GWPF: Follow the Money

Well I said that it was a shame Liam Fox resigned just as the scandal was getting interesting, and it seems I was right.

If you recall, Fox managed to wind up his charity The Atlantic Bridge (TAB) just before it had to answer some awkward questions to the Charities Commission. The Atlantic Bridge seemed to exist to link the Tories to the loony tunes Tea Party end of American politics, and one of its close allies was the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch Industries funded climate change denial front group.

The Atlantic Bridge was operated out of Fox's tax payer funded office by his friend Adam Werrity, whose unofficial role as Fox's advisor and roving ambassadore caused Liam to resign.

A major donor to Atlantic Bridge was billionaire Michael Hintze, he gave £104,000 and free office space to Atlantic Bridge. Piddling small change to him. Here he is on facebook. 21 people seem to like him.

Not to beat around the bush, hedge fund manager Hintze is in the news again today. Twice.

Firstly he turned up yesterday as one of the big donors to the Tory Party wined and dined at Cameron's place after the election. As a £1.5 million donor to the party that counts as a very expensive buffet. I hope there was at least a chocolate fountain.

Secondly the Guardian is today claiming that Hintze is the mysterious big donors to Nigel Lawson's climate change denial group The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The evidence is a reply he gave to an unnamed environmental group in which he indicated his support for Nigella's Dad, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the last-recession-but-one.

The identity of this chap has been a mystery for a while. A judge recently refused to order the GWPF to name him on the grounds that, lunches with the current Chancellor not withstanding, the group was not particularly influential. With only 143 members that may seem fair enough, but Lawson did get to have lunch with George Osborne, which is something Friends of the Earth hasn't managed despite having a thousand times as many members.

So it appears Hintze, by means of his bulging wallet, has managed to get the ear of both the Prime Minister and, indirectly, the Chancellor. No wonder the 'greenest government ever' is looking a sort of sludgy brown at the moment.

Global Warming Report Agrees With Climate Change Denier

Another month another report on climate change, this time by the Berkely Earth group. More famous for anti-war protests in the sixties, Berkley is also the home to a university apparently.

The Berkley Earth Surface Temperature Report (BEST) discovered that the earth is indeed warming and that this is not a quirk of poor quality or badly placed weather stations, nor of the encroachment of cities into the vicinity of the experts thermometers.

Interestingly this tallies with the results of climate change denier Anthony Watts, who launched his surfacestation.org project four years ago. His tireless volunteers toured the country identifying badly cited weather stations. This pioneering study then allowed the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to recalibrate the surface temperature record of the USA, chopping out all the dodgy weather stations. Their result was that this led to a slight increase in the recorded warming.

You'd expect Mr Watts to be delighted that a major research group has confirmed his findings, but rather inexplicably his opinion of BEST is that it "the study’s methodology was flawed because it examined data over a 60-year period instead of the 30-year-one that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies. He also noted that the report had not yet been peer-reviewed and cited spelling errors as proof of sloppiness." Spelling mistakes by scientists? Unhaerd off!

The report also coincided with a second leak of hacked emails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. The point of the leak appeared to be to show that climate scientists hid data that didn't agree with their pre-judged opinion of the science.

This is a view endorsed by Mr Watts, a gentleman who would clearly never do such a thing himself.

How to cook a data set

Take a look at this chart, which has been doing the rounds of Climate Change denier blogs and other discussion forums under the title of 'NASA satellites reveal no Global Warming for 30 years'. The original source appears to be here, a blog called C3 Headlines.

Pretty conclusive heh? Four out of six data points showing cooling easily balancing out the two that show warming. The source of the data, the very respectable National Space Science and Technology Centre, adds a touch of respectability too.

So what's the trick?

Well, the data isn't made up. The original numbers are all here and, although it takes a bit of time to wade through them, the figures used on the chart are correct.

What's been done is a bit of good old fashioned cherry picking. That's easy enough to do, but what some eagle eyed denier has spotted is that the cherries that are worth picking lie at 5 year intervals. Neat.

The result is a bit like the Bible Code. If you have a big enough set of numbers then, rather like the million monkies with their typewriters coming up with Hamlet, there's always going to be a pattern that shows what you want to find. If you searched hard enough you'd probably find the results of the Six Nations rugby tournament hidden somewhere.

