Abraham, J

<a href="http://www.stthomas.edu/magazine/2012/Winter/abraham.html">http://www.stthomas.edu/magazine/2012/Winter/abraham.html</a>

In fact, what became a global confrontation between Abraham and Monckton can be traced to an invitation that the Minnesota Free Market Institute extended to Monckton in October 2009 to speak on the Bethel University campus in Arden Hills. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0" target="_blank" title="">In his talk </a>(not sponsored by Bethel), Monckton maintained that scientists are wrong about warming temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and even problems facing polar bears. At last count, a YouTube video of that talk had received 259,517 views.

"I knew I needed to respond," Abraham recalled. "I could not let that go unanswered,

and I asked myself, ‘If I don’t, who will?’" He spent that winter researching Monckton’s

statements to the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

"I thought, man, this guy is a great speaker and he is very convincing. If I didn’t know the science, I would believe him. Frankly, the nonscientists in the audience didn��t have a chance. They had no way of knowing what he said was not true. I felt Monckton took advantage of them and he knew he was taking advantage of them."

As part of his research, Abraham wrote to the authors or the directors of organizations

that had published papers that Monckton referenced in his Bethel lecture. In case after case, the scientists wrote back to say that Monckton had it wrong.

If you believed Monckton, Abraham said, you would believe that: the world is not warming, sea levels are not rising, ice is not melting, the ocean is not heating, scientists

are lying and there’s a conspiracy.

Abraham’s calm and cerebral response took the form of an 83-minute video that he

made available on the web in late May 2010. And there the point-by-point rebuttal sat

for some weeks, for the most part unnoticed. That changed, and dramatically so, when

George Monbiot, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper in England, wrote about Abraham’s work.

"Viscount Monckton’s assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota," Monbiot wrote. "Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it.

"The results of Abraham’s investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation. Some of Monckton's assertions are breathtaking in their brazen disregard of facts."

Picking a fight with ‘quite a dragon’

The story might have ended there, but Monckton tossed gas on the fire by responding

with the kind of verbal attacks that attract audiences to professional wrestling.

In his initial response, Monckton said Abraham’s comments were a "hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal" that was "delivered in a nasal and irritatingly

matey tone (at least we are spared his face - he looks like an overcooked prawn)."

He also wrote that Abraham was "snake-like" and "his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction."

But Monckton was just getting warmed up. On the Alex Jones radio and Internet program, Monckton described Abraham as "this wretched little man" who "only belongs to this half-assed Christian Bible college." Monckton described Abraham’s response as "complete fabrication" and "lie after lie after lie after lie."

Jones, for his part, called Abraham’s response a "scurrilous list of fiction" and asked Monckton: "Doesn’t he know that you’ve routed all these other fraudulent professors

and this time he’s picked a fight with quite a dragon?"

"I don’t think he’s realized it yet," Monkton replied. He later gave Father Dennis Dease’s email address and encouraged viewers to "email this creep of a president." (It marked the first time, Dease later said, he’d been called a creep, at least in public.) In the first of repeated threats of legal action against Abraham and St. Thomas, Monckton said, "We are looking at a legal case if we can’t get any sense out of the president."

Global movement’s salvo ‘fired by a quiet, unassuming professor’