The Smear
A former science adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009
There was an invitation to go head to head with Gore and testify at the hearing on Capitol Hill Friday. But Monckton now says that when his airplane from London landed in the U.S. on Thursday, he was informed that the former Vice-President had "chickened out" and there would be no joint appearance.
The Reality
The GOP can not claim Margaret Thatcher as one of the deniers in this through Monkton.
Monkton was indeed employed by the Thatcher Government and as he himself admitted as part of his congressional hearings on the environment his primary role was employment and poverty.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=printfriendly&id=7599Unlike the GOP deniers, Margaret Thatcher was a scientist, and not just any scientist, an FRS. The highest scientific accolade short of the nobel prize.
http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=1019Margaret Thatcher was also one of the first of the World Leaders to take on environmental issues, primarily the issues of the thinning of the ozone layer and global warming. She led and delivered a global ban on cfcs in fridges?
The Republican Party may try and claim Thatcher as one of theirs, but as a leading chemist she would have had no truck with the fundamentalist Christians who infected the Republican Party. True Conservative, yes, in the UK sense of the word and not the prostituted brand of Conservationism the GOP have laid claim to. Young Earth, climate change denier. Absolutely not.
As highlighted by her speech at the World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1990.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108237
..But the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.
Our ability to come together to stop or limit damage to the world's environment will be perhaps the greatest test of how far we can act as a world community. No-one should under-estimate the imagination that will be required, nor the scientific effort, nor the unprecedented co-operation we shall have to show. We shall need statesmanship of a rare order. It's because we know that, that we are here today.
For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.
Now we know that this is no longer true.
We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.
In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.
We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.
I want to pay tribute to the important work which the United Nations has done to advance our understanding of climate change, and in particular the risks of global warming. Dr. Tolba and Professor Obasi deserve our particular thanks for their far-sighted initiative in establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC report is a remarkable achievement. It is almost as difficult to get a large number of distinguished scientists to agree, as it is to get agreement from a group of politicians. As a scientist who became a politician, I am perhaps particularly qualified to make that observation! I know both worlds.
Of course, much more research is needed. We don't yet know all the answers. Some major uncertainties and doubts remain. No-one can yet say with certainty that it is human activities which have caused the apparent increase in global average temperatures. The IPCC report is very careful on this point. For instance, the total amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere each year from natural sources is some 600 billion tonnes, while the figure resulting from human activities is only 26 billion tonnes. In relative terms that is not very significant. Equally we know that the increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere date from the start of the industrial revolution. And we know that those concentrations will continue to rise if we fail to act.
Nor do we know with any precision the extent of the likely warming in the next century, nor what the regional effects will be, and we can't be sure of the role of the clouds.
So exactly why should Al Gore debate with an "advisor" to Margaret Thatcher? She had many and I would rather take her opinions straight from the horses mouth, especially as she was one of the leading Chemists in the World and he was primarily an economics advisor.
Yet again Republicans show quite clearly that they know NOTHING even when it comes to one of their idols.
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