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Last year, the man who calls himself Lord Monckton put on a two-hour show at Utah Valley University, prancing and posturing like the king's fool.

Christopher Monckton has made an international name for himself as a climate-change debunker and self-purported member of the British House of Lords. Before heading out to hear his speech, I pulled the roster of that house, and Monckton's name wasn't on it.

Now the House of Lords has published a cease-and-desist order demanding that he stop claiming to be a member of the upper house, the Guardian newspaper reported Monday.

Monckton remains a British peer — his formal title is the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley — but he can no longer masquerade as a member of the House of Lords.

He has also been warned against co-opting Parliament's portcullis, or iron grate, emblem on his letterheads and lecture slides. It is, after all, the property of the queen.

Looking back, Monckton's performance at UVU was fascinating, if completely at odds with established science. He denied there was any global warming, that no glaciers were melting (tell that to Greenland), the loss of sea ice was normal and that polar bears are in no danger of losing habitat.

Also that Al Gore, co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, had "jus' done made it all up."

State Rep. Mike Noel,R-Kanab, an ardent climate-change denier, was greeting people in the audience that day in Orem. Noel spent much of the 2010 legislative session telling anyone who'd listen that the whole climate deal was a big conspiracy with no basis in fact.

Monckton, in the time since, has not shed his tendency to call anyone who disagrees with him Nazis or Hitler Youth. He also once espoused the notion that people with HIV/AIDS should have been isolated on, what, a desert island?

It was clear to me last year that Monckton is a poseur, a fountain of garbled "statistics" who has claimed to have been a top science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

But his puzzling insistence that he was a member of the House of Lords — although without the right to sit among real lords or to vote — has to end. So does his use of the emblem, which is prohibited by law and could lead to fines and prison time.

But for all that, he's still on the circuit. The Guardian reported he's in Australia on a lecture tour, although some of his appearances were canceled when he called a former adviser to that nation's government a fascist during a stop in Los Angeles.

It's worth remembering that, last year, he started his presentation with, "Don't believe a word I say."

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook.com/pegmcentee.