This trick wouldn't have worked last month, where the figures would have been 0.19, -0.04, -0.18, 0.03, -0.13 and 0.02 - a clear warming trend, even though this has been a cold winter.

The trick certainly didn't work last February either, when the data set would have shown an even stronger warming trend: 0.18, -0.09, -0.01, -0.24, -0.32, -0.07.

Games like this can be played all day, but they don't really prove anything. The only way to tell if we're warming or cooling is to do a proper statistical analysis, and that's shown on the bottom line of the data - a warming trend of 0.14 degrees per decade. At 15 years this trend becomes statistically significant with a confidence level of 95%. So, we are warming.

But I'm not going to leave it there.

If any climate scientist had tried to use a trick liked this to 'prove' Climate Change, then it would have been all over for the discipline. C3 Headlines can get away with this stuff because it serves a particularly gullible and self interested client group.

Scientists by contrast have to be open, honest and upfront. When Professor Phil Jones and the UAE were accused of fraud after Climategate their entire body of work was on trial.

The likes of C3 Headlines though are expendable. They put out their bogus data, which can ultimately be denied itself by those who fund it and quote from it.

As Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, lamented on Tuesday, if only the media would stop reporting the debate about Climate Change as if it was a divorce trial and start showing how barren the cupboard was on the denier side.

26/03/2012

Note: C3 Headlines appears to have responded to this post. I'd like to reply to their reply - but as they haven't actually answered any of my points I can't. Sorry guys, you got caught. Live with it.

Military Intelligence Blunders and Climate Change Denial: Lessons to Learn

1. "Well, don't worry about it."
The Failure of Imagination.

Early in the morning of the 7th September 1941 a technician monitoring a radar on the northern tip of Hawaii noticed some unexplained blips. As a good soldier he reported it to the Duty Officer, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler. "Well, don't worry about it," the officer replied. Forty minutes later bombs were raining down on Pearl Harbour, most of the US Pacific Fleet was on fire or underwater and over 2000 people dead.

The attack has become synonymous for the failure of military intelligence. Famously an oxymoron, intelligence failures are generally responsible for worst disasters in military history, from Lord Chelmsford going off to chase phantom Zulus and leaving his camp at Isandhlwana poorly defended, to the USA blundering into Vietnam thinking they were only facing a few foreign infiltrators.

But if failure to spot the warning signs in war can lead to the deaths of thousands, being ambushed by Climate Change could lead to the deaths of millions, and we are being bigger Muppets than the unfortunate Lieutenant Kermit.

Military intelligence failures don't just happen because someone is being dense, they happen because one bunch of people has outsmarted another, and this is a lesson that those of us who want to do something about Climate Change, especially scientists, often forget.

Figuring out relativity was easy by comparison, as there was no Cavorite industry hacking Einstein's emails and claiming it was all down to Ether. Darwin met a bit of resistance on Evolution, but it took the Creationist nearly a hundred years come up with Intelligent Design, by which time the science was settled.

But back to 1941. Tyler wasn't to blame, he was on his second day in the job and nobody had told him anything, but the authorities in Honolulu most definitely were. Tensions were rising and intercepted radio messages told the Americans an attack was coming. The response though was just to bunch the aeroplanes more closely together on the tarmac.

This may sound daft, but it meant they could be more easily guarded by sentries. This was because the only attack the commanders could imagine was a sabotage by secret agents. That the entire Japanese Fleet would silently steam half way across the Pacific to bomb them was something they just couldn't envisage. It didn't matter that the Royal Navy had pulled a similar trick on the Italians the year before, in their world this sort of thing was unimaginable.

And that I suspect is where most people are with Climate Change. It is too big to imagine. The blips on the radar screen are getting bigger, but we'd rather not worry about it.


2. "I'm not worried because he's not worried"
The Denial Loop

Egypt's surprise attack across the Suez Canal in October 1973 was one of the great coup's of all time. The Egyptians crossed the canal by surprise, dug in, and fought off counter-attacks by the hitherto invincible Israeli Army. Only an intemperate advance brought on by the collapse of their Syrian allies prevented the first Arab victory in war over Israel.

Egypt had been planning the operation for six years, and had ran exercise after exercise, sometimes mobilising of thousands of civilians as well as tens of thousands of soldiers. The result was that when the actual assault came, even the Egyptian soldiers involved were taken by surprise, not believing it was the real thing until they were actually ordered to put their boats into the water.

