Has Christopher Monckton ever won a lawsuit?

My lawsuit was much better than "Cats." I'm going to file them again and again.

Christopher Monckton is an ignorant, incompetent, dishonest, delusional mess of a gibbering idiot. I've reported on this fact for years and I have yet to hear from any lawyers, which is why I was skeptical that the Nova-Monckton account of him repeatedly crushing his enemies in lawsuits was anything other than a slop bucket of narcissistic lies(*).

First claim: Monckton sued the British government over using An Inconvenient Truth in schools, and won.

We have had some good court victories. In 2007 the London High Court condemned Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy-horror movie. It found nine errors so serious that the court ordered 77 pages of corrective guidance to be circulated to every school in England. The judge said: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.”
Two days later, Gore won the Nobel Mickey Mouse Prize. But he was holed below the waterline. Now he is seen not as a prophet but as a profiteer.
The whingers of the do-nothing brigade were at work even then. The lawyers refused to file the case on the ground that there was no chance of success. They were fired.
The new lawyers said we could not possibly win on the science and refused to use any scientific testimony. The judge threw the case out. I recovered the position by instructing the lawyers to write to the judge asking if he had even seen Gore’s movie before he had reached his judgment without holding a hearing.
Tellingly, the judge did not reply. I insisted on – and got – a new judge. This time the lawyers did what they were told. I wrote 80 pages of scientific testimony. Bob Carter and Dick Lindzen– bless them both – worked from the document in crafting their evidence, and signed off as expert witnesses. As soon as the other side saw it, they collapsed and settled, paying the plaintiff $400,000.

Reality: Monckton wasn't one of the litigants in that suit, which the deniers lost. The quote from the judge, which I've bolded above, is a fabrication -- a total fiction (for a comparison with what the judge actually said, see this outstanding analysis, beginning at the two-minute mark.)

He claims to have asked one of his friends to fund Stewart Dimmock, who actually sued. Dimmock has been asked who helped fund his suit, at refused to name anyone, calling it "a private matter." Many sources, understandably, report this as fact, because who would lie about participating in a failed lawsuit? But the reality is that Monckton lies constantly, habitually, and always by way of growing the legend of Monckton.

The case, Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills, wasn't settled, and Dimmock didn't get a payment of $400,000. He did, as is routine in British legal battles, win a payment for a portion of his legal costs, leaving him 60,000 pounds poorer.

His stated objective in the lawsuit was for An Inconvenient Truth not to be shown in schools any more. The judge rejected that request.

Monckton claims to have been involved in funding this failed lawsuit, but as far as I know, no one actually involved in it has confirmed that, placing his role in the same category as his claimed discovery of the cure for AIDS.

The second win claimed by Monckton has already been exposed as another fantasy: he claimed that Mann had settled a lawsuit with Tim Ball for a million dollars. Whoops! Pure fiction, and Jo Nova was troubled to print a correction.

Monckton also trumpets a huge, simply huge, victory against the dasterdly BBC:

I sued the BBC a couple of years ago when they did a hatchet job on me. I had been told – in writing – that I should have the chance to alter any points that were inaccurate. Fat chance.

So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.

I insisted on seeing the programme before it was broadcast. It was a disgrace. I wrote to the Director-General listing two dozen factual errors and numerous other biases in the schlocumentary. No reply.
So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.
The BBC crumbled and cut the programme from 90 minutes to an hour, taking out the overwhelming majority of the vicious nonsense. There were still some objectionable points, so I went into court.
I fought the case myself. When I introduced the two barristers and three solicitors for the Beeb, the judge interrupted me and said: “Lord Monckton, I fear I must draw your attention to a potential conflict of interest. You see, I am a member of your club.”
I had no objection and invited the BBC’s expensive QC to give his opinion. He had no objection either, but added: “Er, I too have a conflict of interest. I also am a member of Lord Monckton’s club.”
The judge did not prevent the Beeb from leaving a few barbs in my side. The BBC issued a lying statement that I had lost. But the judge held that I had “substantially won” the action. A 90-minute programme had become 60 minutes. The Beeb had lost. Big-time.

