http://joannenova.com.au/2012/02/cooking-the-books-monckton-replies-to-cook/When Christopher Monckton debated at the National Press Club in Canberra last July, he showed exactly why the fans of a man-made catastrophe are so frightened of free speech and open debates. With no slides nor images, in a single hour he still changed the opinions of fully 9% of the audience , including influential journalists who had expected nothing of the kind. The Roy Morgan polling organization tracked the moment-by-moment opinions of a representative sample of 350 people throughout the debate, and Gary Morgan, the CEO, announcing the result, said that in his long experience of polling he had never seen a swing like it in opinion on any subject in so short a time.
John Cook of un-SkepticalScience tried to rescue something from the event for the “cause”, but here Monckton shows how the claims that Monckton was “confused”, “lying” and “misrepresenting evidence” all come to naught, and if John Cook only had the manners (or curiosity) to ask Christopher first, he would have found that out before airing his poor research and logical errors in public. Monckton quotes peer reviewed references ad lib, and does calculations off the top of his head. Cook makes out that he is baffled by Monckton’s sources, which is odd because Monckton quotes the IPCC, Garnaut and other “consensus” documents, which we might have thought Cook would know well.
As usual, the point of the alarmist rebuttals is not to understand the science, or to find common ground to build a better understanding, it’s to put the words, “myth”, “lies”, “bizarre”, ‘trick” and ‘distort” into the same paragraph as the words “sceptic” and “Monckton” even if there is nothing to substantiate those terms. In other words, it’s just policy-driven PR dressed up as science.
What most disturbs me is that Cook underlies his entire reasoning with the logical fallacy that “consensus” is science, and that only the Chosen Ones are allowed to form an opinion. The attitude “Thou shalt not question our experts” belongs in a religion not in science, and shows that Cook is not even slightly skeptical – what skeptic starts with the position “the experts are always right?”. Hailing consensus ought be anathema to any scientist in the quest for understanding.
The University of Queensland employs Cook now, so what does that “center of higher education” make of his low standards of reasoning or evidence and his anti-science values? It supports him, evidently. (The Quest for Knowledge being trumped by the Quest for Grants and Peer-Group Approval). The vice-chancellor has failed to answer a question from Christopher Monckton about why the university provides cover for Cook’s crude propaganda.
Cook claims the lesson for him is that “verbal debates are a mistake”. Which is true when you can’t reason and don’t have the evidence. Like any sore loser he tries to blame the loss on something else — claiming Monckton lies, yet here we can see that if Cook had stood up in the National Press Club, and made these claims with Monckton present, Monckton would have had no trouble refuting them, and quite possibly even more of the audience would have been converted. Open debate is the only way the truth gets tested.
Cook himself has been asked to post up Monckton’s rebuttal of his mistaken accusations on his website, but apparently lacks the intellectual honesty to do so. It is our pleasure to do for him what he should have done for himself in the interest of fairness and balance and the search for the truth.
Jo