But it still shouldn't have worked. Against them was the combined intelligence might of MOSSAD and the CIA. Israel had the agents on the ground and the Americans had the spy planes and satellites. Together they should have seen it coming.

What went wrong instead was that each agency looked at the other and, seeing no reaction, assumed they knew something they didn't. MOSSAD didn't panic because the CIA didn't panic, and the CIA didn't panic because MOSSAD didn't panic, and so on.

Campaigners trying to convince a sceptical public know the problem only too well. If Climate Change was a real threat the government would do something about it, says Joe Public. Whilst in the corridors of power the green lobbyists are told that the government would love to do something to limited our fossil fuel consumption, only the public won't allow them to you see......


3. "I'm not lying, he is"
Bluff and counter bluff.

If you want to point to where it all went wrong for America in Vietnam most historians will point you to the Tet Offensive in February 1968. For three years Westmoreland and the military had been telling the public that the war was as good as won. Then suddenly there were thousands of guys in black pyjamas running around South Vietnam's major cities and blowing things up. No matter that by the end of the week most of them were dead, the damage had been done.

The shock the American public felt after Tet was similar to that felt by scientists and activists after Climategate. Despite the well documented funding of dubious Climate Change denying lobby groups by the fossil fuel industry, and not withstanding the rather obvious fact that lots of rich people are going to loose a lot of money if we give up on fossil fuels, when a few stolen emails are quoted out of context a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible people choose to believe that there really is a scientific conspiracy. Why? Are people really that stupid?

The CIA aren't stupid, and although they get a lot of the blame for Vietnam, mostly they did a good job. The agency base in Saigon had been telling Washington for years that this was a full blown insurgency and not just a bit of cross border raiding, but the top brass at Langley hadn't believed them, and by the start of 1968 they were signally back to America that something big was in the pipeline.

Something big was indeed brewing; a major offensive involving attacks in every major southern city. Insurgencies by their very nature are secret, but the Vietnamese knew they couldn't keep something this size secret, so instead they went for an elaborate bluff.

The spot they chose was Khe Sanh, a US marine base on the border. It was no threat to the Viet Cong, who could easily bypass it, but at the end of 1967 the Vietnamese started moving large forces up to Khe Sanh. At the same time they planted documents which said the plans for a national offensive were just a bluff and that Khe Sanh was the real objective.

The trick worked better than they could have expected. France had quit Vietnam fifteen years earlier when their outpost at Dien Bien Phu fell, and President Johnson was terrified of a similar debacle. Ignoring the numerous intelligence reports which suggested Khe Sanh was the bluff, he ordered a model of the base constructed in the White House basement. So whilst he was busy watching a struggle for a few square metres of worthless jungle, the Viet Cong overran huge chunks of South Vietnam.

Poor old Johnson. He wasn't a bad bloke, and the chants of "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" really hurt him. But in the end the demonstrators were right and he was wrong. The Americans were taken by surprise, lots of people died, and it was all pointless from then on.

But the world of bluff and double bluff can be confusing, and in the end, like Johnson, we can just end up seeing what we're most afraid of and not what's really out there.

Why did so many people fall for Climategate? Maybe they don't like clever clogs, maybe they like idea that a lot of self-righteous beardy people have got it wrong, or maybe they just like their cars and foreign holidays. Either way the deniers found that the easiest way to protect an extremely plausible conspiracy is to suggest an utterly implausible one.


4. "None so blind as those who don't wish to see."
When all else fails, ignore the inconvenient facts.

General Montgomery had a brilliant plan, one that would definitely end the war by Christmas. It involved a desperate race to reach a bridge captured by paratroopers before they were overrun by the Germans. True, the relief force would be advancing down a single road where one German with a panzerfaust could hold up the entire army, and true, to date the only race Monty had looked likely to win was onto a pedestal, but it might just work.

The Dutch resistance weren't so sure and brought back worrying reports of German tanks refitting in the woods. They were ignored. Major Urquhart, the intelligence officer, wasn't too impressed either and kept producing aeriel photographs of said panzers in the woods. He was sent on sick leave. Nothing was to stop the master plan.

The result was heroic, but pointless.

