The One That Will Not Tolerate Any Discussion. . .

I was working the night shift last night. It's not too bad as I was in the warm and could get on with my work without interruptions and too many bloody silly phonecalls. It also meant that I was working alone, I had the whole office to myself.

One of the advantages is being able to listen to Richard Bacon on 5 Live, it is quite an entertaining mix of the earnest and the ridiculous, as you will possibly have seen in his cameo on The Thick Of It the other week. The late night phone in is great, all the freaks and wierdos come out to play.

Normally the freaks and wierdos are calling in, last night he had them there, in person, and it really did sound like Armando Ianucci had scripted the whole thing. I nearly choked on my muller crunch corner when at the start of the second hour of the show he posed the question that in light of climategate, is global warming real or a massive scam?

To ensure balance, he had a foaming at the mouth 'denier' who talked over everyone, incessantly, to the extent that the segment became almost unlistenable, and of course the absolute barking at the moon, batshit mental 'warmist'. He was an amazing piece of work and came out all guns blazing. No sooner had he been introduced than he embarked on the most amazing rant, browbeating the BBC for daring to allow any debate on the subject, it really was an exceptional demonstration of the practices of the warmist camp and is well worth a listen. It's about an hour into the podcast, the debate over the fidelity (or otherwise) of men that goes before isn't quite so entertaining.

The message that most people would have taken away is that warmists are all nutters who shout and scream, at everyone, regardless of if they agree with them or not, and deniers are all boring farts who just trot out stats and won't shut the hell up. I think the idea was to tell people not to worry about it and to let people who are better than you deal with the issue.

Amazing.