Tom Chivers makes a sturdy(ish) defence of the BBC's choice of attendees at the seminar. Well, not that sturdy actually, but full marks are due for effort.
He gets a load of stuff about Climategate wrong, but as he uses Wikipedia as his source that's not really surprising. What I thought was interesting was his take on what debate there should be on climate:
There are people, notably Richard Lindzen, who think people have overestimated the sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions, and think we can survive many times higher concentration than is currently suggested. There are advocates of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. These are important arguments, that need to be had in public, loudly and passionately. These are the sort of balanced debates I would like to see in the media, between intelligent, informed people.
But this is the problem, Tom, don't you see? Sceptics are not allowed to talk about climate sensitivity on the BBC because the science is all "settled". The seminar attendees told the corporation so. The amount of science that is settled is piffling - temperatures went up a bit at the end of the last century, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that's pretty much it. Everything else is up in the air. Which is why the BBC policy is so iniquitous.
The suggestion, implicit in Tom's defence of the seminar, is that the seminar was actually a balanced group for guiding the BBC's editorial policy. This is, of course, completely absurd. If he really can't see that then I think he has a serious credibility problem. But he does raise one interesting question. Who should have been at the seminar?