James Cameron—a Titanic lack of balls [update 3]

 Director James Cameron is famous for a movie in which you can spend two hours watching people drown (Titanic) and for the first movie in history about war between aliens and humans in which we’re meant to barrack for the aliens (Avatar). He also famously issued a challenge to climate skeptics, saying in a much-discussed March interview he wanted “to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads."

So Ann McElhinney, the co-writer and co-irector of Not Evil Just Wrong, accepted immediately—telling Cameron she’d “even drive herself to your Camegigantic gated Malibu double mansion to shoot it out.” So did Marc Morano of the popular Climate Depot website.  And new media mogul Andrew Breitbart.

So Cameron accepted the challenge. “His people” set it all up. He agreed to a debate this week at a conference in Colorado. And then, bit by bit, he just kind’a chickened out, as Ann McElhinney describes:

As the debate approached James Cameron's side started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We agreed.
They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to "a roundtable." We agreed.
    Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.
    Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed
    Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he "wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out," decided to ban the media from the shoot out.
    He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.
    No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet.  No one would be allowed to record it in any way.
    We all agreed to that.
    And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. "shoot it out " Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.
    James Cameron's behavior raises some very important questions.
    Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change?  If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?
    Or is it just a pose?
The man who called for an open and public debate at "high noon" suddenly doesn't want his policies open to serious scrutiny.
   I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.
    But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron … has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.

And after cancelling the debate? “Cameron still went to the conference where he called climate skeptics ‘swine,’” and sniffed that the skeptics weren’t “of his stature in society.”

Make that King of the Fucking Hypocrites.

UPDATE 1: Says Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, “Cameron let his friends in the environmental community spook him out of this debate," When he was warned that he was probably going to lose and lose badly, he ran like a scared mouse.”

UPDATE 2: Cameron busted on his stated reasons for withdrawing. Emails show the real story.

UPDATE 3: Meanwhile, a founder of warmist site Real Climate demonstrates at Wikipedia how intellectual honesty is done in warmist circles, leading the charge as the most prolific climate information gatekeeper at Wikipedia.  If he can’t argue his case, he simply bans it.