The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley was a contemporary of mine at university. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? I heard him speak a few times in Cambridge Union debates, and very amusing he was – I remember him asking the chamber if anyone knew the meaning of Northern English word, “Fookoffyoo”, which, he claimed, people from those parts often used when addressing him.
We had only one intimate conversation during our time at college, the memory of which I shall always treasure:
We had only one intimate conversation during our time at college, the memory of which I shall always treasure:
Monckton: “Write your account there.”
Me: “Where?”
Monckton (impatiently tapping page on desk between us): “There, for
goodness‘ sake!”
Me: “Oh. Right. Sorry.”
Monckton: “Oh, for God’s sake, get on with it, man!”
Me: “Right. Sorry!”
To explain, “Chris” Monckton, as he is more familiarly known in this demotic age, was investigating allegations of impropriety in a recent Union Society election, and I was one of the witnesses. Can’t remember anything else about the incident.
Monckton was an adviser to the Thatcher government, created and published two versions of the Eternity puzzle (solve it and you win $2m) and is now a vocal and vigorous critic of anthropogenic global warming. Last year he delivered a lecture in America, which was then torn to pieces by John Abraham, an American fluid mechanics academic, in an illustrated talk posted on the internet. The gist of it was that Monckton was a scientific ignoramus who had barely got a single fact right: in other words, a hard-headed scientifically proficient Yank got to stomp all over some ridiculous, retarded, inbred limey aristocratic who probably had to use his fingers to count past five.
Now, I have met some spectacularly stupid aristocrats, but Monckton isn’t one of them – as Professor Abraham subsequently discovered. Monckton wrote to the Dean of the Minnesota Bible College which employs Abraham to demand the removal of their Associate Professor’s offending attack from their website, and gave Abraham himself one month to answer 500 questions contained in a separate 83-page “letter”. (Hat-tip: James Delingpole’s telegraph blog.) Otherwise, he says, he will demand that the college donates $100,000 and Abraham $10,000 to a Haitian Earthquake charity.
As to the scientific points contained in Monckton’s letter, they sound highly convincing, but I have no way of knowing whether they are correct or not. What I can say with certainty is that this thundering, coruscating, blistering refutation is one of the funniest things I have ever read.
I promise you, it is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few examples of Monckton’s methods of attack to whet your appetite.
First, straight sarcasm (in this instance, wondering why Abraham hadn’t bothered contacting him before publishing his attack):
Have you heard of Mr. Alexander Graham Bell’s wondrous invention, the electric telephone?
Have you heard of Mr. Albert Arnold Gore’s astounding invention, the World Wide Web?
If you had been truly interested in discovering any of my sources that a non-climatologist such as yourself would not be familiar with, why did you not, even once in the months you say you spent preparing your talk, use either the electric telephone or the World Wide Web to contact me and simply ask?
And more sarcasm:
As “a scientist” (2-3), are you aware of the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica? Hint: they are the two opposite poles of the Earth, the former an ice-capped ocean, the latter an ice-capped continent.
Then there’s loftiness – for which Aristotle comes in handy, several times:
Are you aware of the Aristotelian logical fallacy of accident, by which an inappropriate argument from the general to the particular is perpetrated?
Are you familiar with the Aristotelian fallacy of logic known as theargumentum ad hominem, the fallacy of attacking the person as a way of avoiding having to deal with the substance of his argument?
Are you aware of the Aristotelian logical fallacy of presumption known as the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the fallacy of the appeal to ignorance?
(This question is repeated later in the letter, but, as Monckton puts it, “this time the post hoc ergo propter hoc species of the fallacy?” )
Then there’s loftiness on an Olympian scale:
Are you not aware of the results of the astronomer William Herschel in 1801, who, when reading a table of annual anomalies in grain prices in Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, concluded that the grain prices were anti-correlated with the 11-year cycles in sunspot activity, suggesting that even the very small variations in total solar irradiance over the 11-year cycles were having a detectable effect on climate, such that more sunspots and consequently greater solar activity caused better growing seasons, grain surpluses and a drop in grain prices?
Cosmically snotty, or what? (I think what makes this so pant-wettingly funny is the feeling that Monckton may just have bumped into Herschel and Smith earlier that day at his club.)
Then there’s utter contempt:
In what way is Dr. Soon’s graph “confusing”? Are you perhaps unfamiliar with the standard methods for graphical representation of climatological data? You do seem to have a remarkable difficulty in understanding even the very simplest graphs. Or do you say the graph is “confusing” merely because you find its results uncongenial? Please explain.
Then there’s the sort of withering contempt one might employ when dealing with an overly-familiar social inferior:
Though you say I said, “Hey, maybe this global warming is due to solar effects” (82) [and, by the way, I seldom say, “Hey”, and I should also hesitate to say “due to” where “owing to” would perhaps be grammatically preferable], did I in fact use these words?
There’s more – lots more - of this stuff. Abraham’s original attack on Monckton and “Chris’s” flame-thrower rejoinder can be found here.
Monckton’s letter has ascended the podium to join my other two favourite works of controlled invective. The others are F.R. Leavis’s 1962 Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures?: The Significance of C.P. Snow, in which he savages Snow’s fatuous theory that those who study the Arts would benefit from a decent grounding in science – and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, partly a collection of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s letters mocking the fusty, self-regarding Arts Establishment of his day, partly a transcript of his libel case against John Ruskin, the eminent critic who had accused him of “cockney impudence” and of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.
Interestingly, the crudest and most vicious of these works is the only one penned by an academic. Whistler throws darts at his opponents, Monckton horsewhips his target his attacker. But Leavis drags Snow into a dark alley and gets to work with knuckle-dusters and a Stanley-knife - I shall provide X-rated extracts in the near future.
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