Global-warming skeptic speaks at Liberty University

British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton took on the United Nations, Al Gore and the mainstream media during a talk at Liberty University’s student convocation Wednesday, in which he questioned the science behind climate-change research and called for an end to the “global warming panic.”

Monckton — whose career has spanned business, journalism and architecture — served as the science policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and has been called the “high priest” of climate-change skepticism.

As early as 1986, Monckton advised Thatcher to investigate the scientific merits of blaming carbon dioxide for global warming.

Monckton praised the late Rev. Jerry Falwell for his outspoken criticism of global warming and mocked Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth,” calling it a “mawkish, science fiction, comedy horror movie.”

His message at Liberty, punctuated by applause from the student audience, came after an uncharacteristically snowy winter in Virginia and elsewhere thrust the global warming debate back into the spotlight.

Jerry Falwell Jr. said inviting Monckton to speak at Liberty was a way to expose students to both sides of the climate-change debate.

“A lot of our students come from public schools where the truth of global warming and the science of global warming is not always known,“ Falwell said after convocation.

Christians have a calling by God to protect the environment, Falwell added, and therefore should have a complete view of the global-warming debate.

“Many Christian young people are susceptible to the claims of the vast majority of environmentalists today who use pseudo-science to promote political agendas in the name of protecting the environment when their real goals are destroying freedom and destroying the economies of the western world,” he said later by e-mail. “Lord Monckton illustrated for our students in great detail how the hard left is doing just that around the world.”

Monckton’s views have drawn criticism from political leaders and scientists. Shortly before the Copenhagen climate conference last November, for example, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd criticized Monckton and other global-warming skeptics, calling them “small in number but too dangerous to be ignored.”

One of Monckton’s central claims is that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile. Such actions, he said, would “close down the economies of the West and make no different to the climate.”

Monckton is transparent about his lack of a science background.

“I have no scientific credentials whatsoever except a rather profitable knowledge of mathematics,” he said, adding that mathematics is the language of science.

Monckton said the “global warming panic” was responsible for countless deaths from starvation in Third World countries when Western nations shifted their priorities from growing food to growing biofuels.

“This is an outrage and a scandal that everyone at this university should oppose,” Monckton said.

He said that programs to reduce carbon emissions take money away from immediate problems, such as starvation, infectious disease, water quality and deforestation.