Climate wars: I’m being attacked by my own side. Why?

There’s nothing more irritating then being asked to apologise for something you haven’t done. No, wait, there is: when the person demanding the apology is one of the friends you admire most in the world — and when the alleged victim of your non-existent crime is one of the people you most despise.

The friend’s name is Anthony Watts, meteorologist and fellow happy warrior in the great global battle against climate change nonsense. He runs the world’s most widely read climate sceptic website, Watts Up With That?, which got to the Climategate story before I did. Recently, we were both winners in the 2013 Bloggies Awards: he deservedly won best science blog (for the third year running); I was named best political blogger.

What was significant about this year’s Bloggies — voted for by readers all over the world — was the large number of categories won by notorious climate sceptics. Besides Wattsy and me, prizes went to Small Dead Animals and Australian Climate Madness, while runners-up included ClimateAudit, JoNova and Tallbloke’s Talkshop.

This was originally going to be the subject of this week’s column. The Bloggies do not have a notable right-wing or sceptical bias (my category, for example, has been won three times by the left-wing Huffington Post). So it’s surely a sign of just how rapidly the cultural ground is shifting. Even the once ardently warmist Economist has noticed: the other week it got as close as it could to writing a grovelling retraction on AGW without actually admitting to having ever been wrong.

The subject I’m going to write about instead is far more important than that. It concerns what I call the Left-Liberal War On Metaphor. Before I go into more detail, though, let me describe what Watts thinks I did wrong.