Monday, June 28, 2010

More reviews on Lord Monckton's "science"

Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah
A Local Front in a Global Battle

The Monckton Files: Solar Variation
Recently, Prof. John Abraham criticized Lord Christopher Monckton for citing scads of scientific papers to back up his opinions about climate change, but when Abraham actually looked into those papers, it often turned out they didn’t support Monckton’s conclusions, or they even contradicted those conclusions.  

Given his rap sheet (including numerous infractions mentioned on this blog), I thought it would be fun to start examining Lord Monckton’s recent testimony before a committee of the U.S. Congress.  What if I were to scan through the document, randomly pick one of Monckton’s claims that I don’t know much about, and start investigating the literature he cites?  Would I find that he makes reasonable points, or that he has continued his nearly unblemished record of propagating scientific-sounding nonsense?  

Tim Lambert has already shown that Monckton’s testimony was flamboyantly incompetent about three issues (solar brightening, ocean acidification, and Snowball Earth), so I picked another topic that has to do with variations in the radiation output of the Sun.

read on at http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/the-monckton-files-solar-variation/

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Monckton's testimony to Congress
May 9, 2010 by Tim Lambert

The most damning thing about Christopher Monckton's testimony to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on global warming science (video here), is the fact that the Republicans could not or would not get a single scientist to testify.

His main argument is based on the same confusion that I dealt with in my debate with him -- the idea that Pinker (2005) which found an increase in short wave radiation at the surface, actually found an increase in radiative forcing. Rachel Pinker herself explained the difference:

The CO2 "radiative forcing" value that Mr. Christopher Monckton is quoting refers to the impact on the Earth's Radiative balance as described above. The numbers that we quote in our paper represent the change in surface SW due to changes in the atmosphere (clouds, water vapor, aerosols). These two numbers cannot be compared at their face value.

But Monckton ignored this correction from Pinker in his testimony:

read on at http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/05/moncktons_testimony_to_congres.php

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