| by LORD MONCKTON | Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, high priest of climate skepticism, advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote leaders for the Yorkshire Post, was editor of the Catholic paper The Universe, managing editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, assistant editor of Today, and consulting editor of the Evening Standard. He invented the million-selling "Eternity Puzzles," "Sudoku X" and a promising treatment for infections. See the Science & Public Policy Institute. |
Academic freedom is dead, as it was under Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao. The right of climate professors to follow wherever science and logic lead them is now being ruthlessly suppressed – and this time throughout the once-free West.
Seven case histories. First, professor X. He cannot be named for fear of reprisals. A university approached him, invited him to travel halfway around the world, paid his airfares and accommodation, offered him a senior professorship and research facilities, and sent him home telling him a contract would be in the post.
Then the government discovered professor X had once written an influential paper questioning the climate “consensus.” More than a year after he was offered the job, the vice-chancellor and the dean continue to say the contract will be with him any day now. But he has good reason to suspect that will not happen unless and until the government changes.
Secondly, professor Y. He, too, has requested anonymity. For decades, he was a university professor of Earth Sciences. He was semi-retired, but kept an office and an email address at his university and supervised the occasional Ph.D. student.
However, he, too, had been outspoken in questioning the imaginary “consensus.” Suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, his university told him his office and his email account had been closed and ordered him to have no further contact with his Ph.D. student, who was cut adrift with no one of sufficient expertise to mentor him.
Thirdly, professor James Enstrom. His crime was to carry out academic research indicating that the hated California Air Resources Board had fiddled the figures so as falsely to justify regulations requiring every diesel truck in the state to undergo an unnecessary $15,000 refit. At the direct urging of “Democratic” state legislators, UCLA fired professor Enstrom for his inconvenient results.
Fourthly, professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, the world’s most knowledgeable atmospheric physicist. He has said, bluntly and on many occasions, that natural variability is sufficient to explain just about all recent global warming. Like nearly all of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence, he had his house burned down in mysterious circumstances.
Fifthly, professor Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute. He discovered that the Sun had more to do with global warming than did CO2. When he presented his results in London before the Royal Society, the world’s oldest taxpayer-funded pressure group, the assembled professors savagely howled him down as a threat to their government funding. He had a heart attack and nearly died.
Sixthly, professor Fred Singer, a rocket scientist who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service and has more recently published a string of papers questioning the party line on climate. Though he is now well into his 80s, his international speaking schedule is heavier than mine. Al Gore alleged Fred had unduly influenced the dying Roger Revelle (who had first discovered that CO2 concentration in the air was increasing) to co-author a paper saying the threat of global warming had been exaggerated. When Fred fought back, Gore backed off, but a team of paid trolls kept rewriting Fred’s Wikipedia entry to maintain – falsely – that he believed in Martians.
The seventh case history is the worst of the lot. In 2008 professor Murry Salby was recruited from the U.S. by Macquarie “University” in Sydney, Australia, which awarded him a professorship under a national employment contract specifying that it would fund him to convert several hundred thousand lines of computer code for his models so they would work in Australia.
Professor Salby moved to Sydney, but the university discovered he was beginning to have doubts about the party line on climate. He received none of the promised funding. Instead, he got a series of lame excuses. After three years, he got a small part of the funding he had been promised. After five years, the rest of the funding had still not materialized, so his models would not work.
The university then lured an exceptional student from Russia to work with him, requiring her to abandon her Ph.D. scholarship in Russia. Her research, approved by the university, required use of his models, which the university continued to fail to fund. He applied to an employment tribunal, which told him the university, by not registering his contract, had nullified it.
Meanwhile, he began writing a book about the climate. His results were explosive, and fatal to the party line. He had discovered that today, as in the past climate, warmer weather causes increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, and not the other way about.
Using funds the university had contracted to provide, professor Salby arranged a speaking tour of European universities. The travel forms he filed included a description of his findings. The university imposed unreasonable restrictions at several venues and then blocked presentation of his results altogether.
Next, it reduced his role to that of a teaching assistant, marking students’ papers on behalf of lecturers junior to himself. When he objected, it accused him of “misconduct” and stopped paying his salary, blocking access to his office, to his computer and even to personal equipment he had brought from the U.S. His Russian student was forbidden to speak to him and was left without expert supervision.
Professor Salby, who had by then agreed to present his results at several universities in Europe, had to travel almost entirely at his own expense. While he was away, the university held a misconduct hearing in his absence. It prevented him from returning in time for the hearing by canceling his non-refundable air ticket back to Sydney. He did not discover this until he turned up at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to catch his flight. He was stranded with nowhere to go and nowhere to stay.
When he eventually returned to Australia, he filed a complaint with the employment tribunal under statutes forbidding the university to retaliate. The university fired him anyway. And that, as they will discover, was a colossal mistake.
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