The debate at the Belladrum festival was a bit of a shambles to tell the truth. The festival itself looked as though it was going swimmingly, but the "Verb Garden", the bit where I was appearing, seemed to have been organised by the University of the Highlands and Islands and arrangements left more than a little to be desired in my opinion.
Having given up my day and driven three hours to the festival, I got my accreditation without any problems. However, I was then told that I could go and queue up with the other punters if I wanted a cup of coffee. No spliffs, no groupies, no nothing. Hmm. I hooked up with John Shade fairly soon afterwards and we had a nice chat and an expensive sandwich while awaiting our moment in the spotlight.
As the deadline approach it emerged that the meteorologist who was going to do the mainstream climate science bit on the panel had had to call off. And the university seemed to have told the media and some of those involved (including the press!) that it was starting at 3:30 rather than the correct time of 13:30. So when it came to time to kick off, there was the chairman - Gary Robertson from BBC Scotland - John and myself and no opposition at all. The renewables chappie who was the other half of our opposition was still en route.
With the audience waiting - perhaps 40 people or so - we had no choice but to go ahead. My normal experience in these kinds of debate is that sceptics are never in a majority, so it was an interesting dynamic, although not one that I particularly enjoyed. It was just a bit dull to tell the truth. One audience member clearly felt the same way and stormed out saying that it wasn't a balanced debate. This was true, but hardly something we could do anything about.
After fielding a few questions from Gary about our general positions on climate change we moved pretty swiftly on to questions from the floor. This was much more lively, and we had some good back and forth about climate models and windfarms and suchlike. One young woman, who said she was a physicist, took issue with my downplaying of the climate models, but I think I may have convinced her that you do actually need to validate them and show that they are capturing all the necessary features of the real climate before you use them to support public policy decisions.
Eventually, our renewable energy opponent appeared and told us all what a wonderful economic opportunity windfarms represented. I'm not sure anyone was actually convinced though. One chap in the audience recounted the tale of a friend of his who spent an evening fending off phone calls from the electricity grid. They wanted him to switch off his windfarm for a time. Eventually he bid them up to £78,000. I think people in the audience could see that this wasn't a good thing.
Overall I think it may have been worth the trip, shambolic organisation notwithstanding. I think it will have been interesting for the audience to hear the sceptic side in such detail - it's not something the general public gets to hear very often.