He lost, of course. Really this story gets to the heart of why Monckton is such a memorable liar. It's full of specific details -- about the club, and the judge, and the director-general's personal assistant. Yet nothing that can be easily checked, nothing that can be readily verified. It's full of numbers -- two dozen errors, 90 minutes to an hour, two barristers and three solicitors, etc. And it has a simple story of Monckton prevailing against odds. Really the only weakness of the story, as is typical of Monckton, is that he cannot control his own narcissism long enough to sell the story. Monckton is always the least believable part of a Monckton anecdote. He demands! He sues! He belongs to a fancy club! He takes on an army of lawyers and wins!

Monckton has surely mastered the Big Lie(**), as his fictional legal career illustrates.

Monckton has also threatened legal action against George Monbiot after an article dissecting Monckton's dishonest hackery. (He claimed it was "libellous of me in my calling.") But no lawsuit ever emerged. He promised to have John Abraham brought up on charges of academic misconduct; he didn't. He made the same threat about Dr. Barry Bickmore: again, no follow-through.

So here is my question of the day: Has Monckton ever actually followed through on his profuse threats, undertaken legal action against a critic, and won a judgement against them? Or are his repeated claims to have done so -- claims that have now progressed to advocating specious lawsuits against critics as a strategy, since it's worked so well for him -- simply another of his narcissistic fantasies?

See also:

Skeptical Science's Monckton Myths.

Barry Bickmore's Lord Monckton's Rap Sheet.

Abraham debunks Monckton (1/6)

Monckton Bunkum (Parts 1-5):

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*That, and of course the fact that their mouths were moving.

** The Big Lie is a propaganda technique described by Hitler in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Monckton, exceptionally, explicitly admits to hiding behind this cognitive glitch:

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong but that I got just about everything wrong. And how plausible is that?

The rise of the psuedo-expert

Andrew Sullivan highlighted this graphic a few days ago: it is a translation of a note by Leonardo da Vinci. He also points to this analysis, which I find telling in our particular historical moment today:

I think it's pretty interesting that of the nine tasks shown, six involve consulting and learning from other people. Leonardo da Vinci needs to find a book. Leonardo da Vinci needs to get in touch with local merchants, monks, and accountants who he hopes can help him better understand concepts within their areas of expertise.
Leonardo da Vinci knows he doesn't know everything.

The climate debate is of course saturated with people who believe they know everything. Monckton is a particularly egregious example, but this behavior extends on the way down to the lowly comment-leaving "skeptic." An important aspect of their rhetoric is its implicit populism; how dare so-called "experts" with their "training" and their "lifetime of peer-reviewed scientific work" fail to respect the blog-taught skeptic auteur.

This behavior extends beyond the climate wars; it has become a key element of dishonest rhetoric in the internet age. Bill Keller's recent essay "The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting" tells the story from another angle:

Back in the very pre-digital days, the writer A. J. Liebling famously remarked that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to the man who owned one. Nowadays, of course, freedom of the press belongs to anyone with Internet access, from the information guerrillas of WikiLeaks to the blogger next door. The democratization of media has diminished the authority once held — and sometimes abused — by a few big newspapers and broadcasters. In many ways this has enriched society, creating a great global buffet of information and opinion, pooling the knowledge of the masses and providing an almost instantaneous reality check on the conventional wisdom.
The consequences have not all been happy, though. The easiest way to stand out in such a vast crowd of microbroadcasters is to be the loudest, the angriest, the most outrageous. If you want that precious traffic, you stake out a position somewhere in oh-my-God territory and proclaim it with a vengeance. Global warming is a hoax! Vaccines make you sick! Obama is a Muslim! In vanquishing the conventional wisdom, sometimes it seems we have vanquished wisdom itself. . . . In the Internet age, anyone can be an expert, and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist.

When people take the time to actually become experts, or at least competent, the internet free-for-all is valuable. But pseudoskeptics, whose ultimate goal is to forestall action, rarely take that path, and it's not hard to see why:

1. Loudly asserting expertise may not convey authority upon you, but it does serve to create confusion. Creating an environment in which real scientists are not trusted is just as effective -- and far easier -- than building a solid argument that convinces people who know the science.

2. Expertise is narrow. Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most famous polymath in human history, yet, the areas in which he trusts his own knowledge exclusively are rather narrow; his dependence on other scholars is quite extensive. That's the reality of knowing something well; it takes time and effort. Fake expertise, based upon expensive claims, arrogant assertions, and vicious, slanderous attacks on real scientists, is a Swiss Army knife of rhetoric.