But it was a really good plan, and that's the problem. If only our climate wasn't so sensitive to pesky carbon molecules, then we could build paradise. Whether it's Social Democracy 2.0, the cutthroat world of the Neoliberals or even a Marxist workers paradise, it all depends on using cheap energy with no consequences.

There are no easy answer to stupidity, and the only solution to bad intelligence is better intelligence.

Perhaps though we could take heart from the biggest military intelligence disaster of this decade; the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. We couldn't stop the war, but at least most of us saw through the deceit. You can fool all of the military all of the time, but you can only fool all of the people some of the time.

Climate Change Deniers in the Institute of Physics

Has the Institute of Physics hatched a cuckoo-in-the-nest in the form of it's Energy Sub-Group?

The other day I named a Peter F Gill as one of the contributors to the submission to the Climategate enquiry who mouths denier propaganda. Another name that has now popped up Terri Jackson (pictured).

Terri was on the Energy Group of the IoP. Like the Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea, the Energy Group and the Energy Sub-Group are not the same. However Mr Gill, at least, has served on both. Terri though appears to have left the Energy Group under a bit of a cloud. Here's a letter she wrote to the denier blog Climate Realists which gives a flavour of Jackson's views and perhaps explains the problem.

In it we find the standard denier arguments; "the earth has been warmer in the past", "it's water vapour", "humans only contribute 3% of CO2", "Mars is getting warmer" and "it's the sun". In the Skeptical Science catalogue that's a 1, a 2, a 16, a 24 and a 27. In typical denier fashion these are thrown out like machine gun bullets. The intention is clearly to confuse and create the illusion of scientific controversy - the classic tactics of denial whether we are talking about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer or fossil fuels and climate change.

In a recent interview for The Irish News Jackson throws out some more factoids; the alleged removal of the Medieval Warm Period from the Hockey Stick graph, and the old ones about the Vikings in Greenland, sea ice not changed in 30 years and warming observed on other planets - thus adding a 22, a 23, a 25 and a 26. (She seems to be more less doing them in the right order, doesn't she?.

She also refers to barking mad climate change denier Lord Monckton (the chap who gave free advice to the BNP and refused to apologise for calling a Jewish activist a Nazi) as "my colleague".

This is where it gets interesting. Monckton is currently on tour in Austraia and according to Donald Oats, who bravely sat through his garbage in the name of science, some of Monckton's ad libs referred to respectable academic bodies making some "very interesting submissions" to the inquiry. The IoP's contribution is the only evidence that really fits the bill.

Did Monckton know about the evidence in advance? If so, who told him?

The IoP's Energy Group is now free of deniers like Jackson, but Gill remains on the Energy Sub-Group. Whether he is in good company there will not be know until the IoP tells us who makes up this secret committee.

However for a bit of light relief it's amusing to read, given the criticism levelled at the CRU for deleting emails, that the IoP's own electronic correspondence includes the following disclaimer

This email (and attachments) are confidential and intended for the addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient please notify the sender, delete any copies and do not take action in reliance on it…

Pots and kettles?

Have Climate Change deniers infiltrated the Institute of Physics?

Twenty years ago I was a hard working physics undergraduate.

Okay, well, maybe not. As I type this at 9PM on a Friday evening it would probably be more accurate to say that 20 years ago I would now be on my fourth bottle of Newcastle Brown in some some seedy student bar, quenching a thirst generated by having been out of bed for almost eight hours. However I was doing this whilst enrolled on a course entitled Physics with Astrophysics. And I did eventually sober up enough to get my degree. Just.

It was never cool to admit to being a physicist. I did once met a woman who thought that at a pinch 'astrophysics' could be interpreted as 'rocket scientist' and that I would make an interesting addition to the notches on her bedpost, but that was pretty much the exception that proved the rule.

However now even I am starting to have doubts about admitting to which branch of the sciences I studied, and the reason is the House of Commons inquiry into Climategate.

Embattled University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit Professor Phil Jones was given a luke warm grilling by MPs on Tuesday, but the hot news on the denier blogosphere wasn't this but the submission to the inquiry from the Institute of Physics.

In what could charitably be referred to as a 'robust' submission, the IoP repeated most of the more lurid accusations against Jones and the CRU but also, for good measure, stuck in the assertion that

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions

Ouch.

