Crikey's Guy Rundle has a look at the latest tour of Australia by mad British aristocrat Chris Monckton to entertain the climate skeptic fringes - Rundle: will Mad Monk be brought low by madder Monckton?.

There is no doubt that times are not good for the Australian far Right — but will its troubles create real problems for the Coalition, and the mainstream Right? Will the Mad Monk be brought low by the madder Monckton?

Two days after I noted the rise of “hysterical conservatism” in the US, its Australian manifestation had exploded closer to home, with a storm over Christopher Monckton, viscount and jobbing political hack turned climatologist, and his decision, in speeches elsewhere, to label Ross Garnaut as a Nazi, juxtaposing a quote from Garnaut with a large slide of a swastika.

Monckton used the term “fascist”, a term of abuse that has lost nearly all dramatic effect — but the swastika is something else. Fascism, Italian-style, was a cruel political movement, but its frequent use as a catch-all term including Nazism obscures major differences.

Nazism was something more than merely violent — it was a radically evil movement that celebrated itself as the negation of any notion of common human being, of mercy, kindness or love. The swastika was the symbol of that — it was meant, for its enemies, to be a pure expression of despair. Originally a north Indian symbol of the wheel of life, it has become the image of death.

Monckton is not the first climate-change denialist — yes, yes, a usage I’ll return to — to use the Nazi analogy; he may not even be the hundredth. Highlights in Australia included Andrew Bolt’s incessant references to “greenshirts”, and George Brandis’s extension of the argument in the coward’s castle of the Senate. ...

Monckton’s right to say pretty much what he likes is not in dispute; the question is whether a Catholic university, and its faculty, should see itself as a glorified conference centre with a chapel, or as some other sort of thing — the sort of entity that would legitimately express some concern at the possibility that a swastika might be brandished within their institution

Indeed, you would have to say, that if a Catholic university, of all places, cannot recognise the real being of symbols such as the swastika, the bodying forth of evil, then it is more or less lost as an institution.

Monckton’s swastika act is, of course, pathetic — a ramping up of his narcissistic campaign for attention. To say his lordship is something out of Wodehouse would be an insult to the subtlety of the master. Bug-eyed (not his fault, but what can ya do?), in tweeds, claiming membership of the British “upper house” (he has lost his right to vote as a hereditary peer since the House of Lords was reformed).

Devisor of the easily solved “unsolvable” puzzle (which cost him £1 million, the prize he had promised for it, and reportedly, his castle), he is natural kin to Peter Cook’s creation, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, who devoted his life to teaching ravens to fly underwater (Dud: “your life Sir Arthur has been a … failure.” Pete: “Yes I think it fair to say that my life has been a complete and utter failure.”).

And Monckton’s apology is disingenuous. He has used not merely the fascist slur, but the Nazi slur so often that even planet Albrechtsen was moved to reprove him on his last visit. Most famously, at Copenhagen, he repeatedly barked “Hitler Youth!” at a young climate activist, Ben Wessel, even after Wessel had informed him he was Jewish — indeed, his family were Holocaust survivors.

The Nazi-climate change “argument” relies on a meta-version of the false syllogism by which people such as Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism) argue the left to be Nazis. “The Nazis like bushwalking/The Greens like bushwalking/Therefore the Greens are Nazis” and so on.

The trick can be done on anything you like: freeways, anti-smoking campaigns, a sense of place and national community, state-funded economic development, and, if you like, Fanta* (short for Fantasie), the drink Coca-Cola developed to sell in Germany during WWII, when the main brand had become official sponsors of the other side.

The left for many years did it with any notion of national pride, flag or honouring military service: the Nazis were patriotic … etc, etc. It was bad then, and it’s bad now when it is almost solely coming from the Right, on other themes.

The habit is kitsch, but it has a more insidious effect, a debasement of our capacity to think about the difference between political contestation within a shared framework, and radical evil, which is intent on the annihilation the other.

