Today I am launching a new and much-coveted award. It will be presented to whoever manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change.

The prize consists of a tasteful trophy made from recycled materials. Later this week, I will publish the full terms and conditions and unveil the beautiful trophy, which is currently being fashioned by master craftsmen in mid-Wales. I'm also suggesting that the lucky winner take a one-way solo kayak trip to the North Pole, to see for him or herself the full extent of the Arctic ice melt - but that's not part of the prize.

My first nomination for this award is...Christopher Booker!

In his latest column for the Sunday Telegraph, Booker manages six and a half clangers: pretty good going in fewer than 900 words.

Here they are:

Claim 1:

"[James Hansen of Nasa] was last week publicly disowned by his former supervisor Dr John Theon, who said that Hansen's unscientific claims had been an embarrassment to Nasa ever since he joined Al Gore in whipping up panic over global warming back in 1988."

Fact:

Theon was not Hansen's supervisor in any reasonable meaning of the word, as blogger BigCityLib and Gavin Schmidt of NASA have noted.

Claim 2:

"Nothing was more laughable than the sequence showing a huge poster of the infamous 'hockey stick' temperature graph being driven round London on the back of a lorry, without any mention of the expert studies which have made the 'hockey stick' one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science."

Fact:

Far from being discredited, the hockey stick graph of past temperature reconstructions has been supported by a large number of further studies, as you can see in this graphic and on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's site. Those who claimed to discredit it have been comprehensively rebuffed. You can read more about this on the A Few Things Ill Considered blog and on Real Climate.

Claim 3:

"As late as August 28 this year it [the BBC] was still predicting that Arctic ice might soon disappear, just as this winter's refreezing was about to take ice cover back to a point it was at 30 years ago."

Fact:

This is complete trash. See the latest results from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It reports: "Average Arctic sea ice extent for the month of December was 12.53m square kilometres (4.84m sq miles). This was 140,000 sq km (54,000 sq miles) greater than for December 2007 and 830,000 sq km (320,000 sq miles) less than the 1979 to 2000 December average." And: "Average ice extent in December was well below average and very close to that measured in 2007."

Claims 4, 5a, 5b and 6:

"The BBC couldn't wait to publicise the recent study claiming that Antarctica, far from getting colder over the past 50 years (claim 4), as all the evidence suggests, has in fact been warming (5a). It didn't, of course, explain that the new study is based on a computer model (5b), run by the creator of the "hockey stick" [Martin Mann], which in the absence of hard data (6), allows for inspired guesswork - what the study's authors call 'sparse data infilling'."

Facts:

4. All the evidence suggests nothing of the kind, as Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt explains.

5. The study is, in fact, based on satellite data and air temperature records from weather stations, as you can see in this letter.

5*. Michael Mann is one author of some of the past temperature reconstruction studies. He is only the fourth of six authors of the Antarctic warming paper.

6. As you can see in this joint letter, there is a good deal of hard data as well.

Well, that's a pretty impressive performance, and a strong challenge to all those climate change deniers who might be tempted to have a pop at this prestigious prize. So who will take on the mighty Booker? Let battle begin!

Monbiot.com

This blog has been amended