Dennis Avery kills climate change AND Maggie Thatcher

onJul 21, 2008 @ 12:52 PDT

With characteristic attention to the facts, Dennis Avery, Monsanto’s man in the organic food debate, killed both climate change and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a post yesterday on his Centre for Global Food Issues website.

“Consensus on man-made warming is shattering,” Avery announced, basing this wild-eyed overstatement on last week’s story that:

Physics & Society, The journal of the 46,000-member American Physical Societ, just published “Climate Sensitivity Revisited,” by Viscount Christopher Monckton. Monckton is an avowed man-made warming skeptic, and former science advisor to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (My emphasis.)

This whole story is afloat in hogwash, a fact that APS President Arthur Bienenstock has been at pains to point out.

“Consensus on man-made warming is shattering,” Avery announced, following on with,

The “consensus” on man-made global warming may have received a mortal wound.”

That “mortal wound” was the risible article submitted by journalist and failed political candidate Christopher Walter (the self-celebrating Third Viscount Monckton of Brnechley) to Physics & Society, an American Physical Society (APS) newsletter. Notwithstanding that APS has made it strikingly clear that a) Physics & Society is an in-house newsletter, NOT a professional journal; b) that Monckton’s article was not peer-reviewed; c) that it bears no reflection on the APS position, Avery reports:

Physics & Society, The journal of the 46,000-member American Physical Society, just published “Climate Sensitivity Revisited,” by Viscount Christopher Monckton. Monckton is an avowed man-made warming skeptic, and former science advisor to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (My emphasis.)

Avery’s characterization of Monckton’s paper is clearly hogwash (a product that Avery would point out is rotten with e coli and to be avoided at all costs). Even Steve Milloy, another of Monsanto’s favourite spokesters, has acceded to reporting up-to-date information on the APS story. Milloy’s most recent post on his appropriately named JunkScience website carries a wonderful letter from APS President Arthur Bienenstock, who explains the current situation ever so patiently:

Some people and news services misinterpreted the Newsletter publication of one editor’s comments and Lord Monckton’s article as a retreat by the American Physical Society from its official position on the contribution of human activities to global warming. Consequently, the APS felt it necessary to ensure that its official position was known both to those who logged on to the APS website and those who had followed a link to Lord Monckton’s article on our website and were unaware of the context in which it appears. That is the origin of the comment that appears at the top of the article on the website. I am sure that you would not want the Society’s position to be misunderstood in this important matter.”

(The last line should put permanently to rest the notion that physicists are not funny.)

Monckton and Milloy make their living by undermining public understanding of science. The fact that Milloy would post Bienenstock’s letter, almost without commentary, demonstrates (somewhat to MY surprise) that even he is committed to SOME standard of accuracy – a standard which Avery evidently feels no compulsion to maintain.