to discuss the political climate of global warming i'm joined by lord christopher monckton in london he's a writer and former policy advisor to british prime minister margaret thatcher in washington we have jason kowalski a policy coordinator at one sky campaign and also in washington we have a senior policy associate at the environmental and energy study institute and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger lord christopher monckton if i could go to you first. going from copenhagen last year to today or approximate what's going to be happening in the u.s. senate about climate change laws what progress is the world made and the progress of the discourse on climate change is a gotten better or worse more intense thinner how would you describe it. i think what's happening is that climate change is rapidly fading from the headlines in most western countries certainly simply because it's become blindingly obvious after the third very cold winter in a row that global warming simply isn't happening there hasn't really been any in any six in any statistically significant sense fo

lord monckton. you think that. coal and oil aren't are cheap is that is that your premise is that we we where we should say. no there's no harm to those things whatsoever aside from nuclear. or the color of the only mass form of energy that can supply anything like a modern economy in the quantities required wind power can't do it as denmark and spain have both discovered denmark having built up a capacity theoretically of twenty percent of its total grid with wind trying to take five percent without destabilizing the grid and it has to export the rest at very very cheap in lovemaking rates to other countries there's a very strict limit that wasn't my question lorrimore you can generate likewise with solar power that has to be collected at places that are often a very long way from the centers of population where the power is needed and that causes enormous environmental disfigurement with long transmission lines and of course the accompanying transmission losses so there are no easy fixes in the new technologies a

i'm kind of incredulous that what i just heard i'm tempted to ask lord monckton if he was at a casino rolling loaded dice and they kept coming up craps you know loses losses for him if he would he came up with a couple of you know even bets you know the temperatures stay the same if he were to continue to bet all these always dollars i mean i live in the north northern part of the united states and climate change is happening it's happened it's been happening for decades the fact that we have a couple of cold years or a leveling off of a short term trend is hardly grounds on which to throw out what has been a long term trend and what people are still projecting is a long term trend so i think it's amazingly short sighted and i think it's a very weak case on which to sort of say we're going to take the pick apart this whole apparatus we're not going to care about clean energy and you more which has by the way lots of other benefits other than then. dealing with climate change but i'm just incredulous that what i just heard and i'm i'm supposed to be the evenhanded one here but we we de