Lord Monckton is on the fringe: Barnaby Joyce  

The Age reports that even Barnaby Joyce thinks that Lord Monckton (about to commence his climate charlatan circus' circumnavigation of the country) is out of order - Lord Monckton is on the fringe: Barnaby Joyce.

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the eccentric UK climate sceptic, is proving too hot for some of Australia’s most prominent climate sceptics — including Barnaby Joyce.

Joyce, who famously said that climate change sceptics were being treated like holocaust deniers and likened environmental campaigners to eco-Nazis, believes Monckton is on the fringe of the debate and unhelpful to those who question human induced climate change.

Monckton, an adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is about to embark on an Australian tour with our very own climate sceptic celebrity Ian Plimer.

The tour is reaching most of Australia, except the Northern Territory and Tasmania, and it will cost $100,000. That enormous sum is being underwritten by two semi-retired engineers in Noosa, John Smeed and Case Smit — and includes the $20,000 stipend Lord Monckton has requested to do the 13-day tour.

Monckton has had his fair share of strange moments. One of his more obscure was proposing to quarantine all aids victims in the 80s (he has since said the idea is unworkable because the epidemic has grown so much it would unfeasible).

But it is his scepticism of the science underpinning global warming that has returned him to the public's attention. Monckton not only promotes the usual gamut of solar radiation and hockey stick criticisms of the science, but also claims any global efforts to curb emissions is a plot to establishing a world government and give power to the World Bank.

Monckton also says that after the Berlin Wall fell, the communists needed another way to centralise power and have created climate change as their Trojan horse.

Joyce told Greenlines this week that while he would listen to Lord Monckton when he is in town, people should not read much into it.

‘‘Obviously I and my constituency have some doubts (about the science) but when you find yourself waltzing with the fringe you should take a step back,’’ Joyce said.

‘‘Lot’s of people from the fringe often take up causes and it can do more harm than good.’’

A spokesman for Opposition leader Tony Abbott said he would not meet with the Lord when he speaks at the National Press Club on February 3 in Canberra (it is a private function not as a formal speech on the Gallery’s speaking roster).

On Wednesday conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian wrote that Monckton was an extremist in his language and is hurting the cause of those who want to ask hard questions of the science.

That is despite Albrechtsen’s column of October 28, which is devoted to Lord Monckton's global world government theory and demanding why the Rudd Government doesn’t reveal what they are signing up to in Copenhagen.

‘‘Monckton became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new world government only when a friend of his found an obscure UN website and hacked his way through several layers of complications before coming across a document that isn't even called the draft treaty,’’ Albrechtsen wrote in the October opinion piece that you can find here.

Well, American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson did say foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Only Opposition Energy and Resource spokesman Nick Minchin was more positive about the Lord, telling Greenlines he listens to both side of the debate and would be very happy to meet him.

Lord Monckton begins his lecture tour in Sydney on January 26 with a luncheon at the Union Club.