Last week in Australia, David Suzuki did something he hasn’t done before: He allowed himself to be interviewed in a situation he did not control.

It was a disaster.

Usually, Suzuki speaks through his TV show on the CBC. When he appears at celebrity events, questions have been pre-screened.

Suzuki refuses to be interviewed by media he does not control, especially the Sun News Network.

His Australian visit shows the wisdom of this standard procedure.

Because when the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) put even the simplest questions to him, he fell apart. But unlike his Canadian events, Suzuki couldn’t turn off the cameras.

The first question put to Suzuki by a critic in the audience was about the 15-year hiatus in global warming. There just hasn’t been any observed climate change since 1998, and it’s a major problem for the climate change industry, whose computer models all warned that we’d see significant warming by now.

Thermometers — including hyper-accurate satellite readings — say it just hasn’t happened. Here is a transcript of Suzuki’s response:

“Yeah, well, I don’t know why you’re saying that … In fact, the warming continues …. So where are you getting your information? I’m not a climatologist. I wait for the climatologists to tell us what they’re thinking.”

Normally, that’s the worst Suzuki would face — one tough question that slips past his handlers. But he had no handlers that day. And ABC let the questioner come again, citing his sources that the world hasn’t warmed: “Sure, yeah. UAH, RSS, HadCRUT, GISS data shows a 17-year flat trend which suggests there may be something wrong with the CO2 warming theory?”

Now, that’s scientific jargon that a layman wouldn’t understand. But Suzuki claims he’s a scientist, and he has opined on global warming for years. But he had no clue what the questioner was even saying. Suzuki asked for an explanation: “Sorry, yeah, what is the reference? I don’t ...”

He actually said that.

The questioner had a third go at it, speaking very slowly: “Well, they’re the main data sets that IPCC use: UAH, University of Alabama, Huntsville; GISS, Goddard Institute of Science; HadCRUT. I don’t know what that stands for, HadCRUT; and RSS, Remote Sensing something. So those data sets suggest a 17-year flat trend, which suggests there may be a problem with the CO2.”

Suzuki still had no clue. “No, well, there may be a climate skeptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion … You know, we can cherry pick all kinds of stuff. Cherry pick, in fact, the scientists that we want to listen to, but let’s listen to the IPCC.”

That’s classic Suzuki — impugn the motives of anyone who disagrees with him. He heard “Alabama” and thought “hick” and called them a “skeptic.” He said we ought to listen to the IPCC – the one acronym Suzuki did know. That stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s climate bureaucracy.

But all of those places the questioner mentioned — including Alabama — were IPCC research stations. They’re the places that crunch the temperature data for the UN.

Suzuki had no clue.

ABC’s host tried to ask the question one more time. One more time, Suzuki was clueless.

“Well, what’s the problem? I mean they’re concluding still the warming ...” That was the first question in a very long hour for Suzuki. On everything from fracking to immigration, he shrugged at best, and made personal attacks at worst. He suggested the Canadian government was out to throw environmentalists in prison — the same government that has given him a TV show for 40 years.

He accused GMO food scientists in the audience of being in it for the money — and sat in shameful silence as they each told him their companies were giving away the patents to GMO food to poor farmers for free.

It was embarrassing for Suzuki to be revealed as a know-nothing huckster. But it’s equally embarrassing for the Canadian media, who for 40 years acted as Suzuki’s PR men, not real reporters like they have in Australia.