maroon of the month

There's a must-watch video up on YouTube at the moment, the latest in Peter Sinclair's excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week series. At a glance you'd assume its main focus to be Christopher Monckton, who's on another tour of Australia promoting AGW denial (that being one of only two countries in the developed world where he's not likely to be laughed out of the room), but most of it comprises an interview done for the BBC's Horizon between Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and James Delingpole, perhaps the stupidest of the Telegraph's crop of climate change-denying columnists . . . a feat that takes some doing, bearing in mind you have Christopher Booker and Richard North in the hunt.

(a) Delingpole has no scientific training, yet presumes to instruct the President of the Royal Society on the nature of the scientific enterprise -- on what science actually is.

(b) Then, when asked a perfectly straightforward question that probes the intellectual integrity of his rejection of established climate science, he finds himself flabbergasted, lost for an answer.

(c) Later, we discover, he wrote to complain of being "intellectually raped" because he was stumped for words in front of Horizon's many viewers. The real reason he was dumbfounded is because, of course, he was found dumb.

In the little Consumer Guide to Prominent AGW Denialists that I put as the conclusion to my book Denying Science, I obviously didn't have space to describe all of them. Delingpole is on the list of those I decided to omit. In a sense I now wish I'd included him after all, because his pretensions really are hilarious; on the other hand, his views are so plain daft that surely no one could possibly take them seriously: better to devote my available space to others equally foolish, but at least not so obviously so.