David Bellamy the former environmental hero has caused us some grief as environmentalists for not only is he a climate change denier but he has spread dubious stories promoting ragwort hysteria.
However, there is an interesting reaction to the posting of the youtube videos of his encounter with George Monbiot. Youtube is not noted for the quality of its comments that are made give some insight into the mind of the deniers of climate change.
The poor standard is exemplified well with the comment, referring to Bellamy “He don't (sic) need to check his facts” It may be that we are dealing with a non native speaker of English here but it does illustrate the poor general literacy.
There are a few who valiantly try to correct the nonsense but often in vain. The real problem of course is that the deniers are essentially conspiracy theorists and we do see references in these comments to “The new world order” a well known American conspiracy theory about a world government.
We also see mention of the infamously bad film deniers film, “The Global Warming Swindle” out of the same basic stable as the infamous “Against Nature” which resulted in an as then unprecedented apology forced on Channel 4 by the regulator
Others use argument from authority and talk about David Bellamy being a scientist and George Monbiot being a political journalist. In fact, Monbiot has a science degree from Oxford and is actually a Fellow of Oxford University.