Topic: WorldNetDaily
John Griffing begins a Jan. 6 WorldNetDaily article this way:
The attendees at the recent global “climate” conference in Doha, Qatar, most of them highly influential and powerful in their home countries, were treated to a special address recently.
“There has been no global warming for 16 years (actually 18 or 19 years, on closer examination),” the speaker said. “Even if warming were to occur at the predicted rate this century, it would be many times cheaper to adapt … than to attempt, futilely, to mitigate it today. An independent scientific enquiry would be a good idea, to make sure that the conferences on the climate were still heading in the right direction.”Those words are what Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, described as the high priest of climate skepticism and a regular columnist for WND, recalls telling the stunned crowd of affluent attendees.
He addressed the conference, which had just finished hours of consultation and discussion of how to prepare for the catastrophe long predicted by Al Gore, that of global warming.
But Griffing failed to tell his readers the real circumstances around Monckton's "special address."
As the Guardian reported, Monckton impersonated a delegate from Burma, and he was ejected from the Doha conference about a minute into his speech after his deception was discovered. Monckton had been seen at the conference dressed in a traditional Arab attire while distributing leaflets on his anti-global warming views. This video show Monckton's stunts at the conference.
In addition, Monckton's claim that there has been no global warming for 16 years is just as dishonest as his behavior at the conference. As Discovery News explains:
The key point here is in the arbitrary starting point. Climate scientists note that while the underlying long-term trend is unmistakable, it can be masked by short-term natural variations. And 1998 was an exceptionally hot year as a result of a very strong El Niño that created a lot of atmospheric warming. (In fact, it currently occupies the bronze medal position, behind 2005 and the race-leading 2010.) Move the starting point to 1999, and the picture changes considerably.
And that picture shows that if you include more years, the overall trend is one of increasing temperatures.
Since nobody believes WND, the default mode for any original article it publishes is to figure out where the deception is. As we've demonstrated, it's usually not hard to find.