The deliberate reaching for the swastika as a way of debasing politics, rather than, say the hammer and sickle — which would be more with the grain of frequent claims that Greens are crypto-communists — is because climate-change denialists recognise that the hammer and sickle, however debased by the actions of many of those wielding it, remains the symbol of a movement acting in the spirit of universal values and a common humanity.

To use the hammer and sickle would be to remind people that combating climate change is a universal cause of humanity, while opposition to it is partial and tied to nations, industries and the implicit claim by the West to deserve higher levels of consumption.

In desperation to avert what is becoming Moncktongate, the Right is repeating the false syllogism on critics of denialism. Thus the term denialism itself — which may have originated with Holocaust denialism, but has since been used elsewhere, such as AIDS denialism — becomes a mark of Nazism. It isn’t, of course — it is simply a useful term to describe politically motivated resistance to obvious and overwhelming evidence that demolished one’s position.

Moncktongate has now become a political and moral test for Tony Abbott, whose principal political action to date has been to exile climate-change denialism from the political mainstream. Does he have the courage and command to talk back to the Right fringe – in the manner indeed that John Howard reproved George Brandis for comparing the Greens to Nazis?

Does he possess that minimum level of political authority? Or is he ruled by his shifty and opportunistic side, the dimension of him that prompted a call for a plebiscite — and then a refusal to say that he would honour it, if the result went against him? Moncktongate is a test of whether he’s got the ticker, or would rather guzzle more Fantasie.

I'm not sure why I find myself watching Chris Monckton's travelling circus of climate charlatanry, but I'm not the only one - Crikey reports on the rapt reception he is getting amongst the more conservative segments of the older generation (the only youngish people paying attention are the LaRouchies, trying somehow to deal with the cognitive dissonance of echoing the Viscount's message while simultaneously claiming global warming is a genocidal plot cooked up by the British aristocracy) - Monckton’s Melbourne meeting: a gathering of men in Richie Benaud blazers.

One shouldn’t imply that the CEC was representative of the huge crowds attending Monckton’s tour. That would be unfair. The LaRouchites were much younger, for a start.

Inside Monckton’s Melbourne meeting, most of the attendees looked like Ian Plimer. It was a gathering of men in Richie Benaud blazers, sometimes accompanied by silver-haired wives, dressed up as if for a night at the opera.

Naturally, the attendees didn’t believe in evil plots led by the Royal Family. In fact, they seemed, if anything, distinctly anglophile, in that Old-Australia-RSL-club kind of way. They’d come, after all, not to listen to Chris Monckton but rather to the “Third Viscount of Brenchley”, a man who was touring not “Australia” but (his slide informed us) the “Commonwealth of Australia”, a distinction that, in context, seemed to matter rather a lot. It was a crowd who saw nothing strange in a priest kicking off proceedings with the Lord’s Prayer, nor in the heraldic crest that adorned every overhead, a grisly emblem with a crown hovering majestically above a portcullis.

John Howard battlers, for the most part: the old, the white and the angry. That anger — and it was palpable — provides a potential constituency for Tony Abbott, and perhaps even a large one. When a picture of Kevin Rudd flashed on the screen, the hostility was immediate and unfeigned.

Later, the Viscount asked rhetorically: “Do we want an emissions trading scheme?”

“No!” came the shout. “No!”

Could supporters of the ETS — by its nature, an unhappy negotiated compromise — muster the same passion in its defence? One very much doubts that Penny Wong, these days, attracts roaring crowds.

The deep outrage felt by climate sceptics, their sense of facing a fundamental attack on their way of life, provides Abbott, at the very least, with a pool of active supporters: highly motivated people to hand out how-to-vote-cards, make phone calls, attend meetings.

But whether he can turn that constituency into a majority is a very different question. For while Lord Monckton eschewed, for the most part, the wraparound jumper craziness of the CEC, he nonetheless strayed regularly into X Files territory. Copenhagen, he explained, represented an attempt to impose world government by bureaucratic coup d’etat.

