The parliamentarians ‘appeared to have two aims: to torpedo the IPCC’s report next week and strike down the UK’s Climate Change Act.' Photograph: 7nuit/Getty

A "flat Earth love-in". That's how one MP described the debate he witnessed in parliament last week. The politics with which citizens of the United States, Canada and Australia are now wearily familiar, in which elected representatives denounce both scientific evidence and the researchers who produce it, have arrived in Britain.
A couple of years ago I decided to stop arguing with climate change deniers. It was driving me mad. Spend too much time grappling with the convolutions of people like Nigel Lawson, Christopher Monckton, Mail and Telegraph columnists David Rose and Christopher Booker, and some of it rubs off on you. I began to feel like the man in the celebrated cartoon: "I can't come to bed yet, dear. Someone is wrong on the internet."

How much longer can MPs resist this flat-Earth love-in?