" is unsatisfactory in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009. He warned that US President Barack Obama intended to sign a treaty at the conference which would "impose a communist world government on the world". This was picked up by numerous commentators on the American right, including Glenn Beck. Writing in Salon, Alex Koppelman criticised Monckton's assertions about the conference's framework for negotiation as being "woefully inaccurate. And that's a nice way of putting it." However, Kevin Libin, in a front-page feature in Canada's National Post, described Monckton as having done a service by having revealed the text of an early draft of the Copenhagen Treaty, which contained provisions to establish a world government.

American Physical Society article on climate sensitivity

In July 2008 Monckton wrote an article about climate sensitivity for the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society., concluding: "it is very likely that in response to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration will rise not by the 3.26 K suggested by the IPCC, but by <1 K."

Some media commentators interpreted the publication of his paper as a sign that the American Physical Society had abandoned its earlier support for the scientific consensus on climate change. In response, the APS reaffirmed its unchanged position on climate change and pointed out that the newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society "carries the statement that 'Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.' This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed." However, the print edition of Physics and Society, and all previous editions, had carried a differently-worded statement to the effect that the jounal carried "reviewed articles". The APS further added a disclaimer to the top of Monckton's article stating: "...Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions. However, subsequently the APS, at Lord Monckton's insistence, removed the statements to the effect that the world scientific community and the Council of the APS disagreed with the paper, when the President of the APS was unable to produce any evidence to support either proposition." In a response, Monckton called the APS "red flag" "discourteous" and pointed out that the review editor of the journal, Dr. Alvin Saperstein, Professor of Physics at Wayne State University, had reviewed his paper "in meticulous detail".

Social policy

Eddy Shah: Today and the Newspaper Revolution describes him as "a fervent, forthright and opinionated Roman Catholic Tory". As one of Margaret Thatcher's policy advisors, he has been credited with being "the brains behind the Thatcherite policy of giving council tenants (public housing) the right to buy their homes." In more recent years, he has given consultancy advice to the Referendum Party, advising its founder Sir James Goldsmith, and in 2003 he also gave consultancy advice to a Scottish Tory breakaway group, the People's Alliance. In 2009 he joined the UK Independence Party, which has advocated a policy of defunding all public spending on climate change.

Business consultancy

In 1987, Monckton founded a consultancy company, Christopher Monckton Ltd., where he served as a director until he retired because of ill health in 2006. In 1999, he created and published 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 two Cambridge mathematicians. By that time, 500,000 puzzles had been sold. Monckton sold his home, Crimonmogate, when it became clear to him that the prize was likely to be won; and the makers of the puzzle used the fact to promote further sales of the puzzle. A second puzzle, Eternity II, was launched on 28 July 2007, with a prize of $2 million. No valid claim for the prize has yet been received. The prize remains available until noon GMT on 31 December 2010.

Views on AIDS

In an article for The American Spectator entitled "AIDS: A British View", written for the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator, he argued that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently," adding that because transmission of the disease required close contact the isolation need not be inhumane. This would involve isolating between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States ("not altogether impossible") and another 30,000 people in the UK ("not insuperably difficult"). The The American Spectator's then assistant managing editor, Andrew Ferguson, denounced the article in the letters column of the same issue. Monckton appeared on the BBC's Panorama programme in February 1987 to discuss his views and present the results of an opinion poll that found public support for his position. UNAIDS figures have shown that, since then, 25 million people have died of HIV and its consequences, with a further 40 million infected. Monckton is on record as saying that many of these deaths could have been prevented if the usual public-health protocols had been followed.

In 1999 the British gay rights group OutRage! launched a campaign to force the manufacturer of Monckton's Eternity Puzzle to disassociate itself from him because of his views. The manufacturers paid no attention. Monckton has since said that "the article was written at the very outset of the AIDS epidemic, and with 33 million people around the world now infected, the possibility of is laughable. It couldn't work." However, he adheres to his opinion that it could have worked if the standard public-health protocol for new, fatal, incurable infections had been followed, and followed early enough (Movie Apocalypse? No!).

European integration

Monckton has been an advocate of Euroscepticism for many years; as he put it in a 2007 interview, he would "leave the European Union, close down 90 per cent of government services and shift power away from the atheistic, humanistic government and into the hands of families and individuals." In 1994, he sued the Conservative government of John Major for agreeing to contribute to the costs of the Protocol on Social Policy agreed in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, although the UK had an opt-out from the protocol. The case was heard in the Scottish Court of Session in May 1994. His petition for judicial review was dismissed by the court for want of relevancy: however, the judge expressed considerable sympathy with the petitioner's position.