He put on a Nazi accent. The real plan at Copenhangen was, he said, all about “the New Vorld Order!”

Indeed, the fascist jackboot seemed to have already come down on poor old England, which was now ruled by “commissars” (a word he repeated several times) from the European Union.

“We in Britain are no longer free.” His voice turned mournful. “I know what it feels like to lose my democracy. Make sure you don’t let your democracy go so cheaply.”

In some respects, this kind of black helicopter nuttiness might have seemed like an add-on to the main message but in other ways it was central. For Monckton was there to explain that there was no climate crisis at all. The temperature was falling, not rising. The sea ice was just fine. So, too, the Eurasian snow cover and the Antarctic ice and the hurricanes and the polar bears. They were all as right as rain, and there were graphs and charts and formulas to prove it.

And that, of course, raised a second question, one that necessarily haunts climate sceptics. If, as Monckton said, the majority of scientists are scandalously and incompetently wrong about global warming, why does the scientific community go along with the charade? What about the media and the political mainstream? Why aren’t they embracing the truth?

The answer doesn’t automatically involve a conspiracy but it certainly marches you a long way that direction. You’d think that a researcher who could allay the world’s fears about global catastrophe would be crowned with laurels. But, no, apparently not. Someone must be getting to the scientists, forcing them to toe the party line. Someone is making sure that the journalists don’t dare speak out. Why, it’s probably the same people who turned Britain into a dictatorship without anyone noticing!

You can see the difficulty for Abbott.

The attendees at the Monckton performance might seem, at first, the traditional pillars of the Liberal Party, an organisation that’s always done well with old, comfortable, white folks. But there’s a big difference between Menzies’ people and Monckton’s people.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

Right-wing populism is neither new nor confined to Australia. As a political tactic, a demagogic anti-elitism was imported from the US where it served Republicans for decades, and accordingly it’s in the US where the consequences can be seen to their fullest. George Bush might have been the fortunate son of a political dynasty but his political career centred on a “just folks” persona in which Bush, a brush-cutting Texan cowboy, fronted as the kind of guy with whom you could have a beer — in contrast with, say, John Kerry, who’d undoubtedly clear the entire bar by, like, talking about politics and stuff.

As a touchstone for electability, the “would I go drinking with this man?” test was, of course, spectacularly insane: a moment’s thought would suggest that proving yourself affable company for alcoholics would not, in and of itself, qualify you to control a nuclear arsenal. Nonetheless, it won Bush two elections and, in the process, shifted the way that the US — and hence the world — thought about power and politics. For, whatever other promises he may have reneged upon, as President, W remained true to an anti-intellectual populism. He was a man with a swagger, an avowed non-reader, a Decider who did his deciding by gut rather than by brain. The political consequences of a presidency ruled by a stomach might be increasingly apparent from New Orleans to Baghdad, but, as Charles Pierce argues in his book Idiot America, the implications for science are even worse.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” he writes, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable because there the Gut truly holds sway. By the rules governing those realms, any scientific theory is a mere opinion and everyone’s entitled to those. Scientific fact is as mutable as a polling sample.”

If your instinct tells you that climate change is a fraud cooked up by leftists still angry about the fall of communism, well, who or what could convince you otherwise? As Pierce points out, the populist disdain for authority means that everyone is an expert — and thus no one is. Worse, in a debate centred on gut feelings, real knowledge becomes a manifest disadvantage, a palpable signifier of inauthenticity. You trust some wingnut blogger precisely because they’re not a research scientist — that’s why they can speak so freely!

Monckton’s supporters might protest that, actually, his tour was all about science. There were graphs, there were charts, there were statistical analyses.

Well, of course there were. But you can’t actually do science that way, can you! How many people in the Sofitel audience knew what a Stefan-Boltzmann Equation called itself when it was at home? Not so many, one presumes — but we all knew how to hiss demonstrably when an outraged Monckton revealed that, throughout the 1600-page UN report of 2007, there was no mention (not one!) of said equation. (It was, one presumes, crowded out by all the plans for a world government!)

