NO DARK and smoke-filled room greeted the man Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decries as part of a worldwide conspiracy of sceptics intent on sabotaging any new climate treaty.
Instead, a gathering of avowed "sensible" environmentalists listened closely in the plush surrounds of Melbourne's Park Hyatt Hotel to a speech by Britain's Lord Christopher Monckton, who dismissed as "bogus" fears of global warming.
"Those who have been fostering what is essentially a baseless scientific scam have being trying to make the obvious sound absurd and the absurd sound obvious, and we are now going to turn the tables on them," Lord Monckton said.
With a rapid-fire computer slide-show as counterpoint to the famed warnings by former US vice-president Al Gore, Lord Monckton set out to an Institute of Public Affairs conference what he called a litany of lies by the United Nations on climate change. Most egregiously, Lord Monckton said, UN reports on climate change ignored evidence of global temperatures that were higher during medieval times than now.
He also rejected often-cited claims that 2500 scientific papers have backed the case for climate change, as well as the analysis of data that showed the problem was worsening.
"I'm calling these lies because that is what they are; they are deliberate attempts to mislead," he said.
Mr Rudd last week repeatedly called Lord Monckton, an adviser to former British Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a "world government conspiracy theorist", warning that unfounded and sceptical claims were hampering climate change negotiations.
"When Monckton speaks, prime ministers tremble," the British peer quipped yesterday during a video link-up from London.
Lord Monckton warned that the treaty proposed for climate talks in Copenhagen next month would create a new tyranny in world affairs.
"What I think will happen at Copenhagen is they won't agree on how much emissions for each country," he said.
"The bureaucrats will then sidle forward with their silky voices and their shiny shoes and their shiny pants, and they will say, 'Well, Prime Minister, you've come all this way, you need to go back with something. Why don't we all agree just to carry forward the institutional framework.
"And thus, by stealth - by bureaucratic coup d'etat - a world dictatorship, long the aim of those who set up the UN's climate panel, will have come into being."
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