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Often I receive comments about how claims made in the references I cite or which have influenced my thinking have all been debunked by legitimate people and methods.

I don’t normally chase up such debunking articles and take them to task because it is like arguing with a brick wall.

This WUWT post is an opportunity to reveal the inadequacies of a typical debunking excercise. Christopher Monckton has been the target of supposedly successful debunking many times. Here we see how it is attempted and how it fails.

Unfortunately, the claims of debunking live on and dishonestly support the illusions of the CAGW fraternity.

Part of the article, written by Monckton himself.

Various You-Tube videos by a former “science writer” who uses a speleological pseudonym “potholer54″ sneeringly deliver a series of petty smears about artfully-distorted and often inconsequential aspects of my talks on climate change. Here, briefly, I shall answer some of his silly allegations. I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him, so the sentences in quote-marks may not be word for word what he said, but I hope that they fairly convey his meaning.

For fuller answers to these allegations, many of which he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, please see my comprehensive written reply to that video at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.

The allegations, with my answers, are as follows:

“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.

“Monckton says he wrote a peer-reviewed paper. He didn’t.” The editors of Physics and Society asked me to write a paper on climate sensitivity in 2008. The review editor reviewed it in the usual way and it was published in the July 2008 edition, which, like most previous editions, carried a headnote to the effect that Physics and Society published “reviewed articles”. Peer-review takes various forms. From the fact that the paper was invited, written, reviewed and then published, one supposes the journal had followed its own customary procedures. If it hadn’t, don’t blame me. Subsequent editions changed the wording of the headnote to say the journal published “non-peer-reviewed” articles, and the editors got the push. No mention of any of this by the caveman, of course.

“Monckton says the Earth is cooling. It isn’t.” At the time when I said the Earth was cooling, it had indeed been cooling since late 2001. The strong El Niño of 2010 canceled the cooling, and my recent talks and graphs have of course reflected that fact by stating instead that there has been no statistically-significant warming this millennium. The caveman made his video after the cooling had ended, but – without saying so – showed a slide from a presentation given by me while the cooling was still in effect. Was that honest of him?

And so on, please read the whole article here.

I believe Christopher succeeds in his debunking of the debunker. Thanks WUWT for posting this.

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