Here’s a great story by Gideon Rachman, fellow blogger and The Financial Times, Chief Foreign Affairs commentator, regarding the latest squabble in the UK press over recnet comments made by Viscount Christopher Monckton.
To quote: “Monckton is clearly an intelligent man. But he is not a scientist. And he has proved dangerously over-confident in his own intellectual judgement in the past. He once designed and sold a puzzle and offered a million-pound profit to anyone who could solve it, confidently predicting that he would rake in royalties for years. But unfortunately, somebody cracked the puzzle rather too quickly, reportedly forcing Monckton to sell his house.”
Here’s my favorite:
“As for me, like most other non-scientists I have contracted out my judgement on global warming to “the experts”. And the sort of people I’ve been trained to defer to seem to be increasingly in agreement that global warming is not only happening, but is closely linked to a rise in emissions of carbon dioxide. On the one side of the debate we have assorted professors from Harvard, MIT and NASA, as well as Britain’s Royal Society and the experts brought together by the UN. On the other side there is, well, Christopher Monckton, Michael Crichton and Senator James Inhofe. It looks like a pretty unequal fight to me.”
