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TO followers of the climate change policy debate, the extreme conspiratorial rhetoric is all too familiar:

Climate change is a hoax. Environmentalists are just communists in disguise. The United Nations is using efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions as a smokescreen for installing a world government. Greenies are actually reds. Eco fascists want your freedom.

Such rhetoric is daily bread for many neo-conservative commentators, some climate change deniers and even the occasional elected representative. The language is divisive, often becomes abusive and – regrettably – has become a feature of the manufactured debate over the risk posed by human-caused climate change.

The manifesto of Norwegian terrorist and Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik, currently facing trial for the massacre of 76 people, shows what can happen when the unhinged take the language of the far-right to its ultimate ends.

In the 1500-word document, published online under his Anglicised name Andrew Berwick before the brutal bombing and shootings in Norway, Breivik reveals a hatred for Islam and socialism.

But the manifesto also echoes the beliefs of many climate change deniers and cites the work of Lord Christopher Monckton, Alex Jones and Steve McIntyre.

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In December 2009 at a gathering of climate change deniers in Copenhagen, Dr Tom Harris** was shimmering with enthusiasm for his latest project.

Dr Mr. Harris, executive director of the Ottawa-based sceptic group the International Climate Science Coalition, explained how he had managed to gather “hundreds” of signatures from “climate experts” who wanted to challenge “supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change” to provide evidence.

Not only that, but it had taken him just “two weeks” to gather the signatures, which he then explained numbered 150 (so much for hundreds).

“This list is growing quickly,” he said, “and we are going to maintain it as something called the register. We expect it eventually to be thousands.”

With such a surge in supporters, how is the global register going a full 18 months on?

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NEVER a stranger to controversy or a fossil-fuel funded think-tank, Scotland-based British peer Lord Christopher Monckton has been caught jumping the proverbial climate denial shark just weeks before a nationwide tour of Australia.

In a conference speech in Los Angeles earlier this month, Lord Monckton compared the Australian Government’s climate change policy advisor Professor Ross Garnaut to a Nazi, saying his views were “fascist”.

In order to ram his rhetorical point home into the darkened Californian conference hall, Lord Monckton displayed a very large Nazi swastika next to a quote from Professor Garnaut, whose reports have been informing the Government’s position as it attempts to introduce a price on carbon.

News of the insult on ABC website The Drum sparked blanket newspaper and television coverage across Australia.

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One of the enduring myths of climate denialism is that global warming stopped sometime in the last decade. I see it in the blaring headlines of pseudoscience websites, in comments on my videos, even some of our most “distinguished” journalists have been taken in.

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Among the many conservative think tanks faithfully pushing the skeptic message in Washington, D.C., few are as prominent—or, should I say, infamous—as the Heartland Institute. The “independent” research and non-profit group has the dubious distinction of having organized the first major denier-palooza, the “International Conference on Climate Change,” last year. Despite a less than stellar showing, and an even more lukewarm follow-up in March, it’s hoping that the third time will be the charm.

The likes of Senator James Inhofe, Lord Christopher Monckton and Anthony Watts will be descending on the Washington Court Hotel this week to discuss the “widespread dissent to the asserted “consensus” on the causes, consequences, and proper responses to climate change.” Its ostensible purpose will be to “expose Congressional staff and journalists to leading scientists and economists in the nation’s capital” and demonstrate that “global warming is not a crisis and that immediate action to reduce emissions is not necessary”—which it calls the emerging consensus view of (the handful of) scientists outside the IPCC.

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An autmotive industry number cruncher called CNW Marketing Research has announced a study which claims that, "dust to dust," high-polluting SUV's consume less energy than high-mileage hybrids. The CNW report claims to have calculated total energy consumption in the full lifecycle of an automobile, including construction and disposal, and concluded that SUVs have an energy advantage over gas-electric hybrids.