You might think that Monckton should be publishing his equations and graphs to the peer-reviewed literature, the traditional route for challenging a scientific paradigm. Ah, but he can’t, because the journals and the university and the other government-funded institutions prefer to foster apocalyptic projections rather than the arguments of a man who says the environment’s just peachy the way it is. Why? Well, now we’re back to interesting theories about commissars and the collapse of democracy and the rest of it.

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed — most of the time — to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

One of the crusty old fogeys meeting the Lord was Opposition Leader Tony Abbott (though I would have thought that given a number of his fellow travellers also have plenty of conspiracy theories about Catholics he might steer clear) - Abbott to the lunatic fringe: it’s OK, I’m one of you.

Tony Abbott met with conspiracy theorist Chris Monckton yesterday at lunchtime, but Abbott wouldn’t allow photographers to record the meeting or publicly comment on what was discussed.

Meeting this shabby character is contemptible and reflects poorly on Abbott’s fitness for high office. There are, after all, plenty of Australian skeptics and denialists out there to meet, plenty of men and women who share Abbott’s view that climate science is crap. We’ve produced quite a few of them.

Despite Ian Plimer or Bob Carter lacking any credentials in climate science, at least they can mount a pseudo-scientific case against global warming. But Abbott decided to meet this low-rent Lyndon LaRouche from London. Worse, refusing to allow the meeting to be photographed shows thorough cowardice. If he’s happy to meet this “swivel-eyed maniac”, as one conservative called Monckton, he should be happy to be photographed shaking his hand.

But forget the moral outrage: this was savvy politics. Abbott has sent a clear signal to the right-wing fringe groups and One Nation-types that have drifted away from the party over the last two years: he’s their man, he shares their values. When they talk about shoring up the base, this is what they mean, pulling those voters out of the “Other” camp in polling, where they’re lodged with Family First and socially-conservative parties, and back into the Liberal column.

It didn’t require being photographed with Monckton – the lunatic fringe will know he met him. It will be all over their blogs and in their email networks. Finally, they’ll think, someone important is listening to us.

Being photographed with Monckton might have sent the wrong single to mainstream voters, because Monckton’s a risk, prone to coming out with potentially ridiculous statements that Abbott would have to distance himself from. Like interning people with HIV, for example, (although apparently Monckton has invented a cure for that).

So best to keep it on the quiet, out the media, because the media loves visuals and stories don’t get one-tenth as far without them. A job well done.

The Age reports that even Barnaby Joyce thinks that Lord Monckton (about to commence his climate charlatan circus' circumnavigation of the country) is out of order - Lord Monckton is on the fringe: Barnaby Joyce.

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the eccentric UK climate sceptic, is proving too hot for some of Australia’s most prominent climate sceptics — including Barnaby Joyce.

Joyce, who famously said that climate change sceptics were being treated like holocaust deniers and likened environmental campaigners to eco-Nazis, believes Monckton is on the fringe of the debate and unhelpful to those who question human induced climate change.

Monckton, an adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is about to embark on an Australian tour with our very own climate sceptic celebrity Ian Plimer.

The tour is reaching most of Australia, except the Northern Territory and Tasmania, and it will cost $100,000. That enormous sum is being underwritten by two semi-retired engineers in Noosa, John Smeed and Case Smit — and includes the $20,000 stipend Lord Monckton has requested to do the 13-day tour.

Monckton has had his fair share of strange moments. One of his more obscure was proposing to quarantine all aids victims in the 80s (he has since said the idea is unworkable because the epidemic has grown so much it would unfeasible).

But it is his scepticism of the science underpinning global warming that has returned him to the public's attention. Monckton not only promotes the usual gamut of solar radiation and hockey stick criticisms of the science, but also claims any global efforts to curb emissions is a plot to establishing a world government and give power to the World Bank.

Monckton also says that after the Berlin Wall fell, the communists needed another way to centralise power and have created climate change as their Trojan horse.

