Lord Christopher Monckton, a conservative British MP, delivered a speech last week in St. Paul about the impending international climate change talks to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Monckton has made some waves in the last few years as a noted climate change denialist. In particular he championed a successful legal challenge against Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from being showed in British schools. (He now funds and supports the showing of The Great Global Warming Swindle in schools instead.)
One of Monckton's previous forays into the science/public health arena resulted in his 1987 essay "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," in which he supported mandatory monthly AIDS testing for everyone, along with compulsory and permanent quarantining of all carriers of the virus.
22 years later, at Bethel University in St. Paul, addressing members of Minnesota Free Market Institute, Lord Monckton painted the modern environmental movement as little more than the latest manifestation of the global communist movement, rising from the ashes of the fallen Soviet Union:
So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it - Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything.
What do you think about this point of view? Do "free market" organizations have any standing to speak about the science of climate change? Are the majority of scientists in the world who agree that global warming is human-caused just a bunch of communists?
Between these ravings and what I'm seeing in the health care "debate," I'm beginning to wonder if there's room for rationality in any argument in American politics.
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Comments: 22
They always have and it seems they always will ???
Don't they care about their kids ????
However, to answer your question: If the human species is gong to allow itself to get trapped into an Orwellian nightmare, as Lord Monckton is hysterically rambling about, then humanity certainly deserves it. But based on the good science I know, the natural laws - including geophysics - which evolved life on this planet simply will make the human species a matter for discussion by some other species that comes along in some far future epoch to analyze our extinction.
Global Climate issues are no different. The less than 10% who benefit from the greed that is the root cause of the problem will never own up to their responsibilities.
politicians, oil magnates, business emperors, bank executives, certain families of influence and so on and so on....
Peace.
no, and no
In reality, this dude is a prime example of the kind of British neofascist boob that The Pythons mocked so tellingly in the "Twit of the Year" sketch.
We need James Bond to get to the bottom of this, get 007 in here quick.
What a delusional loon. He just shot the denialist movement in the foot.
If this isn't a leading question I don't know what is. The implication that only organizations who don't believe in free markets are annointed to speak properly of climate change is enough to make one gag.
The fact that they stand to make or lose money when the decisions are made, presents a conflict of interest that can't be overlooked.
The problem with the "denialists" is that they want to act as though climate change, and whether humans are a factor therein, are untested hypotheses, while any reputable scientist will try very hard to debunk their colleagues' research -- and their own. It is only after rigorous testing that they announce a theory to the world. It is the difference between the scientists' definition of a theory (tested hypothesis) versus that of those outside the scientific community (just a hunch) that causes the confusion. IMHO "denialists" prefer to ignore the difference because they rely on that confusion to convince their audience that the scientific community is in error.
more freedom do you think? or more herding by fear?