Can we have a climate science debate please?
Ready or not, the climate wars are coming again!
Years ago the advocates of alarm about global warming and climate change stopped engaging in public debates because they usually lost heavily.
One of the last exchanges in Australia occurred on July 18, 2011 at the National Press Club. Richard Dennis, the director of an ALP think tank, the Australian Institute, took on the itinerant skeptic Christopher Monkton. Richard Dennis paraded as an economist but it was apparent that he knew less about economics than his opponent. And that was before they got to the science.
The next day a link to the video of the event appeared on the “centre left” blog Club Troppo, with congratulations to Monkton.
Perhaps the debate should move on to address the problem of extricating ourselves from the impending wave of wasteful and counterproductive regulation.
https://clubtroppo.com.au/2011/07/20/to-fisk-and-to-monckton/
The moderator was outraged but he was prepared to keep me on the roster if I did not give offence in future.
Rafe is a veteran blogger and almost an icon of the blogosphere. At the very least he’s an amiable eccentric who doesn’t do any harm because no-one who reads Troppo is likely to take this sort of material remotely seriously anyway.
The readers were less accommodating and the 667 comments included a generous amount of personal abuse.
At the time I was not prepared to debate climate science because I was working on the synergy of the ideas of Karl Popper and the Austrian economists. Climate science intruded early in that month when I gave a talk on Popper and the Austrians at the Mannkal Economics Education Foundation in Perth. Jo Nova turned up with Christopher Monkton who had just landed in Perth to start his Australian tour.
He was interested in the talk but then he took over the meeting to float a plan to raise a large sum of money from Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the country, to recruit all the best conservative journalists and commentators in the country to start a new TV station
We sat together at dinner afterwards and he gave me a crash course in climate science. That led eventually to an introductory book on climate and energy issues, written with Jeff Grimshaw.
Fast forward to 2019 in Sydney where the Five Dock Climate Realists have long maintained a stronghold in the inner West. We resolved to temporarily pivot from the climate debate and launch the Energy Realists of Australia to talk to people about matters that really concern them, like the price and security of power, instead of instead of science, using readily available evidence that they can understand, unlike the finer points of climate science.
So far there is not much to show for our efforts but events are starting to move very quickly in the United States. We expect this will help us after the forthcoming national election when climate and energy realists in the Liberal party can speak freely. In the meantime the pink and green rats in the Liberal ranks maintain their stranglehold on policy because polling indicates the people are not ready to be told the truth about climate and energy issues.
On the brighter side, Commissar Stinson’s revolutionary cadres in the countryside are fighting like lions to save their surroundings from ruin by renewables. As Bill likes to say “We will prevail!”
Here we have a perfect specimen of the Dunning-Kruger effect put to paper, a verbose insistence on being spectacularly wrong, delivered with the confidence of someone who stopped updating their knowledge sometime before the ice caps started their serious melt. The opening whine about climate advocates not debating anymore isn't a sign they "lost heavily"; it's a sign they grew weary of playing chess with pigeons who just knock all the pieces over and claim victory. The "debate" moved on because the evidence became a landslide, burying the flimsy arguments of contrarians under the undeniable weight of observed reality and overwhelming scientific consensus.
Dragging out a single, dated exchange with Christopher Monckton – a figure known more for creative data interpretation than credible science – as some kind of pivotal defeat for climate action isn't a historical account; it's a desperate attempt to inflate a sideshow into the main event. The idea that this amateur-hour performance somehow settled the science, or that an economist supposedly knowing less than Monckton is somehow damning, is laughably pathetic. Monckton isn't a climate scientist; he's a political figurehead for denial, and anchoring your worldview to his "crash course" is like taking navigation lessons from a flat-earther.
Dismissing climate science as mere "finer points" while hyperventilating about energy prices reveals the core fallacy: a myopic focus on the immediate wallet over the literal burning planet. Calling regulations designed to prevent civilisational collapse "wasteful and counterproductive" isn't realism; it's a suicidal level of economic illiteracy that ignores the unfathomable costs of climate catastrophe. The real waste is clinging to a polluting past that actively creates the instability driving those very energy concerns he claims to care about.
His framing of anyone who accepts the scientific reality as "advocates of alarm," "outraged moderators," or "pink and green rats" isn't analysis; it's just playground insults born of intellectual bankruptcy. The "truth" he believes politicians are afraid to tell isn't some suppressed secret; it's simply his outdated, evidence-free opinion being unpopular because it contradicts reality. Public polling reflects growing concern because people aren't stupid; they see the floods, fires, and heatwaves.
And cheering on rural resistance to renewables as a fight against "ruin"? That's not "Energy Realism"; it's actively campaigning for the true ruin of the environment by defending the fossil fuel industry that profits from planetary destruction. It's a pathetic, backward-looking fantasy peddled by those determined to keep us shackled to 19th-century technology while the world burns.
This isn't the voice of an "amiable eccentric" or an "icon"; it's the sound of a broken record stuck on repeat, desperately trying to rewind the clock to a time when ignoring climate change was marginally less insane. The arguments are thin, the evidence is non-existent, and the entire premise is a monument to being spectacularly, hopelessly wrong.
Christopher Mockton, or Lord Mockton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A lazy British aristocrat, is a certified ratbag when it comes anything at all related to the threat of the global climate disaster. He is simply a fossil fuel vested interest and mouthpiece He has absolutely no interest or empathy with millions of people across the world who live with the increasingly severe and escalating weather impacts resulting from climate change.