Climate deniers often like to talk about “global warming profiteers,” some mysterious breed led by Al Gore who, so the story goes, are out to make the big bucks off scaring people about climate change. But if there’s anyone making money off lying about global warming these days, it is “Lord” Christopher Monckton, who continues his globetrotting tour to hawk confusion and misinformation at the Bonn climate talks this month.
Monckton led a “delegation” (nice attempt to sound official) from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (C-FACT), a conservative think tank that has received money from Exxon, Chevron, and the Scaife and Carthage foundations.
Monckton and the C-FACT gang held a “seminar” in Bonn “on the use of the internet to provide ordinary people with fact and opinions that have received scant attention by much of the mainstream media.”
The C-FACT “seminar” is sure to be quite long on opinions, that much is certain. But there won’t be many facts bandied about, certainly not any based on science, given Monckton’s lack of any scientific credentials (he’s a journalist by training but says he makes his living on real estate and, of course, his extensive list of paid speaking gigs around the world.)
In its post alerting the world to the Monckton seminars, C-FACT notes that Monckton was “recently dubbed a ‘famous contrarian’ in Esquire Magazine,” as if the outlet had honored him.
On the contrary, the Esquire piece painted Monckton in quite unflattering terms:
“[Climate denier Marc] Morano spots Lord Christopher Monckton, another famous contrarian. He has googly eyes like Marty Feldman and a plummy English accent straight out of Monty Python.”
Monckton has his work cut out for him to top the performance he delivered at the Americans for Prosperity event in Copenhagen last year, where he called American college students advocating for clean energy the “Hitler youth.”
He should probably leave the Nazi analogies alone this time ‘round, given the location of the talks is Bonn, Germany. But this is Christopher Monckton we’re talking about, so logic and reason are out the window. Look for him to say something outrageous, or at least something stupid enough to get somebody to write about it. (Yeah, that’ll probably be me.)