Joyce told Greenlines this week that while he would listen to Lord Monckton when he is in town, people should not read much into it.

‘‘Obviously I and my constituency have some doubts (about the science) but when you find yourself waltzing with the fringe you should take a step back,’’ Joyce said.

‘‘Lot’s of people from the fringe often take up causes and it can do more harm than good.’’

A spokesman for Opposition leader Tony Abbott said he would not meet with the Lord when he speaks at the National Press Club on February 3 in Canberra (it is a private function not as a formal speech on the Gallery’s speaking roster).

On Wednesday conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian wrote that Monckton was an extremist in his language and is hurting the cause of those who want to ask hard questions of the science.

That is despite Albrechtsen’s column of October 28, which is devoted to Lord Monckton's global world government theory and demanding why the Rudd Government doesn’t reveal what they are signing up to in Copenhagen.

‘‘Monckton became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new world government only when a friend of his found an obscure UN website and hacked his way through several layers of complications before coming across a document that isn't even called the draft treaty,’’ Albrechtsen wrote in the October opinion piece that you can find here.

Well, American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson did say foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Only Opposition Energy and Resource spokesman Nick Minchin was more positive about the Lord, telling Greenlines he listens to both side of the debate and would be very happy to meet him.

Lord Monckton begins his lecture tour in Sydney on January 26 with a luncheon at the Union Club.

The Age has an article on the impending visit of climate change charlatan, Lord Monckton (actually Viscount, for those who care about obsolete aristocratic titles), citing Tim Lambert - Puzzle me this: climate change theory allows no ice age.

CHRISTOPHER WALTER, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, likes riddles. In 1999 he announced to the world that he had invented a puzzle made up of 209 irregular polygons and said he would pay £1 million to the first person to solve it. It was a brilliant marketing ploy and the mind-bending Eternity puzzle was a best-seller.

Two University of Cambridge mathematicians, with the aid of a custom-made computer program, solved it within months.

Lord Monckton was reportedly forced to sell his 67-bedroom mansion to pay the prizewinners. But six years later he claimed that he had been planning to sell the house anyway and the tale of his financial ruin was simply made up to sell more puzzles.

He has shifted his gaze from puzzles to climate change, and the riddle at the heart of his alternative climate-change theory looks, to the untrained eye, even more mischievous.

The theory relies on some superficially impressive mathematics. Though climate scientists immediately debunked his hypothesis when it was published in 2008, Lord Monckton is still the most prominent intellectual spokesman for the climate-change sceptic movement. ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that the effect of doubling the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would make the world warmer by about 2.5 to 4 degrees. Most studies measure the change at about 3 degrees. Climate-change action is based on this consensus view.

Lord Monckton's concept is based on the idea that the calculations have inflated the warming potential of greenhouses gases by about six times.

His theory was published in Forum on Physics and Society, the online newsletter of the American Physical Society.

It was not a peer-reviewed journal, so it was not subject to the normal level of scientific scrutiny that applies to original research, but it was enough to give the claim an initial veneer of credibility.

The argument Lord Monckton mounted has been painstakingly picked apart by several eminent climate-change researchers, but it was an Australian computer scientist, Tim Lambert, who helped collate many of the flaws on his website. ''A lot of the equations used to cover it up were right, but the argument was complete gibberish,'' Mr Lambert said.

The hypothesis took the lowest possible range of carbon dioxide's known warming effect on climate, multiplied it by the lowest possible effect of the various feedbacks that amplify the warming effect, to give a figure well below that shown by any observation.

One of the implications of the hypothesis was that, given what we know about climate, there could not have been ice ages in the past.

''The hypothesis is completely inconsistent with the observations,'' said Professor Matthew England, the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.

''In science, the world isn't wrong so the calculations must be wrong.''

The American Physical Society quickly started receiving complaints from its members about the piece, and a lengthy disclaimer was added to the piece saying the society did not endorse Lord Monckton's findings.