So why did an organisation whose official line on Climate Change is

"The institutes's position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing, and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change."

push Prof Jones under the metaphorical bus?

The answer is proving rather illusive. Despite their submission criticising the UEA for lack of transparency, nobody has been able to find out who actually wrote the submission. The IoP website has changed several times over the last 36 hours, but it now appears that the statement was the work of the Energy Sub-group.

This is where it gets interesting.

On that subcommittee is, and former chair of it, is a chap by the name of Peter F Gill. Mr Gill is the head of a company called Crestport Services who do consultancy work for

"oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman"

In other words, he's in the pay of the oil companies.

Mr Gill pops up every now and again with his own views on Climate Change, and interesting they are too. Especially interesting is his little piece in the April 2008 newsletter of the IoP South Central branch. Under the disclaimer "The opinions in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the IOP Energy Group" he reels off in quick succession a number of what are known in the trade as 'zombie arguments' - discredited attacks on Climate Change science that continue to be repeated by deniers ad nausium irrespective of how many times they have been disproved.

In quick succession Mr Gill gives us

While the focus is on carbon dioxide, it is well known that water vapour is far more important

carbon dioxide content follows temperature changes rather than causing them

and

If mechanisms exist that can cause runaway greenhouse effects, then we are bound to ask why such mechanisms have not shown up in the geological record?

Those of us having to deal with these arguments on discussion boards are indebted to the Sceptical Science blog for their easy-to-use guide to zombie arguments. Mr Gill's article could be summarised as a 2, a 24 and a 41.

Comments like these pop up all over the internet, defying all attempts to slay them, but to find them on a publiction from the Institute of Physics is like finding a recipe for home brew in an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet.

However Mr Gill is not done yet, for he ends the piece

Readers may like to know that the Energy Group of the Institute has invited glaciologist Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski to speak to us in October. .... the speaker has decided to title his lecture "CO2: the greatest scientific scandal of our time".

Professor Jaworowski is a fellow who, for reasons known only to himself, believes the Antarctic ice cores that show how CO2 has risen steadily since the Industrial Revolution are wrong.

Save to say he is not widely respected. But then as Mr Gill ends his contribution

for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant.

If (and it's still an if at the moment) Mr Gill was primarily responsible for putting together the submission to the committee, then the implications for science are scarcely less serious than if Prof Jones had confessed to all things the deniers accused him of.

The Institute of Physics, one of the most respected science bodies in the country, may have submitted evidence to parliament written by an oil industry funded Climate Change denier.

There are worse sins in the world of science than skipping morning lectures, and selling out your integrity is definately one of them. Watch this space - and mine's a Newcastle Brown.

Climate Change Denier 'Proves' Climate Change.

Well I never thought I'd say it, but well done Anthony Watts.

For those who don't know of him, this great pundit for our time is a former US TV weatherman who in a divine flash of inspiration saw that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was so much hot air and so set up the sceptical blog Watts Up With That (witty, heh?).

If you've been on a discussion board and had someone turn up and most some super new 'hot off the press' proof that AGW is a con, then the chances are that they lifted it from his blog.

Of course the main problem Climate Change deniers have is the fact that it really is getting warmer. With 2010 looking like it might be a scorcher despite the cold start we might soon be able to say that the ten hottest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1995.

This irritating truth hasn't put Mr Watts off though and, with the help of some other sceptics and their computers he set out to prove that this temperature record was wrong. The result is surfacestation.org, a systematic review of all the US weather stations. The team rated each station by how good it was, with top marks going to those in virgin countryside and bottom marks to those in KFC car parks, at the end of runways or next to air conditioning ducts (I'm not making this up - that's where some of them were).

This herculean task has proved very useful to climate scientists. The data can now be split into 'good' and 'bad' sites and the two sets compared to see if there is any bias. This, so Mr Watts and his army of volunteers hoped, would show that the rise in recorded temperature was down to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and other such bias and that with the 'bad' data removed the 'good' data would prove once and for all that Global Warming was a myth.

Unfortunately it didn't quite work out like that.

It turned out that climate scientists already knew about UHI effect and had been taking it into account, as they do various other changes in recording practise such as the weather station moving or the time of observations changing.

Not only did the 'bad' weather stations show the same warming trend as the 'good' ones, it seems there may have been an over correction of the UHI effect and that the temperature record should be adjusted upwards not downwards.

