Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Christopher Monckton
3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Names Christopher Walter Monckton
Father	Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Mother	Marianna Laetitia Bower
Occupation	Retired international business consultant

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a retired British international business consultant, policy advisor, writer, and inventor. He served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and has attracted controversy for his public opposition to the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming and climate change.

Biography

Monckton was born on 14 February 1952, the eldest son of the 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. He was educated at Harrow School, Churchill College, Cambridge where he read classics and University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in journalism. On 19 May 1990, he married Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen. He inherited his father's hereditary peerage upon his father's death in 2006.

Career

Media

In 1974 at the age of 22, Monckton joined the Yorkshire Post, where he worked as a reporter and leader-writer. 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 Evening Standard as a leader-writer in 1982.

Politics

He returned to Conservative Central Office in late 1982, this time as a policy advisor for Margaret Thatcher. In 1986, he became assistant editor of the newly established, and now defunct, newspaper Today. He was a consulting editor for the Evening Standard from 1987 to 1992 and was its chief leader-writer from 1990 to 1992.

Although he has in the past stated that he is "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature," Monckton has never been a member of either the House of Lords or the House of Commons. The 1997 reform of the House of Lords ended the right of all but 92 hereditary peers to sit in Parliament, with the remaining 92 being elected by fellow peers within their party caucus. Monckton was one of 43 candidates for a Conservative seat in the House of Lords in a March 2007 by-election caused by the deaths of two peers, but received no votes. He has been highly critical of the way that the Lords has been reformed, describing the by-election procedure as "a bizarre constitutional abortion."

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 claimed that he had to sell his home, Crimonmogate, to pay the prize; he later admitted he fabricated the story as a publicity stunt. A second puzzle, Eternity II, was launched on 28 July 2007, with a prize of $2 million.

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 Yacht Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.

Political views

Social policy

Monckton has been described as "a fervent, forthright and opinionated Roman Catholic Tory" who has been closely associated with the "New Right" faction of the Conservative Party. As one of Margaret Thatcher's policy advisors, he has been credited with being "the brains behind the Thatcherite policy of giving council tenants the right to buy their homes." In more recent years, he has been associated with the Referendum Party, advising its founder Sir James Goldsmith, and in 2003 he helped a Scottish Tory breakaway group, the People's Alliance.

AIDS

Monckton's views on how the AIDS epidemic should be tackled have been the subject of some controversy. In an article entitled "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS", 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." 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"). 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. 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. Monckton has since disavowed his 1987 comments on AIDS, stating 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 doing this [isolation] is laughable. It couldn't work."

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 Maastrict 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.

Global warming

Monckton is skeptical of the anthropogenic causes and scope of global warming, which he regards as a controversy catalyzed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round" following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although he has acknowledged that global warming is real, he has cast doubt on its provenance and the underlying science in a number of newspaper articles and papers. His views have attracted controversy and strong criticism from scientists and environmental activists, including Al Gore and George Monbiot. According to Monckton, his interest in the subject was provoked by "a finance house [asking] me to look into it to see if it was anything the financial sector should worry about. The more I looked the more I thought, hang on, none of this quite adds up."

In two high-profile Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton has disputed whether global warming is man-made, suggested that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic and criticized the science performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In particular, he has criticized the IPCC's interpretation of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the IPCC's scientists have misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming. 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."

Gavin Schmidt has criticised Monckton's analysis of climate sensitivity as "sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary" [1]. Dr. Stephan Harrison criticises Moncktons' articles as "full of errors, misuse of data and cherry-picked examples" [2]. The British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has criticized Monckton's arguments as "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish." In a response published in The Guardian, Monckton has argued that he "got the science right" and that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics". According to Monbiot, Monckton has since threatened him and The Guardian "with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science." Monckton's views have also been criticized by Al Gore. In an article in The Sunday Telegraph, the former U.S. Vice President and environmental campaigner described Monckton's scientific assertions as "extremely misleading" and "completely wrong". Monckton has in turn accused Gore of having "bastardised" science and having produced "a foofaraw of pseudo-science" in the form of his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Monckton's critics charge that "[his] science is self-taught and his paper qualifications nonexistent" and that "he is trying to take on the global scientific establishment on the strength of a classics degree from Cambridge." For his part, Monckton takes the view that it is "a very modern notion that you need paper qualifications to pronounce on anything and it comes from the socialist idea that people need to be trained in the official, accepted, dogmatic truths."

After the U.S. Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe wrote a bipartisan letter to the Chief Executive Officer of ExxonMobil asking him to stop funding think tanks that reject global warming, Monckton wrote to them, asserting that their letter to ExxonMobil violated the corporation's right of free speech and calling on them to reverse their position or resign. 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. A number of his writings on global warming, including his letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller and his IPCC critique, have been published by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), part of Frontiers of Freedom, a conservative organization funded by ExxonMobil that has campaigned against the screening of An Inconvenient Truth in U.S. schools. Monckton and other unnamed backers part-funded 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. He is also funding the distribution to schools of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film. He is a supporter of The New Party and wrote part of its manifesto.

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 has provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, to be called Apocalypse No, described as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science." The film will include 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.

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

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

See also

• Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
• Rosa Monckton

External links

• Apocalypse Cancelled
• Greenhouse warming? What greenhouse warming? by Christopher Monckton
• Gore Gored Monckton's response to Gore
• Monckton saves the day!, The Observer, May 6, 2007
• Real Climate: Cuckoo Science - analysis of Monckton's Telegraph articles, November 9, 2006