Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Christopher Walter Monckton
3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Spouse	Juliet Jensen
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 questioned the theory that anthropogenic global warming and climate change may cause catastrophe.

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 English tabloid newspaper, 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.

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 the story was 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" . 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, his consultancy company has advised many political parties, including the Referendum Party, advising its founder Sir James Goldsmith, and, in 2003, the Scottish People's Alliance.

AIDS

In an article entitled "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS", written for the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator, written after he had consulted the first medical scientists to investigate disease, 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 the isolation should be humanely done, and need not be as drastic as the isolation that had been used as the standard method of preventing the spread of previous fatal infections. 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 an unsuccessful campaign to force the manufacturer of Monckton's Eternity Puzzle to disassociate itself from him because of his desire to spare the 25 million who have since died and the 40 million who are now infected (UNAIDS statistics) because the standard public health measures were not applied. Monckton more recently said that, though isolation had been possible and would have been right in the 1980s, "the article was written at the very outset of the AIDS epidemic, and with 40 million people around the world now infected, the possibility of [quarantine] is laughable. It couldn't work." AIDS, he has said, was an almost entirely avoidable and heartbreaking tragedy that occurred because the short-term vested interest of a narrow special interest group prevailed over the general interest.

European integration

Monckton is in favour of Europe and, therefore, against the European Union on the ground that, if it were to apply for membership of itself, its application would be rejected on the ground that it is insufficiently democratic. In a 2007 interview, he said he would "leave the European Union, close down 90 per cent of government services and shift power away from atheistic-humanist, bureaucratic-centralist governments and back 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, which, however, expressed considerable sympathy for the petitioner's position and would have found in his favour if the Government had not discovered, at the last moment, a line item in the EU Budget authorizing expenditure on the Social Chapter under the Maastricht Treaty that the UK Parliament had previously expressly declined to authorize. The Government took Monckton's challenge so seriously that it put up the Lord Advocate personally against him. The outcome was such that the Government was unable to recover its costs in the cause.

Global warming

Monckton is critical of the theory that anthropogenic global warming may prove catastrophic. Although he has acknowledged that global warming has occurred, he has cast doubt on its provenance and the underlying science in a number of newspaper articles and papers. His researches have attracted strong opinions for and against. 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 Sunday Telegraph articles published in November 2006, Monckton disputed the extent to which 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 criticized the IPCC's attempted abolition of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the IPCC's scientists had misapplied and failed to mention the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and discussed 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."

In an article in The Sunday Telegraph replying to Monckton, the former U.S. Vice President and environmental campaigner Al Gore 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.

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).

Monckton was an expert witness in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007, to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. The judge held that "The Armageddon scenario that he [Al Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view," and ordered that the UK Government must issue corrective guidance in writing to all schools, putting right nine "errors" of science in Gore's film. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had recommmended that a friend should support the case financially "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense", and that he had acted as an expert witness in the case. He is also seeking funding for the distribution to schools of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and of his own feature-length documentary, Apocalypse? NO!, as a riposte to Gore's film.

In March 2007, Monckton was featured in 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, called Apocalypse?, No!, described by a detractor as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science.", and by a supporter, Professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, as "the best presentation of the many I have seen on either side of the climate debate - powerful, informative, and emotionally compelling". 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.

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 numerous papers by Monckton on scientific and economic aspects of climate change.

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
• Real Climate: Cuckoo Science - analysis of Monckton's Telegraph articles, November 9, 2006
• Monckton saves the day!, The Observer, May 6, 2007

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