Why TVNZ ducked climate clash

UPDATED: TVNZ responds to claims it was pressured to drop a controversial interview. (see comments below article)

TVNZ dropped plans for a Q&A debate pitching controversial British climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton against global-warming scientists because the boffins wouldn’t front.

Political insiders also claimed Q&A bowed to pressure from the Greens after leader Russel Norman, who was overseas, allegedly decreed the debate should not be dignified by the presence of a Green MP.

Wellington climate scientist Martin Manning was reported this week saying the scientific community had also decided not to “engage” with Lord Monckton because it would “mislead” the public.

Richard Harman’s rival independent current affairs programme, The Nation, quickly secured an exclusive interview with Lord Monckton (59) on this weekend’s high-rating TV3 show.

Auckland climate scientist Glenn McGregor will also appear on The Nation.

Lord Monckton is happy to debate climate change with anyone but the global-warming devotees have ducked for cover during his New Zealand visit, which comes at the invitation of Climate Realists – who believe human activity has minimal impact on the world’s climate.

The third viscount Monckton of Brenchley, he is a former newspaper editor, a hereditary peer, a serially unsuccessful would-be MP and head of the policy unit for the United Kingdom Independence party.

A member of Margaret Thatcher’s Number 10 policy unit during the 1980s, one of Lord Monckton’s many claims to fame was his invention in the 1990s of the Eternity puzzle, a mathematical puzzle for which he offered a prize of £1 million to the first person who could solve it within four years.

Two Cambridge mathematicians won the £1 million after 18 months and after 500,000 puzzles had been sold, but after another four years no-one claimed £2 million for solving Eternity 2.

Lord Monckton inherited his peerage after the passing of the House of Lords Act 1999, blocking hereditary peers from automatically sitting and voting in the House of Lords.

He asserted the act was flawed and unconstitutional but in July the House published an online “cease and desist” letter on the parliamentary website confirming he was not a member of the House of Lords.

In a 1987 American Spectator story he argued the only way to stop AIDS was to screen the entire populations of the US and UK and quarantine all carriers of the disease for life, a view he modified some years later because with 33 million people then infected, his reckoned his solution was laughable and wouldn’t work.