Former Thatcher Adviser Monckton Warns Global Warming Alarmism 'Kills People If You Get the Science Wrong'

Speaking at international conference, he blames the propagation of the global warming 'scare' on a combination of factors, including the 'the media wanting a scare story.'

By Jeff Poor - Business & Media Institute

March 5, 2008

Science is a very powerful thing and it's important to get it right.

That's the message Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York.

According to Monckton, the movement behind global warming alarmism can be traced to some ugly things, and being wrong about it could have a grave impact on humanity.

"I think the question you're asking is who's behind the scare," Monckton said. "There's been a long history of scares recently and scientific frauds of various kinds. It began, I suppose, with the eugenics movement in the 1930s which led to Hitler. It followed on with the Lysenko movement in Russia under Stalin. It went on with the great leap back under Chairman Mao which led again to tens of millions of deaths. The point you're making is that this kills people if you get the science wrong."

Monckton used the banning of DDT, which was linked to the deaths of 40 million children dying from malaria, as an example. The World Health Organization lifted the ban on Sept. 14, 2006, and that was, as Monckton said, "The science standing in front of politics."

Monckton held the media responsible for the one-sided portrayal of the climate change issue and stated that global warming alarmism can be defeated when refuted by science. He used a recent court ruling in Great Britain as an example that restricted showing Al Gore's documentary, " An Inconvenient Truth," in schools.

"You sell far more papers by saying, 'Gee, wow - World to End; Shock; Sensation' than you do by saying 'Climate Continues to [be] Changeable,' which is the truth," Monckton said. "So where the media is largely closed on this, but the courts are not and that is the place where if you go and make a reasoned argument based on the science, you can always beat the other side, because their science - and we heard it over and over again today - is simply incorrect."

The idea of the media being "closed" on the subject was supported in the Business & Media Institute's latest study, "Global Warming Censored," which found the U.S. network news leaving out skeptics of climate alarmism 80 percent of the time.

Monckton blamed the attention garnered by global warming alarmism on a combination of factors, but said it wasn't conspiratorial.

"Now here we are once again with another scare," Monckton said. "It's the same people behind it. It's the international left. It's the media wanting a scare story. … It's not so much a conspiracy I think, as a coincidence of outer interests who is set to take and advance their causes collectively by getting behind this nonsense."

Monckton told the audience that the science will eventually prevail and the "scare" of global warming will go away.

"They've got the science wrong and it will gradually penetrate to the general public that they have got the science wrong and once the penny drops - that will be the end of this scare too," Monckton added. "We're not far away from it now."