As might have been anticipated, the radio "debate" today twixt me and the tireless Christopher Walter (Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) descended quickly into name calling and then further into pointlessness - an argument about science that neither of us is qualified to pursue.
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.
For the record:
We at the DeSmogBlog are proud of our principal funder, John Lefebvre. That's why we list him on our website. Unlike the people at Monckton's SPPInstitute.org. (which split off from the Frontiers of Freedom Institute so they could try to deny their Exxon connections) [2]we have maintained a policy of transparency, and will continue to do so.
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.