I'm pleased to see that The Great Global Warming Swindle is still up on the website of the UK's Channel 4 television station, despite the communication regulator's critical remarks on it.

The programme was done as an antidote to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It beat up poor Al pretty mercilessly. It was hugely entertaining. Channel 4 prides itself on iconoclastic stuff and likes stirring up debate. But of course the enviro-nazis don't want debate on this issue stirred up, and around 250 folk complained. The regulator, Ofcom, has to investigate even if it only gets one complaint, so the watchdogs went through the programme with a fine-tooth comb. They concluded that it treated some of the climate-change experts unfairly and did not give them a chance to respond.

Well, they didn't need to respond because they'd got their response in at length beforehand, thanks to Big Al. It was Swindle that was the response. But the regulators ruled that the programme, while polemical, had not materially misled people. People watching it knew what they were getting.

Still, I'm sure the fuss will be enough to ensure that all the schools that are happily showing An Inconvenient Truth to their pupils (with all its own polemics, and with its demonstrated errors) do not show this cheerfully vicious rebuttal. There's something terribly one-sided about this debate, don't you think?