Download Debunking the myths behind the pontificating potty peer

Debunking the myths behind the pontificating potty peer
SMH (back page News Review section) 6.2.10
Coalition left exposed by privates on parade
MIKE
CARLTON
T
o judge by the torrent of emails flooding
in, climate change is still the hottest issue
in town. Amazingly, quite a few people
have fallen for the drivel spouted by the
visiting Viscount Monckton. In the interest of
national sanity, let us demolish some of their more
outlandish notions, point by point:
The UN's climate change fraud is cover for a
plot to bring about a world government. This
world government codswallop began years ago
with one Lyndon H. LaRouche, a conspiracy
theory lunatic so far to the right he makes George
W. Bush look like Hugo Chavez. A convicted
criminal, self-styled "economist" and vicious antiSemite, LaRouche also believes the Queen and
the Duke of Edinburgh head a Zionist cartel that
runs the global drug trade. Monckton shares many
of his lurid fantasies, which are staple fare for the
knuckle-draggers who infest late-night talkback
radio.
A UN ban on using DDT to control malaria has
killed up to 40 million people. More LaRouche
claptrap filched by the potty peer. They both
loathe Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent
Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of
pesticides. Monckton has blamed Jackie Kennedy
for these imaginary 40 million deaths, claiming
she read the book and pushed President Kennedy
GRINNING from ear to ear at his blip 'n the latest
opinion poll, Tony Abbott reminded me,
irresistibly, of a Holden ute with a chrome grille
and both doors open.
His hastily cobbled climate change policy
was not so exciting. To coin a phrase, it's
absolute crap. Big polluters could continue
pumping carbon dioxide into the heavens, just as
they are now, while the rest of us hoard potato
peelings and scurry about planting 20 million
trees.
How contrary. Only last week Tony was in
rural Queensland, staunchly defending the
inalienable right of farmers to bulldoze every tree
on their land to the horizon and beyond. His
costings are done on the back of an envelope
and he can't tell us where the money will come
from, although his fellow Riverview old boy,
dopey Barnaby Joyce, assures us it can be found
by slashing foreign aid and sacking public
servants.
Sooner or later someone in the
parliamentary Liberal Party is going to have to
take Barnaby outside and bash him up in the
dunnies.
They all know how it's done. These days
the Liberals are almost entirely run by Sydney
private school boys: Abbott himself; Nick Minchin
(Knox Grammar); Joe Hockey (St Aloysius);
Philip Ruddock (Barker College) and even
Malcolm Turnbull (Sydney Grammar), to name
but a few. And I think Julie Bishop might have
gone to Cranbrook.
[email protected]
to ban DDT. JFK did no such thing.
Here in Australia, another right-wing nutter,
John Stone, a former head of the Treasury and
Queensland National Party senator, wrote
recently: It is now possible to say quite
unequivocally that Carson's book has been
responsible for killing more people than Mein
Kampf."
Phew. In fact there is no United Nations ban
on DDT for malaria control, only for spraying on
edible crops. DDT is still widely used in the Third
World, although it is being phased out because
the mozzies are becoming immune to it.
Polar bear populations are increasing. Yes, but
not because the planet is cooling, as Monckton
and his barmy loggers would have you believe.
Bans and quotas on hunting have pushed
numbers back up. But where the polar ice cap is
melting, the bears are in big trouble. In Canada's
Western Hudson Bay, for example, the population
has dropped 22 per cent since the 1980s, and the
animals are smaller and weaker.
Monckton is a mathematician. Baloney. He has
a Cambridge degree in Classics, ie Latin and
Ancient Greek, and a diploma in journalism
(whatever that means) from Cardiff. He can
blather mathsy stuff in TV interviews, but that
doesn't mean he's a mathematician. I know every
song the Rolling Stones ever wrote, but that
doesn't make me Mick Jagger.
Monckton was a science adviser to Margaret
Thatcher. Wrong. Thatcher has a science degree
herself; she hardly needed a science adviser who
didn't. Monckton was hired in 1982 as a low-level
drone in her policy unit, working on public housing
and the like.
Monckton helped end the Falklands war by
advising Thatcher to have MI6 place a dysentery
bacillus in the drinking water of the Argentine
troops.
Pure tosh. It never happened.
Monckton is a member of the House of Lords.
He is not and never has been, although in his
travelling stand-up comedy act he artfully displays
the crowned portcullis logo of the British
Parliament. Hereditary peers no longer have the
automatic right to a seat. Monckton stood at a by
election for the Lords in 2007 but got not one vote.
Monckton has never claimed to be a Nobel
Prize winner. Oh yes he has. His biography on
the website of his grandly titled Science and
Public Policy Institute states: "His contribution to
the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 ...
earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate.
His Nobel Prize pin, made of gold recovered from
a physics experiment, was presented to him by
the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the
University of Rochester, New York, USA."
Monckton repeated that garbage, word for
word, in an impertinent open letter written to
Senator John McCain in the 2008 US election
campaign. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented by
the King of Norway, not by retired boffins in
upstate New York.
And on it goes. The viscount and his
performing eyeballs caper around the globe like
some gibbering reject from a Monty Python
sketch, to the febrile applause of the sort of dopes
who - in this country, anyway- once thought
Pauline Hanson was their Joan of Arc.
Truth is, he's not even much of a viscount, as
viscounts go. Nelson got his viscountcy for
Trafalgar; Montgomery for Alamein and the war in
Europe; Bill Slim for beating the Japanese in
Burma. Monckton has his coronet because his
lawyer grandfather sorted out the abdication of
Edward VIII and his messy marriage to Wallis
Simpson.
Not so much Viscount Monckton as Discount
Monckton, according to one of my happy emailers
this week.