In the Canadian tradition, it would be "unparliamentary" to accuse ClimateAudit's Steve McIntyre of purposefully misrepresenting climate science, but his latest attack on the so-called "hockey stick" suggests that McIntyre is a great deal more interested in scoring distorted debating points than in saying anything that is actually factually correct.

McIntyre, apparently a retired mining stock promoter, has enjoyed a certain degree of fame in the denier community since 2003, when he and an economist named Ross McKitrick launched an attack on a graph (inset) by the highly respected actual scientist, Michael Mann.

In response to the M&M attack, Mann published an amendment to his original work, giving deniers the world over the courage to say that the original graph had been "debunked." They then extrapolated to say that if there was an error in this single graph, that must mean that climate change wasn't happening or wasn't caused by humans - that the whole anthropogenic theory had collapsed in the math of a single published paper. Here is a recent and typically ridiculous example.

The panicky Professor Ian Plimer appears to have run from the field of intelligent debate in his latest duck-and-dodge fest with UK Guardian Columnist George Monbiot.

Plimer is the author of Heaven and Earth, a terrible hash of logical misdirection, plagiarism and mistakes which was shredded into fine bits by people like our favourite Australian, Tim Lambert at Deltoid blog.

After Monbiot joined the public lashing, Plimer protested and demanded that Monbiot engage with him in debate. Monbiot agreed, but only on condition that Plimer first respond in writing to a handful of questions about the accuracy and source of material in his book.

Plimer has been hiding out ever since.

The denier web has been alive with excitement over the past week about a presentation by the German meteorologist Dr. Mojib Latif, who told a recent scientific meeting in Geneva that he expects a temporary lull in global warming.

One of the National Post's most vigorous climate change deniers, Lorne Gunter, grabbed onto this story in a celebratory column titled: Global Warming Takes a Break. But Gunter has not suddenly decided to take science seriously. He dismissed as somehow unknowable Latif's ultimate conclusion: that climate change is a real and pressing problem and that even if global temperature increases stall, they will inevitably resume.

Nope. Gunter doesn't want to listen to a whole scientific sentence: but he's willing to bet our lives on a  fragment that bolsters his own agenda.

RealClimate.org has stepped in to deliver a devastating aside in the unfolding "debate" between Guardian columnist George Monbiot and hopeless Australian climate change denier Ian Plimer.

The back-and-forth began when Monbiot ridiculed Plimer's book Heaven and Earth as an unsourced, unscientific load of codswallop.  Plimer retaliated with a challenge to a public debate, which challenge Monbiot rebuffed as giving Plimer an unwarranted opportunity to hold forth unaccountably. But then Monbiot reconsidered and said the he would debate Plimer if only the geologist and businessman would agree to answer some basic questions about the content of his book (like, where was he getting his purported evidence; some of the footnotes can't be sourced).

What a difference a year can make. While the consensus on the Hill may not have grown stronger in the interim—I’m looking at you, House Republicans—the American public seems to be increasingly wising up to the idea that global warming is, in fact, a real threat and not some nefarious liberal plot to deprive it of its God-given right to pollute.

That is the principal finding of a new survey, entitled “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” that was released this past week by the Center for American Progress. The survey, which the authors describe as an “audience segmentation analysis,” splits the American public into six distinct groups based on their level of engagement with global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive.

The authors polled 2,129 American adults in the fall of 2008 on a variety of issues related to global warming, including risk perceptions, policy preferences, and values.

DeSmog fans will likely know about Tim Lambert at Deltoid - a smart Australian scientist who does fabulous work debunking some of the ridiculous denier talking points. But he has recently been pointing to some contributors who are also raising the bar: Robert Grumbine (Penguindreams ) at MoreGrumbineScience, and Tamino, who plays the deniers for fools at Open Mind. (Hat tip to VJ).

These guys are adding significantly to the quality science debunking that we have come to expect from RealClimate, the kind of stuff that leaves the deniers sputtering because, well, it's all about science and they're, well, not.