Christopher Monckton, Chairman Rupert's heart of the nation, and a no brainer ...

(Above: Christopher Monckton as featured in Monbiot's royal flush: Top 10 climate change deniers).

It was disturbing to learn that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has joined the vast international conspiracy, led by the United Nations and scientists in government-funded black helicopters, insisting on the reality of climate change.

The Bureau of Meteorology says figures showing Australia has experienced its hottest decade since records began in 1910 are clear evidence of climate change.

The Bureau's annual report has found the average temperature over the past 10 years was 0.48 degrees Celsius above average. (Australia bakes through warmest decade on record).

Naturally the ABC was all over the news like the chicken little alarmists they are, failing to remember that the planet has actually cooled since 1998 and quoting possum-stirring climatologists who just want to get people needlessly excited:

Climatologist David Jones says each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the previous one.

And he has warned that this year is set to be even hotter, with temperatures likely to be between 0.5 and 1 degrees above average.

"There's no doubt about global warming, the planet's been warming now for most of the last century," he said.

"Occasionally it takes a breather, during La Nina events for example.

"But we're getting these increasingly warm temperatures - not just for Australia but globally - and climate change, global warming is clearly continuing.

"We're in the latter stages of an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean and what that means for Australian and global temperatures is that 2010 is likely to be another very warm year - perhaps even the warmest on record."

It seems NZ is the same (NZ records warmest decade to date) but enough of that already. Google up warmest decade and you can get all kinds of panic merchant and alarmist news about the heating up of the planet.

How is a learned newspaper, "the heart of the nation", namely Chairman Rupert's flock of minions ensconced at The Australian, going to respond to such news, aka desperate attention-seeking and conspiratorial ersatz pseudo-science?

Why naturally by publishing an article by Christopher Monckton under the rather peculiar header Mr Rudd, your misguided warming policies are killing millions.

Now of course it's Tim Blair's favourite cry that "Not a single person has been killed by global warming" (you can find the line here, but it's everywhere in Blair, like a plague of cockroaches as he preaches his cockroachist humans are good, kill all the poley bears creed).

Blair leads his line in the cause of identifying hysterics and Al Gorists, so it's tres piquant that Christopher Monckton - make sure you read his wiki entry here - should dramatically announce that Chairman Rudd's warming policies are killing millions.

Well that should shut up Tim Blair. QED, climate change, courtesy of Chairman Rudd, is clearly killing millions.

I keed, I keed.

Loon pond badly needs the likes of Monckton to keep the wheels turning, and sure enough his piece is delivered in rhetorical style by addressing Chairman Rudd personally. "You say I am one of ..." is the opening declaratory phrase, which oddly enough reminds me of the soft core style of writing pornography favoured by millions of middle class Americans ... "You walk into the bedroom and you shed your night dress and then you reach out for my pulsing ..."

But enough of that. Too much catering to the discerning adult male reader and this site will explode in a cloud of steam, and global warming will surely increase tenfold.

No, back to the argument, and Monckton delivers a beauty with "Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum ..."

Golly that sounds terribly scientific, and it reminds us inter alia, in an ad hominem kind of way, that we just love the pari passu pro rata pursuit of truth on the pond, best done by the deployment of Latinisms of the kind favoured either by lawyers or Christopher Pearson or other adherents of the papal follies of Rome.

Fortunately the always invaluable wiki provides a handy list of Latin legal phrases (here) which you can use to bolster your argument in case it seems flimsy or foolish, all the way from ab extra to voluntas necandi ("w" involves an arcane Philippines term). And if that isn't enough, you can always resort - in an argumentum - to wiki's handy list of latin phrases, which starts here.

But I digress. How is Chairman Rudd killing millions?

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world's poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, to grow biofuels for clunkers that don't. The policies that you advocate are killing people by the million. At a time when so many of the world's people are already short of food, the UN's right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has rightly condemned the biofuel scam as "a crime against humanity".

Oh dear. That sounds suspiciously like George Monbiot, well known climate change enthusiast at The Guardian, only he blamed George W. Bush rather than Chairman Rudd:

Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation’s transport fuel.

So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 this column warned that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. (here with footnotes).

Oh dear. Would this be the same George Monbiot who wrote of Christopher Monckton's noble work in the UK Sunday Telegraph in these unkind terms?

In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in that publication, it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist.

The author of this "research article" is Christopher Monckton, otherwise known as Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. He has a degree in classics and a diploma in journalism and, as far as I can tell, no further qualifications. But he is confident enough to maintain that - by contrast to all those charlatans and amateurs who wrote the reports produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - he is publishing "the truth". (here).

And who also voted Monckton as one of his royal flush of top ten climate change deniers (here):

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, whose academic qualification is a classics degree, maintains that "politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." He came to public notice with a long paper published on the website of the Sunday Telegraph, accusing the UN of scientific fraud. His paper was filled with sciencey equations and calculations, which were rapidly dismissed as bunkum by real scientists.

He has threatened several of those who have challenged his scientific claims with libel suits, but they have not yet materialised. Though he has never held a seat in the Lords, he maintained in a threatening letter to two US senators that he was "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature".

He has also claimed that, among other unlikely feats, he was responsible for winning the Falklands war. His grand statements about climate science and his own credentials have earned him the nickname among some environmentalists of Viscount Monckhausen.

Well ain't it grand that Monbiot and Monckton now seem to think alike, at least on the matter of biofuels.

Now you might ask - as you do when writing rhetorical pieces, because you might well ask - has Monckton drunk the kool aid on climate change and gone over to the Monbiot side in other matters?

Not really. Here's his solution. First go ad hominem (don't ya love Latin):

Nor is the IPCC's great lie the only lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a "global warming" profiteer.

Second deliver a flurry of gibberish, as a summary of other eye-glazing insights involving numbers and ppmv data, which are flung around like confetti, and which are designed to prove nothing much is happening in the climate change arena, but really prove what Monbiot was saying about Monckton's scientific method:

It is also a fact that, while those of the UN's computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase.

In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause "global warming" is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than about one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.

And thirdly, while suggesting nothing is happening, and even if it were, nothing can be done, but confronted with the leftist conspiratorial propaganda of the Bureau of Meteorology announcing the hottest decade ever since records began in the antipodes, still assert grandly and boldly that nothing needs to be done:

It would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02C of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It's a no-brainer.

Well there are no brainers, and then there are writers who demonstrate no brains.

We merely report, and you decide. But how could we start the new year without a squawk about the heat? And when confronted by this kind of idle rhetoric, no wonder Chairman Rudd feels like he's being given a free kick to pursue his flawed schemes.

So kudos to The Australian. Out of hundreds of possibilities for column writing on a serious issue, they chose Monckton to start off the year.

Clearly they realise loon pond is a looming threat to their circulation, and they'll stop at nothing to match our loonacy.

The heart of the nation? Well it surely ain't the brains ...

Now remind me. When were you last inspired? To think again? Or perhaps even to think for the first time. Please no hate mail here, send your complaints direct to Philip Adams, Ray Martin, Tetsuya, Gerry Harvey, Peter Cosgrove, Grant Hackett, Tim Horan, and Collette Dinnigan. (here). Quislings and lickspittle fellow travellers all. (Oops, a dollar to the Godwin's law swear jar).