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[log in to unmask]" type="cite"> Dear John and forumers,

I share your concern about the interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01kksqt/Today_13_07_2012 (find at about 2:44 minutes), but think both Humphrys and Cicerone, performed awfully.

Beginning with the UK's "rotten summers" as being the being the basis for an entitlement to skepticism, Humphrys goes from his proper role asking investigative questions, and moves to beyond devil’s advocate, in successive verbal pounces, along a trajectory towards full-blown - and very pompous - denialism. My worst favourite was Humphrys "we remember the Great Ice Age in this country a few centuries...the weather changes, that’s what the weather does….", before then non-plussing Cicerone with the statement “So you don’t know that yet, you don’t know whether it’s local or not…..”
 
His hyperbolic statement was stunning: “But to say nearly every spot on the globe has warmed significantly over the past 30 years - and indeed the entire planet is warming - is different from saying it's going to continue to warm to such an extent that we have to spend vast and unimaginable amounts of money to protect ourselves against a catastrophe that many people, some distinguished scientists say, isn't actually proven…..”

And even while Cicerone responds “Well of course the way you've worded it, it was quite strong "vast and unimaginable sums of money" , I don't think I've heard anybody make such a proposal..”, Humphrys continues to bleat on that “Well, huge amounts are needed to combat CO2 emissions.... huge amounts…” (of money)..., thus winning his point for false skepticism.

Eventually, Humphrys convinces Cicerone with a Lomborg-type argument that it could be better to spend the money alleviating poverty in Africa instead of power plant CO2 sequestration, and that this is a “zero-sum game”. 

It was simply extraordinary to find a BBC flagship-journalist querying mainstream science, with trip-you-you up questions like "…But you can't absolutely prove that CO2 in the atmosphere is responsible for global warming?.." where he wins the concession that "we will never have absolute proof…."…. These are not objective questions, especially when they are tied in with Humphrys stating the outlier views of “skeptical scientist” Richard Lindzen “that CO2 is not doing what you say it is doing”, as it was worth the time of day to hear about that wacky material. 

There is no disguising the final pleasure in Humphrys voice, once through use of the straw-man argument, Cicerone admits he doesn’t want to sound “…apocalyptic, you’re not saying “if we don’t do these things” that we are going to hell in a hand-basket, that we are all going to fry in a few years….”.

This then takes our now-confused Cicerone to emit the false metaphor of the "self-fulfilling prophecy", as when hordes of people are running down a street crying that the bank is going to go bust, leading to a run on that same bank. A useless argument, as if in fact the bank was really in fine ship-shape, and there were no apocalypse remotely in sight….

Through this crushingly ignorant stuff, Humphrys seems to unrobe himself as an anti-AGW spoke-person, it would seem, only capable of re-hashing a series of settled arguments.  Neither of them performed well, but Humphrys was abysmal.

Mark Kowal