Dubbed the "high priest of climate skepticism," former Margaret Thatcher adviser Christopher Monckton has become a formidable foe of the movement claiming mankind is causing catastrophic "global warming," noting that the average worldwide temperature has not risen in nearly two decades.

So when President Obama recently announced his plan to bypass Congress and use his executive power to "fight climate change," targeting the coal-energy industry, Monckton responded.

Some of what Obama said was simply copied from Al Gore's writings on global warming, he said, and virtually everything was incomplete, misleading – or wrong.

Obama's declarations included:

"Science … tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind."

"The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years. … these are facts."

The "sea level in New York, in New York Harbor, are (sic) now a foot higher than a century ago."

"The question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late."

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It was too much for Monckton.

"The 'image of Earth from space' intro is lifted from Gore's sci-fi movie 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Gore may well have written much of the speech," Monckton said. "The phrase 'carbon pollution' is also lifted from Gore. It occurs 30 times in the text of the speech.

"One imagines he means 'carbon dioxide pollution.' But CO2 is not a pollutant and is not listed as one on the U.S. national inventory of pollutants. It is a naturally occurring trace gas, harmlessly present in the air we breathe out, and in the bubbles in bread, Coca-Cola, and (more importantly) champagne."

Then Monckton launched into a point-by-point demolition of Obama's claims:

The "worry that rising levels [of CO2] might someday disrupt the fragile balance that makes our planet so hospitable" is scientifically unfounded. CO2 concentrations, at almost 400 μatm, are almost as low as they have ever been in geological time. In the Jurassic era, 175 million years ago, CO2 concentration was about 6000 μatm; in the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, it was 8000 μatm; and in the Neoproterozoic era, 750 million years ago, it was 30,000 μatm, or 75 times today’s concentration. Yet the planet survived and throve. The statement that "the 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years" is no big deal. Recorded history, as far as global temperatures are concerned, only goes back to 1850. The weather was warmer than today in the medieval, Roman, Minoan, Old Kingdom, and Holocene Warm Periods, the last of which endured for 4000 years (8000-4000 BC) and was 3 Cº warmer than the present. Obama says, "Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached record highs." Welcome to our variable climate, which, like the baseball scores, is a chaotic object where new records will tend to be set all the time. Yet the 3500+ Argo bathythermograph buoys deployed throughout the world's oceans since 2006 show very little ocean warming overall, so that – according to the now-failed ENVISAT satellite, sea level in the 8 years 2004-2012 rose at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century. His moan about ice in the Arctic shrinking to its smallest size on record is also little to worry about: for the Arctic ice record only goes back a third of a century. It is likely that there was a lot less ice in the Arctic in 1922 and again in the mid-1930s than there is today, but we cannot demonstrate that definitively. The statement that sea level is a foot higher than a century ago should also be put in context. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age sea level has risen by 400 feet – a rate of getting on for 4 feet a century. So 1 foot a century is no big deal (and the 1.3 inches/century equivalent warming rate from 2004-2012 is still less of a big deal). He whines on: "2012 was the warmest year in our history." That may or may not have been true for the U.S. (there is good reason to suppose that 1934 was warmer): but it is certainly not true globally:

The graph, showing the Hadley/CRU data, makes clear that January 2007, an el Niño month, was the warmest on record; and 1998, an el Niño year, was the warmest year on record. El Niños are naturally-occurring events. Since the entire trend-line falls within the blue zone of measurement/bias/coverage uncertainty, we do not even know to 95% certainty that there has been any global warming at all for the past 17 years 4 months. Notwithstanding continuing increases in C)2 concentration, there has been no warming at all for 12 years 6 months:

The statement that "Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl [in the 1930s]" is equivalent to a statement that the drought of the dustbowl years was worse than today's drought. Yet the world is warmer now than it was then: