Discourse, controversy, comes with the territory of academic freedom, UNDA academics say as they reject efforts to shut down prominent climate sceptic’s lecture
By Anthony Barich
The University of Notre Dame Australia’s reputation as a credible academic institution was not tarnished but strengthened by hosting controversial climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton on 30 June in Fremantle, University organisers said.
The university “came under quite a bit of pressure internally and externally to cancel the event”, UNDA College of Business Executive Dean Prof Chris Doepel, who organised the event, told The Record.
He said the event has not damaged UNDA: “in fact, many people have perceived our independence as being a very strong virtue … that we have in fact allowed someone with a contrarian point of view to be heard and be questioned”.
This pressure included an open letter signed by 50 academics organised by University of WA post-graduate student Natalie Latter accusing Lord Monckton of promoting “widely discredited fictions about climate change”.
While it also accused him of distorting the research of “countless scientists”, Lord Monckton made his own allegations against scientific authorities.
“Each of us has the responsibility of coming to our own conclusions after absorbing knowledge from all reliable sources,” Mannkal Economics Foundation chairman Ron Manners, who gave the vote of thanks after Lord Monckton’s address, said.
“(Lord Monckton’s) reflections should enable us to skip past the ‘deafening daily static’ from so many vested interests”.
Lord Monckton told more than 200 guests at UNDA that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change changed its 2001 recommendation that “long-term predictions of future climate states is [sic] not possible” to “the body of evidence points to global warming” due to one man rewriting the original report, which was in consultation with some 200 scientists. UNDA Vice Chancellor Celia Hammond said the university hosted Lord Monckton, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in fidelity to Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities to be “immersed in human society” and not shirk difficult issues.
About 20 student-aged protesters held banners outside the building chanting, “Lord Monckton is a hoax, climate change is no joke” every so often, but stopped soon after the address started.
When the late mining magnate Lang Hancock’s daughter Gina Rinehart – who has sponsored the Lang Hancock Lecture series – asked Prof Hammond to host Lord Monckton, UNDA also planned to host a prominent Australian speaker who opposes Lord Monckton’s views in late September. This speaker, yet to be announced, will discuss public policy in response to climate science.
In October, UNDA will host a seminar on the theological and spiritual aspects on the theme of humanity’s responsibility of stewardship of the earth.
Prof Doepel told The Record that the university had a right to “challenge the consensus view” on climate change by hosting Lord Monckton.
“He does express a contrarian point of view and we are not frightened to allow a contrarian point of view to be presented. There were some highly qualified people here who took issue to some of his assumptions and mathematical modelling – and that’s exactly what I expected would happen,” Prof Doepel said.
“We let him have the podium and let him be challenged by people who would inevitably come to a lecture like this. We believe that’s consistent with what a university should do.
“He’s talking about public policy as well as science; he has been a (government) adviser before in policy positions, so he does have credentials to make those sorts of claims.”
In his talk titled The Climate of Freedom, Lord Monckton conceded that there is a ‘greenhouse effect’, humans are causing global warming which, he said, does exist. His main argument was that the world is not warming anywhere near as rapidly as the Australian Government claims.
He also warned against the Australian Government’s carbon tax based on Europe’s experience with such a tax.
“Trust me, you need it like a hole in the head … It will cause a potential economic disaster of the most catastrophic proportions,” he said, adding that money would be better spent allocating such funding to helping the Third World.
He said that given China is building two coal-fired power stations a week until 2030, the West “is not the problem, therefore it is not the solution”. He warned about the economic consequences of “attempting to mitigate global warming by taxing, regulating, reducing or replacing anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide”.
He also addressed “the antithesis between the free enterprise ideal exemplified by the life and deeds of Lang Hancock and the notion of authoritarian consensus that grips academe and politics today”.
He also defended carbon itself, saying “it’s not the killer it used to be” as coal plants have fewer emissions due to improvements; adding that many life forms depend on it.
When WA Greens Senator Scott Ludlam told Lord Monckton, “it must be lonely being on the fringe when 97 per cent of scientists” confirm global warming, the Briton questioned that figure, as only “a few dozen” scientists were actually involved in climate sensitivity work.
Prof Doepel conceded that UNDA did not expect Lord Monckton to call the Federal Government’s chief climate change adviser Prof Ross Garnaut a fascist, displaying a Swastika next to a quote from him at a Los Angeles conference last month.
“That hasn’t helped us with our PR but he’s been quite sincere in his apology and he assured the Vice Chancellor his address here would be delivered in an appropriate manner,” Prof Doepel said.
Lord Monckton, a former journalist and now Chief Policy Advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute, said journalists had failed to ask why the cost of mitigating the effects of global warming would far outweigh the cost of doing nothing.
When asked by retired ABC journalist Peter Kennedy whether he thought his Nazi slur against Garnaut helped or hindered his cause, he pointed to inconsistency in Australian media.
He referred to a columnist last month saying that opponents of the consensus on climate change “should be gassed” to death.