However, the paper is still the core of the argument he will be promoting on his Australia tour.

Clive Hamilton has an article at Crikey reporting on the imminent arrival in Australia of climate charlatan Chris Monckton - Viscount Monckton of Brenchley's over-egged CV.

When he arrives on our shores later this month Viscount Monckton of Benchley will be greeted as a saviour by local climate change deniers. He will be chaperoned by Ian Plimer, and Monckton’s sponsors, engineer John Smeed and his friend, retiree Case Smit, are hoping for big things. He’s already booked on Alan Jones’s show; I’m guessing Andrew Bolt is drafting an encomium to the English lord; and it's a sure thing that The Australian will give over its opinion pages to him. ...

One thing’s for sure, Monckton -- the “high priest” of climate scepticism soon to tour Australia -- does not lack self-belief. His significance on the world stage is enough for him occasionally to forget himself and rewrite his biography.

He has claimed to be a member of the House of Lords (well, he once tried to become one), to be a Nobel Laureate (he wrote a letter to the IPCC which won a Nobel Prize, a connection close enough for him to commission his own gold Nobel prize pin), to have single-handedly won the Falklands War (he persuaded the British Army to use germ warfare on the Argies), and to have invented a cure for Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, food poisoning, and HIV.

In principle, over-egging one’s qualifications ought not to invalidate one’s arguments, but why are we not surprised that his statements about climate science have been debunked as amateurish, confused and full of school-boy howlers?

But the real fun starts with his politics. Here he is three months ago in a bravura performance before the Minnesota Free Market Institute:

So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace ... now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He will sign anything … in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, your prosperity away forever.

So you see, Obama is in on it; after all, his Democrat party believes in “the tyrannical, anti-democratic system of command economy administration that we in Europe would call Communism, or Fascism, or International Socialism”.

It is tempting to scoff at the simple-minded mid-west Americans who lap up these fairy stories, until we remember that Senator Nick Minchin believes them too.

Monckton travels the world alerting anyone who will listen to the secret plan for a United Nations world government, referring to it as the "New World Order" the term of choice of American wingnuts and televangelists like Pat Robertson whose 1991 book of that name uncovered a conspiracy by Wall St, the Federal Reserve and various others to create a world government serving the Antichrist.

The Viscount can see the extreme left lurking everywhere; not only at the heart of the environment movement, but in the corridors of EU head-quarters (“a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars”) and the scientific establishment itself, characterising the venerable Royal Society as “a mere Left-leaning political pressure-group”.

It was perhaps at the Copenhagen conference last month that Lord Monckton’s eccentricity reached its zenith. He described the entire conference as “a sort of Nuremburg rally”, including “the Hitler Youth marching in and breaking up meetings”.

If you're wondering how the Copenhagen conference could be a conspiracy to impose communist world government and at the same time be populated by Hitler Youth, Monckton reminds us that “of course the Hitler Youth was also left-wing and green”.

The Viscount even made a point of confronting the Hitler Youth, whom he found lurking at a conference stall masquerading as bright-eyed environmentalists. One of them took exception to being called Hitler Youth, explaining that he is Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Holocaust.

Still, in a spirit of healthy debate the young man offered Monckton his card so as to engage in a follow-up discussion. Monckton would have none of it, retorting: “I do not take the cards of the Hitler Youth.” (Watch it and weep on YouTube.)

There is much more one could say about Monckton -- for him Zimbabwe will always be Rhodesia and he has argued that blood tests should be compulsory for all, with those found to have the HIV virus locked away for life -- but it feels cruel to go on. ...

Lord Monckton concedes that he is used to looking like an absolute prat, which explains why in Britain moderate conservatives keep their distance. The Spectator's Rod Liddle-- himself sceptical about global warming -- describes him as "a swivel-eyed maniac".

Monckton and his associates are to climate scepticism what black-clad anarchists are to the anti-globalisation movement, except that the Moncktonians are no longer just embarrassing parasites on the body of sceptical thought but have colonised the host entirely.