in which Monckton makes the claim:

"The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize."

Oh, so his contribution was by way of a letter in which he points out that there was an error in the values contained in a table. Nevertheless, by Monckton's own statement, the IPCC was claiming a lesser value than the sum of the erroneous values. That doesn't appear conspiratorial to me. The errata for the Working Group I contribution to the report admits to errors in the labelling of graphs to the tune of 10x. But hey, Monckton claims his letter changed the IPCC report! Therefore he shares in the Nobel prize. Yet he's not listed as a contributor or reviewer for any of the components of the report.

"The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold."

That comment about the 50 cm increase in thickness is interesting: just kinda sits there, a seed of doubt.

So here's the abstract from a recent review article on the topic (Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, Andrew Shepherd and Duncan Wingham, Science 16 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1529 - 1532):

"After a century of polar exploration, the past decade of satellite measurements has painted an altogether new picture of how Earth's ice sheets are changing. As global temperatures have risen, so have rates of snowfall, ice melting, and glacier flow. Although the balance between these opposing processes has varied considerably on a regional scale, data show that Antarctica and Greenland are each losing mass overall. Our best estimate of their combined imbalance is about 125 gigatons per year of ice, enough to raise sea level by 0.35 millimeters per year. This is only a modest contribution to the present rate of sea-level rise of 3.0 millimeters per year. However, much of the loss from Antarctica and Greenland is the result of the flow of ice to the ocean from ice streams and glaciers, which has accelerated over the past decade. In both continents, there are suspected triggers for the accelerated ice discharge—surface and ocean warming, respectively—and, over the course of the 21st century, these processes could rapidly counteract the snowfall gains predicted by present coupled climate models."

And regarding Greenland, from the body of that paper:

"Since the most recent IPCC report, there have been seven estimates of Greenland mass imbalance based on satellite altimetry (18), interferometry (12), and gravimetry (11, 15, 16, 19, 20). There is consensus that during the 1990s the interior underwent modest snowfall-driven growth, which appears to be associated with a precipitation trend present in the meteorological record (32), offset by losses from lower altitude regions (Fig. 3, A and B). The decadal imbalance is not accurately determined. The more positive satellite altimeter estimate (18) is affected by signal loss in the steeper coastal margins; the aircraft laser measurements (8) are relatively sparse, although more sensitive to losses from marginal glaciers; and the mass-budget estimate (12) is undermined by the uncertainty of some 50 Gt year–1 in the accumulation. Nonetheless, the consensus of these measurements suggests a net loss in the 1990s of some 50 Gt year–1." (my bold)

So, there is more to the story than what Monckton states. The authors of this review actually discuss the weaknesses of the data and the problem with the variablity of the ice discharge rate. But it's odd that Monckton would not reference a very recent review article on the topic.

But that shouldn't come as a surprise, given that Monckton's superb scholarship led him to write last year "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none." 1421 debunked.