Climate debate? Who'd have thought it.

Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle will have shaken up everyone from Glastonbury Tor to Tory central office.

According to numerous, previoulsy silent academics, global warming is not what we thought, is not our fault and is part of ongoing process over which we have little influence. The program maker Martin Durkin has said far from struggling to find academics who disagree with Al Gore's accepted wisdom, C4 found there were hundreds of academics willing to take part.

Those of us who have studied Lovelock's Gaia theory could be forgiven for nodding sagely. But what is the man and woman in the congested street to think? This was a polemic and there was no contradiction of the impressive range of contributors. There were however references to how political forces from all sides have been queueing up with increasing zeal to hijack, and then stymie debate. We had a shot of the tediously unamusing Rob Newman foaming at the mouth from yet another platform, and repeated accusations that bad science underpinned the reactionary fulminations from the 'green' left. So how would the program be received?

A cursory glance at the broadsheet TV reviews is interestingly revealing. While The Times and DT are pretty circumspect in covering the program, The Guardian's Zoe Williams did the best she could to underline the program's point.

Cycling evangelist Williams' critique showed just how the Green lobby has become viciously extremist in its tone, betraying a real lack of tolerance of debate. Williams is typical of the new lefty, desperately searching for a cause which lends itself to the radical tendency of old. In her forensic examination of the debate, she simply launched an astonishingly ignorant attack on Nigel Calder, completely dismissing a 50 year career in popular science, and completely ignored those other MIT professors and ex-greens like Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. She had a feeble pop at Winnipeg, from whose University came particularly persuasive and reasoned debate - not to Ms Williams' taste, and accused Channel 4 of turning into Fox News. There was no attempt at offering any proper criticism as her attempts at inane wit came across as flailing defeatism.

This programme was the flip side to Al Gore's Oscar-winning and curriculum-bound An Inconvenient Truth and should be seen as a partner piece to it. If nothing because of the number of heavyweight academics who seemed to have turned away from the global warming industry having spent their careers examining the facts in a way, and with minds, that the likes of David Cameron, Thom Yorke and Zoe Williams cannot. The notion then, that the green lobby are in cahoots with the anti-globalisation mob ratched the debate up further. The programme argued the denial of fossil fuel technology to the third world was condemning developing continents to extreme poverty and stagnation. The African input to the debate was particularly devastating and shows just how hypocritical today's anti-West, sod-the-poor hard left-wing activist really is.