Published works

  • The Laker Story (with Ivan Fallon). Christensen, 1982. ISBN 0950800708
  • Anglican Orders: null and void?. Family History Books, 1986.
  • The AIDS Report. 1987
  • European Monetary Union: opportunities and dangers. University of St. Andrews, Department of Economics. 1997
  • Sudoku X. Headline Publishing Group, 2005. ISBN 0755315014
  • Sudoku X-mas. Headline Publishing Group, 2005. ISBN 0755315022
  • Sudoku Xpert. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315294
  • Junior Sudoku X. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315286
  • Sudoku Xtreme. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315308
  • "Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered". Forum on Physics and Society, American Physical Society. 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published some 70 papers and reports by Monckton on climate-change science.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Who's Who 2007, p. 1599
  2. ^ Cockett, Richard (1995). Thinking the unthinkable: think tanks and the economic counter-revolution 1931-1983. HarperCollins. ISBN 9780006375869.
  3. ^ Kandiah, Michael; Seldon, Anthony (1997). Ideas and think tanks in contemporary Britain, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 59, 62. ISBN 9780714647715.
  4. ^ Womersley, Tara (2001-06-22). "Puzzle inventor sells £1m home to Chanel model".
  5. Beckett, Andy (2007-02-24). "Born to run: There are 47 voters, 43 candidates, and the race to be elected a hereditary Tory peer is on. Is this democracy at last in the House of Lords?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
  6. ^ Brown, Allan. "From here to Eternity II". The Sunday Times, 22 July 2007
  7. Hoggan, James; Littlemore, Richard (2009). Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Greystone Books. p. 85, 113. ISBN 9781553654858.
  8. Monckton, Christopher. "Climate chaos? Don't believe it", The Sunday Telegraph, 5 November 2006.
  9. Monbiot, George. "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong", The Guardian, 14 November 2006
  10. Monckton, Christopher. "This wasn't gibberish. I got my facts right on global warming", The Guardian, 16 November 2006
  11. Monckton, Christopher. Wrong problem, wrong solution, The Sunday Telegraph, 15 November 2006.
  12. Monckton, Christopher (February 2007). "IPCC Fourth Assessment Report 2007 Analysis and Summary" (PDF).
  13. "Quarterly Economic Bulletin" (PDF). December 2006.
  14. "Glenn talks with Lord Monckton". Glenn Beck. 2008-03-04.
  15. ^ Leake, Jonathan (2007-10-14). "Please, sir - Gore's got warming wrong". The Times.
  16. "Al Gore Challenged to Climate Debate". NewsMax, 19 March 2007
  17. Hardie, Josh. "Global warming: fact or theory?", The Cambridge Student, 13 October 2007
  18. Koppelman, Alex (2009-10-19). "Warming treaty to usher in one-world government?". Salon.com.
  19. Editor Jeffrey Marque, Alvin Saperstein (2008). "Editors Comments". American Physical Society. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  20. Monckton, Christopher (2008). "Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered". Forum on Physics and Society. American Physical Society. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  21. Pruden, Wesley. "A bad day for the red-hots". Washington Times, 18 July 2008.
  22. "APS Climate Change Statement: APS Position Remains Unchanged." American Physical Society, 18 July 2008
  23. Wagenseil, Paul. "Newsletter Article Causes Climate-Change Kerfuffle". Fox News, 21 July 2008
  24. "Lord Monckton's Letter to Dr. Bienenstock" (PDF). Science & Public Policy Institute. 2008-07-19. Retrieved 2008-09-27.
  25. MacArthur, Brian. Eddy Shah: Today and the Newspaper Revolution, p. 154. David & Charles Publishers, 1988. ISBN 0715391453
  26. ^ Virginia Berridge. AIDS in the UK: The Making of a Policy, 1981-1994, p. 132. Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0198204736
  27. ^ Leppard, David. "Top Tory in a kilt hit by visa 'racket' case", The Times, 3 October 2004
  28. Vaughan, Adam (2009-12-11). "In denial: Lord Monckton's climate change rant at activists". The Guardian.
  29. Bloom, Godfrey (2009-12-07). "Ukip: take public debt seriously". Financial Times.
  30. ^ "£1m Eternity jackpot scooped". BBC News Online. BBC. 2000-10-26.
  31. Frank Urquhart. "Aristocrat admits tale of lost home was stunt to boost puzzle sales". The Scotsman.
  32. Mackay, Neil (1999-11-28). "Aristocrat's game plan puzzle". The Sunday Herald. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
  33. "Monckton, Christopher. "AIDS: A British View"" The American Spectator, January 1987
  34. Bawer, Bruce (1993). A place at the table: the gay individual in American society. Poseidon Press. p. 75. ISBN 9780671795337.
  35. "OutRage Goads ERTL re Monckton". The Advocate, 5 August 1999
  36. "'I'm bad at doing what I'm told. I'm a born free-thinker ' - The 5-Minute Interview", The Independent, 24 August 2007
  37. "Lawful for UK to contribute to European social policy costs - Scots Law report", The Times, 12 May 1994
  38. Science and Public Policy Institute - Monckton Papers

External links


Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded byGilbert Monckton Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
2006–present 		Succeeded byIncumbent
Extant viscountcies in the peerages of Britain and Ireland
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