Alas if you look for Mr Watt's response on his blog you look in vain but never mind, you can read it here first.

So it's not really good news, we are heading for Armageddon and are probably going to get there a little sooner than we thought, but we can at least enjoy a little schadenfreude at the expense of Mr Watts, who now has to explain to his volunteers that they have just helped their deadly enemies in the AGW camp.

Lond Monckton helps the BNP

It's been a bad week for Climate Change activists, with several hundred banged up by the Danish police, but it's been a worse one for Climate Change deniers.

The shy and retiring, not to mention barking mad, aristo Lord Monckton was ambushed by rather polite climate activists whilst in Copenhagen. He responded by branding them all Hitler Youth.

The brunt of his attack calmly explained to the peer that as a Jew whose grandparents had had to escape Hitler he didn't know quite how to take this.

Well it turns out the one with the Nazi connections may actually be Monckton himself.

The evidence is in the British National Party's 40 page anti-Global Warming rant.

That it's a load on denier b*llocks is no surprise - it would be embarrassing for eco-warriors if it wasn't. But what does raise one's eyebrows is on page 36. It seems the BNP haven't just done a cut and paste job from Monckton's website, but that the peer has been in correspondence with them.

Monckton was an advisor to Mrs. Thatcher and has recently joined UKIP. Flirting with the nasty end of the hard right is clearly the next stage in his reverse political evolution.

They say politics makes strange bed fellows, but perhaps we shouldn't linger too long on the image of Monckton and Nick Griffin disappearing under the climate change denial duvet with Sarah Palin, Ian Plimer and the rest of the sad circle of right wing nutters.

Hmm, I think that's just put me off my tea.

Plimer versus Monbiot: Points victory to Monbiot.

So the big match has finally occurred, live on Aussie TV.

Climate change denier, spokesperson for an Exxon funded think tank and Spectator cover boy Ian Plimer appears to have finally met his Waterloo.

Having wimped out of an earlier debate by refusing to answer some basic questions on his book, he has finally found himself face to face with his nemesis in a televised debate.

Straight questions from our George, evasion and random facts from Plimer. In particular he failed to answer the question as to why, as a geologist, he doesn't seem to know how much CO2 volcanoes admit. Actuallyhis failure to stand by his claim suggests he does know how much CO2 they emit, but that he also knows that to say so will leave his credibility lower than the submarine volcanoes he erroneously claimed weren't in the US Geological Survey figures.

He also ducked, dodged and weaved over his claim that global warming stopped in 1998, a claim he makes no less than 16 times in one chapter. This is simply a bit of legerdemaine: 1998 remains the hottest year ever recorded, but 8 of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since then and this is the hottest decade ever recorded. Again, Plimer's evasion would suggest he knows this.

Plimer also rather amusingly called Monbiot, who is descended from French aristocracy, "ill bred". I guess that may be an Aussie thing. He also waved his book to the camera a suspicously large number of times.

No knockout blow, but the shows emails appear to give Monbiot a clear victory, with Plimer seen as the fact dodger he clearly is. Nice one George.

One person who really should watch this debate and hang his head in shame though is the new presenter of Radio 4's flagship Today program. Webb had Plimer in the studio last month and gave him the lightest grilling anyone on the program has ever had. Webb, an LSE educated economist, clearly doesn't do science.

But then, neither does Plimer.

Plimer withdrawn before he's counted out.

Well it was never going to live up to expectations, but the Monbiot/Plimer fight has unfortunately ended in a damp squib.

As Plimer had failed to answer Monbot's simple questions about his own book (not hard you'd think. If my finals had been asking about a book I'd written I may even have got a decent grade) Monbiot gave him ten days to reply or the debate was off.

Four days before the deadline expired The Spectator, the right wing rag sponsoring the debate, pulled the plug. In doing so they, and their star columnist Rod Liddle, launched into a tirade against Monbiot.

Bizarrely the injustice of this led to Monbiot being defended by people who normally attacked him. This is from The Spectator's own blog:

Not that I am a fan of Monbiot. From what little of his material I have read, I think he is a pompous ass. And I think that the global warming crowd have largely failed to make their case, have probably faked or fudged at least some of the numbers, and may well be proven wrong in time.

