Yesterday we saw a splendid example of climate denialism in operation, a case study of who denialists are, what their concerns are, and how they operate.

Monday’s joint report from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology was a high-profile exercise in getting across the basic message of climate change.

Using figures and graphs simple enough for even Steve Fielding to understand, the report demonstrated how temperatures in Australia were rising, rainfall patterns were shifting and sea levels rising, while explaining how unlikely it was that the changes were somehow natural variations.

It was effective for two reasons. First, the CSIRO and the BOM are both respected Australian institutions. They’re not the UN, or foreign scientists with funny names. They’re fixtures in the popularly-perceived landscape of Australian science. The CSIRO has for decades been one of the most trusted brands in the country and seen by Australians as one of the best sources of information on science issues.

Second, they connected up popular experience with actual climate change. The report talks about the number of hot days a year and trends in rainfall now with climate change.

The basic denialist technique is to sew confusion in the community by repeatedly throwing up confected and disproven claims about the science, or attacking the credibility of climate scientists and scientific institutions, and keep doing it until people figure there must be something to their claims. And it has worked, with assistance from the media.

But once Australians start making the connection between their own experiences and climate change, and moving climate change from a nebulous future threat to something happening in Australia right now, that technique stops working.  And that’s what the CSIRO-BOM report did.

Enter Victorian Senator Julian McGauran. Now, I should set the record straight here, because last time I discussed McGauran, I said he had made no contribution to public life during his extended sojourn in the Senate. This is untrue. As a Crikey reader pointed out, McGauran in fact was the politician who drew attention in 1996 to the alarming invasion of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands by Indonesian thongs, prompting McGauran to call for a Indonesian thong boycott. His environmental credentials are therefore quite sound.

McGauran attacked the CSIRO-BOM report. Did he dispute the figures? Challenge its methodology? Point out peer-reviewed science omitted from the report? No, he claimed the CSIRO had been politicised by Kim Carr.

“Minister Carr without doubt has wandered through the CSIRO offices, intimidating the scientists and the executive to do as they’re told,” the ABC reported McGauran saying. “This is now a political organisation. The executive have become compliant to the minister, utterly.” He produced a press release in which he said “the CSIRO’s willingness to be politicised has led to blatant contradictions and trivial findings.”

McGauran is a perfect exemplar of denialism. Male, in his mid-fifties, wealthy, conservative, regional. And his attack on the CSIRO was a perfect example of denialism in action — unable to dispute the science, McGauran attacked the scientists that produced it, claiming they’d been corrupted and politicised, in effect smearing everyone in the CSIRO.

And like most denialists, he went right over the top into conspiracy theory. McGauran seriously suggested Carr had physically gone to CSIRO premises and intimidated scientists.

Admittedly it’s a scary thought — that giant teddy bear suddenly springing out from behind a laboratory bench to demand scientists fiddle their figures, hiding amongst the test tubes and grabbing a researcher to tell them to toe the line on climate change. Possibly he waved a bunsen burner in their faces, uttering “I’ll show you some real warming if you don’t cook the books” in a growl that has intimidated many a factional opponent.

At least it’s more believable than Chris Monckton’s world government conspiracy theory that involves most of the world’s elected leaders and conservative icons like Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. But it was an extraordinary attack on the CSIRO, one which remains uncorrected by the Coalition leadership.

Usually this sort of garbage gets aired on denialist blogs (Andrew Bolt flailed away at the CSIRO yesterday) and in meetings of elderly Sunshine Coast cranks, out of public sight. Scientists are smeared, conspiracies are peddled, institutions are vilified, as part of the denialist war on younger generations. It’s rare for a politician to be stupid enough to do the same.