By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun

No wonder global warming prophets such as Al Gore, Greenpeace and Clive Hamilton dodge debates. Warming worrier Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog.com runs up the white flag after a radio debate with sceptic Christopher Monckton:

In hindsight, I played perfectly into the hands of Monckton and his happy radio host, Roy Green, who share the same goal - not to win an argument about global warming science, but merely to show that there still IS an argument. Of course there’s not. But while we danced angels around the head of a pin, I can imagine Green’s listeners thinking, “Oh my. This is very confusing. No wonder the government says it’s too early to take action.” Score one for Monckton....

It was also a tactical error to start pointing people to helpful websites with clear graphs and reliable science that could support my position. It left open the possibility for Monckton to say, “I could produce 35 graphs” to the contrary - which fiction then drifted to the listeners as if it were, well, accurate in the real world.

Thanks (and my apologies) to those of you who volunteered some much-preferable debating strategies. Maybe next time.

Hear the debate here. Or read it here.

UPDATE

I really don’t think Littlejohn was ever going to win after this opening salvo from Monckton:

Well let’s first of all begin on this question of funding, and let us talk about the funding for DeSmog Blog. Now DeSmog Blog was founded with $300,000 of money from a man called John Lefebvre who is an Internet gaming fraudster convicted last year of making hundreds of millions of dollars - a large chunk of which he is now being made to pay back to the government - by unlawfully laundering money to do with unlawful Internet gaming.

He is the person who got into bed with Mr. Littlemore’s boss at a PR [public relations] company, a Mr. James Hoggan (ICECAP NOTE: Chairman of the board of the radical David Suzuki Foundation and whose PR company promotes numerous alternaive energy companies), and they took up the DeSmog Blog, whose job of course is not to debate the science of climate, but to inaccurately misrepresent the alleged or supposed or imagined funding of anyone who dares to challenge the supposed consensus on the climate. So let’s get that thing clear first of all. DeSmog Blog was founded, is funded, and is run by a convicted and self-confessed crook, and furthermore that crook is now in the business of running a solar energy corporation and therefore has a direct vested interest in peddling the climate change scare.

I would start by making it clear that Mr. Littlemore is a public relations executive working for a convicted Internet fraudster.

And then Monckton got stuck into the evidence. Read on for sheer enjoyment.

But this trashing of global warmers in a debate has happened before, of course. Ask Michael Crichton.

See post here.

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Lord Monckton Responds to Abraham Attack About Global Warming Science- Press Release
By Bob Ferguson, SPPI

Christopher Monckton has issued an extensive and detailed critique and refutation of a widely-circulated 83-minute personal attack on him by one J.P. Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Professor Abraham’s 83-minute lecture with 115 slides purported to demolish a talk about climate change that Lord Monckton had given in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 2009. More than 2.5 million people have seen Monckton’s talk on YouTube, making it one of the most popular viewings on the web.

In June 2010, Abraham posted up an attack on the internet via the servers of the University of St. Thomas. Within a week, Monckton’s 84-page letter with its near-500 questions was in the Abraham’s hands, to which he has not responded as challenged.

Monckton publicly accuses Abraham of -

· Bad faith in having “furtively” spent eight months preparing his savage personal attack behind Monckton’s back, entirely contrary to accepted academic practice;

· Malice in having made dozens of serious allegations about Monckton when he knew the allegations he had made were false in every material particular, or had no reason to believe the allegations were true;

· Appealing to a false authority on the subject of the climate that, as a lecturer in fluid mechanics, he did not possess (Monckton demonstrates Abraham appears at times competent even in arithmetic);

· Academic dishonesty in having repeatedly made up statements that Monckton had not made, having put those statements to other scientists, having obtained hostile responses from those scientists, and having included those hostile responses in his attack as though they were responses to what Monckton had said; and

· Lying repeatedly by misstating what Monckton had said and then attacking those misstatements; by falsely and repeatedly alleging that Monckton had misrepresented scientists’ results when Monckton had either accurately represented the results or not cited the scientists he was alleged to have misrepresented at all; by unjustifiably and repeatedly impugning Monckton’s integrity, qualifications, experience, and competence in a manner that he knew to be inaccurate; and by repeatedly taking Monckton’s words out of their context and making a wilful nonsense of them.

Monckton backs up his rebuttal with a wealth of detail.

The University of St. Thomas has refused a request by Monckton that it should take down the Abraham’s talk from its servers and has also refused to comply with its duty to investigate Monckton’s complaint about shoddy academic misconduct. Abraham and the University are half-heartedly attempting to characterize the issue as a mere “academic dispute”.

Lord Monckton serves as policy adviser and contributing author to the Science and Public Policy Institute, which has as a courtesy to him and interested readers made his response to Professor Abraham available on its main website. Contact - Robert Ferguson