Fake skeptics need fake expertise because they change their accounts of the science and critique of emissions restrictions on a daily basis, according to the needs of the situation. One minute they are attacking the temperature record. The next they scorn the idea that anyone ever questioned the world was warming. The next day they are economists, knowing that warming will be beneficial to human welfare. On Tuesdays they are experts in international politics, certain that there will never be an agreement to cut greenhouse gases, and by Wednesday, if the winds are favorable, they will once again be experts in radiative physics, proving that carbon dioxide cannot warm the planet.

Real expertise will speak to one of those arguments. In part. Fake expertise is easily invoked to support them all.

My favorite recent example of fake experts in their natural habitat is this thread, in which the subject of how Easter Island with deforested attracted the attention of Judith's pseudoscientists, who instantly, instantly -- use their "common sense" to become experts in archeology. Just one example:

randomengineer | September 22, 2011 at 1:26 am | Reply

Overall I find Diamond’s work absurd and consider him to be equivalent to other obvious cranks and charlatans like Von Daniken. He’s popular only because modern day eco-silliness and cultural revisionism is popular, and it is popular for the same reason the Victorians had such asinine views of societies that preceded theirs — projection in the form of disbelief that previous societies could be quite clever. (e.g. until very recently the prevailing view of Tudor England was informed by a number of victorian works, all of which were breathtakingly wrong, and only recently has been overturned by real scholars like David Starkey.) Diamond isn’t even qualified to serve lunch to real scholars, much less waste their time with his ridiculously slanted and partisan opinions.

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randomengineer | September 23, 2011 at 12:15 pm | Reply 

This thread is no different. An anti-western (typical postmodern revisionism purporting to reject colonialism therefore “cool” and oh so intellectual) eco-warrior like Diamond highlights a suspect eco-warrior opinion paper so as to wield this as a club to make a blunt and wrong point, and the usual suspects chime in with the “hey it was published therefore must be TRVTH” meme.
I’ve seen the easter island eco-rubbish before and have considered it a real hoot. I had no idea anyone took Diamond et al seriously. The notion that islanders who know they’re living on a remote rock would blow the only resources necessary to leave said rock so as to roll giant heads about is absurdity on stilts.

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randomengineer | September 22, 2011 at 12:37 pm | Reply

. . . People were clever even back then. Imagine that. Dragging was invented by those who have a romantic notion of the cleverness of the modern era and a presumption that the ancients were stupid. Diamond et al conjure up the image of imbecile natives deforesting the island to drag statuary assuming they were too dumb to figure out how to move statues any other way. “Scholarship” depending on the notion of stupidity of the people of the past is worthless.

And so on and on. Ultimately, the strategy of the fake expert is a bluff; by bald assertion, frequent repetition, and rapid escalation to hysterical carpet-chewing, they seek to train others to let their ridiculous claims pass unchallenged. If others do engage with them, they seek to assert a false equivalence with informed commentators; they have their opinion, and (scientists, archaeologists, economists, etc) have theirs.

This rhetoric is highly effective in rallying those already predisposed to disregard politically troublesome facts. It is strengthened by the hyperpartisan  atmosphere in which everything is contested, and nothing one's own "side" says can ever be a simple mistake -- as the online legions who rushed to defend Sarah Palin's Paul Revere blunder can attest:

nomedawson 5 months ago

The sad, snide, sappy, snarky, superlious attacks on Sarah Palin by lachrymous, lugubrious, liberal latte-sippers is soooo sanctimonious & shallow. All revolutionary/foundational events soon become encrusted in myth & legend. The truth is too mundane. So, simple minded jingles from Longfellow become rigid doctrine. Who would dare to look deeper? Complexity, nuance? Oooooh, sooo mean! So, if Sarah Palin ever goes to Italy, she must parrot the rubbish that two abandoned babies named Romulus & Remus were sustained into puberty on wolf’s milk; then they founded Rome. Because “it’s one of the key stories” in Roman history.

How does real expertise -- in all its necessary humility, walking its narrow path of specialization, with its retinue of caveats and qualifications -- assert itself in an internet age in which, as Yeats prophetically predicted, the worst are full of passionate intensity?

That is the key question for those on the side of science in the global warming online free-for-all.