Also coming out fighting this morning is Roy Spencer, as mild a character as you could ever wish to meet, but I guess everybody has their limits. Today he has decided that he is just not going to sit back and take the abuse any longer.

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it. They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened. Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back. I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.

This is an interesting step, coming so soon after the UK Green Party's call for a purge of dissenters from government ranks.

On a somewhat related matter, I asked journalist Mehdi Hasan yesterday for some justification of his calling Owen Paterson a denier, given Paterson's acknowledgement that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Despite my prompting him for a response, Hasan refused to even acknowledge my question, let alone answer it, although he was happy to exchange tweets on other matters.