But unless Monbiot has fabricated the email exchanges with The Spectator and Plimer on his website (which would be pretty easy from The Spectator to expose), Plimer is just dodging reasonable questions and The Spectator is backing off from commitments already given.

..........................................................................................................................................

Hang on. I dislike Monbiot as much as the next man; but surely he is saying the opposite of 'let there be an end to the debate.' I think he's entitled to ask why Mr Plimer why he won't debate. If Plimer's view is correct, you can hardly say Monbiot hasn't handed the fellow enough on which to sharpen his teeth.

So what is The Spectactularlyboring playing at? And why is Liddle: ex-Radio 4 editor, wife beater and Millwall fan, joining?

The magazine championed Andrew Wakefield and the campaign against the MMR vaccine, so being anti-science appears to be in their blood, but Wakefield was at least a real GP whilst Plimer is in no way a climate scientist.

I guess Boris isn't coming back to take over again any time soon, so I wonder what their next great lost cause will be?

Monbiot versus Plimer: Round 1

Just as the Aussie cricketers have rallied to deliver a damn good thrashing to floundering England, Ian Plimer has responded to George Monbiot's questions.

It is a response though that is harder to read than one of Warne's googlies. Plimer has sent Monbiot a list of questions that if nothing else make the mind boggle. They consist of a series of increasingly bizarre and probably nonsensical requests for Monbiot to make a series of calcualations "from first principles" and including all data used.

The Internet is currently buzzing (well humming slightly) with baffled warmists trying to figure out what Plimer's grand strategy is. One theory is that he is using the famous Chewbacca defence as featured in a certain South Park episode.

Perhaps it's an act of desperation, perhaps he's playing to his fans who are convinced he has a brain the size of a planet, perhaps he's taking the piss. Who knows?

Monbiot's repost is "you're asking the wrong person" which is a bit lame though. Surely the answer is 42?

The Fight of the Year: Monbiot v Plimer

Any antipodeans who are watching the Ashes in the hope of seeing the usual slaughter of the England lemmings must be a little disappointed, but if you want your fill of defenceless animals being led to the slaughter the speactalce is still on offer in the form of Monbiot versus Plimer; a debate coming to somewhere, sometime.

George Monbiot is a legend in his own lunchtime, a fellow veteran of the Direct Action protests of the 1990s. Our paths never actually crossed as whilst I was hiding in slimy northern tunnels he was proudly proclaiming in parts of the home counties that This Land Is Ours. He is now Britain's foremost environmental columnist by a considerable margin.

Plimer is Ian Plimer, a hitherto unknown Australian geologist who has written a book called Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: the Missing Science. He is a climate change denier and less charitable people than myself might suggest that 'the missing science' refers to the numerous errors in his thesis.

In his book Plimer claims arctic ice is expanding and that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans. On the way he also claims that we orbit the core of a supernova explosion - which would make the sun a neutron star or black hole, and that termite farts are more potent to greenhouse gases than the emissions of 6 billion fossil fuel consuming humans.

There's more, and more, and more.

Anyone following that link will find 38 pages of why Plimer is wrong.

However this hasn't stopped Plimer becoming the poster boy of climate change deniers and the cover story for our own Spectator magazine last month. Judging by what they've written about the book I would presume the Spectator is the traditional sort of publication thta only employs chaps from good schools who studied classics and doesn't let grubby scientists over their threshold.

Somewhere along the line Plimer got a bit cocky and challenged our George to a debate. Monbiot initially turned him down, not wanting to share a platform with a man who can pull imaginary statistics out of a hat, some of which can take up to a minute on Google to prove wrong. However Monbiot had second thoughts and agreed to the debate provide Plimer answered some written questions on some of the more startling claims in his book.

Plimer initially turned the challenge down but then, possibly because word of his refusal to answer questions had got as far as his Wikipedia entry, he accepted. Monbiot printed his 11 questions in the Guardian today.

I don't know if the debate will ever actually happen, but if it does it will probably be a lot less interesting than Plimer's response to these questions. Some, like the termite gaff, he could just claim are typos, but I don't know how he will get round the others.

Like most deniers our antipodean friend enjoys playing the outlaw martyr and in picking a fight with Monbiot this would be Ned Kelly may be about to make his last stand. Is his armour up to it?

Watch this space.