Miranda Devine, Q&A, and no need for an argument about the science when any old argument will do ...

(Above: Miranda Devine on Q&A).

Is it only me that finds shows like the ABC's Q&A entirely unwatchable?

If it isn't full of people saying predictable things in a way that's numbingly predictable, it's full of babble, sound and fury as people attempt to score points - often as a result of point-scoring questions from the real or virtual audience.

Give me the form of Oxford debating any day, though it most likely would lead to dull television. On the other hand, the world could do with a lot more dullness.

But we felt beholden to take a look at the latest exercise (oh we love the royal plural, we do), because it featured Miranda the Devine, and we wanted to see how she'd perform, away from excoriating words, and in a public forum where snarling isn't the best way to settle a point.

Sure enough, the Devine was remarkably sedate. If she repeated her form in her Herald column, the world would be a duller and better place. Sure enough there was some drollery - all the more poignant after Four Corners had just done over Tony Abbott in fine style - but it was quite genteel:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Well, I think Tony Abbott is sort of crossing over. He's showing that conservatives are not people that you can stick in a box and decide that you know exactly what their ideas are on everything.

TONY JONES: What, crossing over to socialism? I mean, crossing over to what?

MIRANDA DEVINE: Crossing over to...

BILL SHORTEN: A parallel universe.

MIRANDA DEVINE: ...to real people, to actually talking to...

PETER DUTTON: Present company excluded, I presume.

CATHERINE DEVENY: We're all human beings. Oh.

Oh indeed. I am not an animal!

But when it came to labelling and defining the Devine, she was quite reticient:

I've never really thought of myself as being particularly dogmatic or slave to any ideology. I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic.

Thank the lord that's cleared up. Next time I read an outburst about this, that and the other, I'll just take it as a fit of pragmatism coming on.

She sounded wounded and hurt by Robyn Williams castigating her kind about climate change:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Or as the ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams called us, "the sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels". You know, that's a - I'm on a hiding to nothing trying to answer that question.

This was a reference to an item in The Australian, which loves to pick up any affront to denialists (here):

DAYS before ABC chairman Maurice Newman delivered his opening address on "groupthink" at the ABC's leadership conference last week, science broadcaster Robyn Williams let his own views on climate change sceptics be heard. Williams delivered the 2010 Commonwealth Day address at a lunch organised by the Commonwealth Day Council of NSW at NSW Parliament House. He urged people to "debate the widest range of credible views, but recognise the cowboys, the misfits and the sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels for what they are. The Commonwealth is a society of nations. It represents an association of goodwill and co-operation, as well as of diversity and contrast. Let's make the most of it. While we can." One audience member approached Williams later to complain about his reference to sceptics as "sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels".

Williams told Diary yesterday the reference was to Goebbels' infamous "big lie", in which if one says something loud enough and long enough it becomes the truth. He says he wasn't accusing anyone of being a Nazi.

But really to make herself feel better, couldn't the Devine have just accepted a description of herself as being a misfit and a cowgirl?

Never mind. The disgraceful Waleed Aly admitted to not reading many of the Devine's column - offering up the feeble excuse that he's from Melbourne and doesn't get out much and he didn't want to turn it into a Miranda session - and thereby missed the most sterling example of Devine's pragmatism as she went on to talk about climate change...

All I will say is that of course the argument is not that we don't believe in climate change. Nor is it that manmade emissions don't have some impact.

Oh dear that sounds like quite a moderate position. Where's the proud warrior we remember from such Troy McClure movies as Planet doomsayers need a cold shower, and Beware the church of climate alarm?

Back then it required messianic courage to battle the fundamentalist zealotry:

There was much more but essentially Plimer's message is that the idea humans cause climate change has become a fundamentalist religion which is corrupting science. It is embedded with a fear of nature and embraced principally by city people who have lost touch with nature.

He likens the debate to the famous 1990s battle he had in the Federal Court, where he accused an elder of The Hills Bible Church in Baulkham Hills of breaching Australia's Trade Practices Act by claiming to have found scientific evidence of Noah's Ark in Turkey.

Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that "we're dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational".

Is a different song beginning to be sung? These days that haven for denialists, The Australian, has taken to calling for the Cool voice of reason on climate, and praising itself for its promotion of intelligent discussion - no doubt thinking of Janet Albrechtsen's many fine contributions to the debate, and boasting how it has recently published a column by Bjorn Lomborg, who accepts the theory of climate change but argues that cutting carbon would be more costly than living with the problem.

You can read Lomborg's Fixing climate change shouldn't cost the Earth, but just as interesting for Devine spotters is this contribution in Q&A:

The question that where the science has not settled, quite obviously as we've seen even recently, is what quantity of change and whether or not it's worth wrecking our economies to try and stop climate change which may not be possible anyway. So how much are we willing to spend, how much are we willing to wreck our economies?

That's when a cheeky member of the audience prodded the Devine with a stick, and said her columns ignored the evidence, and the Devine took the hook, and began to rant about propaganda from the UN, and the UN being a political body and the IPCC ... and a member of the audience interrupted and Tony Jones called out 'All right, okay', and decided he needed to hog the limelight with his own question, and it got got the Devine going, and she forgot all about her previous idea of being moderate and thoughtful:

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt? Did it give you pause for thought this morning, when you heard the head of the CSIRO warn of the dangers of climate change and global warming in this country saying that there is proof, in her view, that Australia is warming dangerously?

MIRANDA DEVINE: No, not at all, because what's new with what she's said? You know, it's the same sort of scare campaign, the same attempt to create this feeling that Armageddon is on its way and it's the greatest moral challenge of our time, which clearly it is not.

Yep, the Devine is so much better placed than Dr Megan Clark, when she spoke out of turn in CSIRO chief defends climate science, and then came that moment when I knew there was an exceptionally good reason never to watch Q&A, but only give the transcripts a quick skim:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Well, we're not allowed to talk about this very important thing that's potentially wrecking our economy? We're not allowed to write about it?

TONY JONES: Well, excuse me, with great respect you are talking about it right now.

WALEED ALY: I suspect you talk about it quite a bit. But my point is...

MIRANDA DEVINE: But you're saying it's...

WALEED ALY: But my point is when you get people who are essentially journalists or just opinionated...

MIRANDA DEVINE: So only scientists can talk about it?

WALEED ALY: Okay, yes. I think...

MIRANDA DEVINE: Right.

WALEED ALY: ...if you're making a scientific argument about whether or not climate change is or is not happening, then that is an argument, in my view, best left to scientists. That might be a radical idea to say that scientists should be involved in a scientific...

MIRANDA DEVINE: We're not making a scientific argument.

Oh dear, we're not making a scientific argument. Somehow mystically it needs to be about how the science is used, and whether or not it's being abused, without ever actually worrying about a scientific argument that might establish whether it's happening or not. The format invites panellists to shoot from the mouth, and like any decent cowgirl, the Devine obliged.

Well there's more if you can stand it, here in the transcript, and of course you can also play catch up viewing at the ABC, but of all the ways to generate heat and smoke and deploy mirrors for cunning lighting effects without substance, surely Q&A must rank with the best of them.

I think in the end that tiddlywinks offers more intellectual stimulation, as well as improving dexterity and testing hand-eye co-ordination ...

(Below: the rules of tiddlywinks here, and please get a decent board!)