tSS attended a lecture recently at the Sheraton On The Park hotel to hear Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley present his fascinating views on Climate Change-or the lack of thereof according to his Lordship, who insists it's all a lefty plot.
Nearly a 1000 crammed into the ballroom (at $20 a head) to listen intently to Monkton. It was as expected, a cross between earnest looking pensioners, a handful of right wing nutbags, a slew of rabid talk show hosts and an unexpected number of notable businessmen. Noticably absent were any prominent representatives of the farming community. A conservative lot, those toiling the land aren't with his Lordship on this matter.
The audience weren't all necessarily supporters of the peer but it was hard not to notice the sea of nodding heads that hung on every word as Monkton laid out his theory that it was all a dastardly conspiracy of the left who had fallen by the wayside after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and had found a new cause to latch onto by preaching doom and gloom about the climate.
"It's all nonsense" said Monkton. "Let me tell you of the real conspiracy that is upon us !".
Outside an ominous wind howled around the marbled porticals of the Sheraton's grand forecourt. Still encrusted in tiny crevices, as everywhere in this town, are traces of the red dust storm that swept into Sydney in September 2009 as city dwellers arose to find that an orange/red Martian landscape had blanketed the city. The outback, nearly 3000 kilometres away had arrived overnight. We were witnessing the result of 200 years of disastrous European style farming methods.
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Let's hear from one of our favourite broadcasters and Sydney Morning Herald writer Mike Carlton as he dissects Monkton's claims :
The UN's climate change fraud is cover for a plot to bring about a world government : This world government codswallop began years ago with one Lyndon H. LaRouche, a conspiracy theory lunatic so far to the right he makes George W. Bush look like Hugo Chavez. A convicted criminal, self-styled "economist" and vicious anti-Semite, LaRouche also believes the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh head a Zionist cartel that runs the global drug trade. Monckton shares many of his lurid fantasies, which are staple fare for the knuckle-draggers who infest late-night talkback radio.
A UN ban on using DDT to control malaria has killed up to 40 million people: More LaRouche claptrap filched by the potty peer. They both loathe Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides. Monckton has blamed Jackie Kennedy for these imaginary 40 million deaths, claiming she read the book and pushed President Kennedy to ban DDT. JFK did no such thing.
Here in Australia, another right-wing nutter, John Stone, a former head of the Treasury and Queensland National Party senator, wrote recently: "It is now possible to say quite unequivocally that Carson's book has been responsible for killing more people than Mein Kampf."
Phew. In fact there is no United Nations ban on DDT for malaria control, only for spraying on edible crops. DDT is still widely used in the Third World, although it is being phased out because the mozzies are becoming immune to it.
Polar bear populations are increasing: Yes, but not because the planet is cooling, as Monckton and his barmy bloggers would have you believe. Bans and quotas on hunting have pushed numbers back up. But where the polar ice cap is melting, the bears are in big trouble. In Canada's Western Hudson Bay, for example, the population has dropped 22 per cent since the 1980s, and the animals are smaller and weaker.
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