Britain’s Guardian newspaper held a debate a couple weeks back over the Climategate scandal. The panel featured Steve McIntyre, proprietor of ClimateAudit.org and debunker of the infamous hockey stick graph. You can find a brief summary of the debate here.

The audio of the entire debate is here at the Guardian site and certainly worth listening to.

I got a chance to listen to the audio as I was doing some other stuff and it was largely predictable. However, there was one point late in the debate when one of the global warming alarmists made the shocking claim – and I’m paraphrasing here – that the reason why Venus is hotter than the Earth and Mars is cooler is the relative amount of CO2 in their atmospheres.

Seriously.

He told the crowd that Venus has too much CO2 and is very hot. Mars has practically none and is freezing cold. The Earth has just about the right amount.

The inconvenient fact that these three planets are varying distances from a HUGE BALL OF BURNING GAS CALLED THE SUN never entered into his analysis.

And he never addressed the fact that, despite the utter lack of any humans to cause global warming on Mars, that that planet has been getting hotter with virtually no CO2 in its atmosphere.

But we need to destroy the global economy – especially damaging to the world’s poor – immediately to stop the Earth from warming. And these people wonder why they’re losing the debate with the public.