A Place to Stand

Thursday C4 News did a fight between David Bellamy & George Monbiot, based on a Guardian article which I am afraid the latter won by the expedient of being rude about Lyndon LaRouche & thereby tarnishing all skeptics by association, also, to be fair, Bellamy had not mastered his brief & couldn't name websites.

I wrote this to the Guardian. Obviously they didn't publish it or anything from the same side. Monbiot's claim about 99.9% of scientists is in no way truthful:

In his defence of the article published by George Monbiot today on Channel 4 he said that "99%" & a couple of minutes later "99.9%" of climate scientists believed in the threat of global warming to our lives.

A recent survey by Professor Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers show impressively that the much- repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human activities and CO2 emissions. If 25% of European (who are after all the believers in this nonsense) don't believe it even exists I would be interested to know what makes Mr Monbiot think that 99.9% of them think it is so disasterous as to justify the $500 million a day Kyoto costs.

Throughout his article Mr Monbiot concentrates on what he, probably correctly, believes to be a typing error (555 glaciers expanding instead of 55%) & on the fact that Mr LaRouche, of whom he disapproves, also disbelieves global warming. This is an example of playing the man rather than the ball (the ball being that roughly as many glaciers are growing as shrinking) & is unworthy of a serious comentator.