Let’s leave the argument about climate change for other people and another day.
This is all about your continued claims to be something you are not - the winner of the Nobel Prize.
The third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley was in Canberra yesterday. He held a private audience with Tony Abbott. Then he addressed an adoring audience who were quite happy to join him in an oddly schoolboyish display.
Lord Monckton would bellow “ETS?”. The crowd needed little encouragement to shout back “NO!” And so on.
But the disturbing element was Lord Monckton’s insistence on Truth. If Truth needed further bolstering, he broke into Latin. He invoked everyone from 12th Century Arabic philosophers to Pontius Pilate. “Quid Est Veritas?” asked Lord Monckton.
Quid, indeed.
He left no doubt that his was a life in lonely dedication to Truth - that thing, he says, that never changes no matter how many lies are told.
For him, human-caused global warming is not simply wrong, or bad science. It is a lie. Or in his view, many lies.
So back to his Nobel prize.
For some time - Google “Monckton” and “Nobel Prize” and see for yourself - the great sceptic-in-chief has been passing himself off as a Nobel Laureate.
Cornered last month by the Sydney Morning Herald, he reportedly said it was “a joke, a joke.”
Yet the website of his organisation, the Science and Public Policy Institute - as of yesterday - continues to press the claim.
The site is extremely specific. Lord Monckton “earned the status of Nobel Peace Laureate (through) his contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.”
That contribution itself is detailed. Furthermore, the website continues, “his Nobel Prize pin…was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York.”
What credible person would not correct the error immediately - if it is indeed an error.
To be sure,
I rang the Nobel Committee that administers the Peace Prize.
Committee secretary Geir Lundestat had never heard of Lord Monckton. I emailed him the Monckton website.
“The claim is ridiculous,” said Lundestat. “He is not a laureate - no way, no way.”
Thousands of people, he said, participated in the program of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 prize with Al Gore.
“But the organisation won the prize. Not even Dr Rajendra Pachauri (the chair of the IPCC) is an individual laureate.”
No individual, no matter what their involvement with the IPCC, can pass themselves off an a Nobel Laureate.
As for Lord Monckton’s Nobel Prize pin?
“It certainly wasn’t issued by us,” said Lundestat. “We have no pin.”
So now you know. Not that the news will disturb many of those lovers of Truth who pack the halls to hear him speak
.