Journalist and failed politician Christopher Walter (the self-celebrating Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) has launched a blustering counter-attack [1] on Dr. Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, [2] attempting to avenge Schmidt's impertinence for picking apart Monckton's [3] amateur science submission [3] to a newsletter of the American Physical Society.

I won't wade into the science: Drs. Schmidt and (Tim) Lambert (at Deltoid [4] ) have done an admirable job of that already. But Monckton's tactics are evident even in the way he sets up his piece.

Monckton writes that Schmidt "has launched a malevolent, scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me," and the high-road Viscount says that, in rebuttal, he will "replace all comments by him (Schmidt) that are purely ad hominem with “+++”.

So, I checked out the first "+++" in Monckton's hyperventilating counterpoint and found that he had replaced the words: "As Deltoid [4] quickly noticed ..." Now, there's a ferociously and clearly malevolent personal attack, no?

Monckton, he who is above ad-hominem attack, refers to RealClimate throughout his piece as "FalseClimate" and concludes with a "chapter" that asks, "Who funds FalseClimate and the blogs connected to it?" (Google John Lefebvre for an answer as it applies to the DeSmogBlog.) Monckton then goes off on a tangent trying to tie a bunch of respected scientists to an imagined leftist-conspiracy to - well, I can never really figure out what the supposed leftists are actually conspiring to do, other than bring a serious scientific issue to the attention of the public.

But since he brought iup the who-is-paying-for-this-opinion? question, Monckton's own counterpoint appears on the site of the Science and Public Policy Institute, an Exxon-funded climate change denial organization [5]. Just for the record.

For more on the who's who of the climate denial industry, check out our comprehensive climate deniers research database. [6]