Crikey

“Too many of us have spent too long in denial over the threat from global warming. The evidence is now irresistible: Searing summers and dry winters in the UK; increasingly frequent tornados and hurricanes worldwide; the shrinking Arctic ice cap.”

The voice of Al Gore? Nope. Try Rupert Murdoch. The excerpt is from the editorial in yesterday’s London Sun. Last week we pointed to James Murdoch and his growing influence on the News Ltd stable when it came to climate change, but The Sun’s backflip is something else entirely. The paper acts as Rupert Murdoch’s megaphone — and now The Sun is saying it was wrong:

Only the severity and immediacy of the threat is open to debate. This week The Sun will present the evidence and suggest how every one of us can help.

This is not just a backflip for Murdoch, it’s a double pike with twist. It’s safe to say that this paper is Rupert without the quote marks, and this week it’s running a massive campaign entitled “Go Green with The Sun.”

There’s suggestions on how to go green, “20 wacky green facts”, a tiny picture of Al Gore (“Al Gore … he’s a bore no more”) under the headline “You HAVE to see this film” and a call for an “eco-basher tax.”

But it looks like Murdoch’s global warming memo got lost at the branch office and never made it to The Oz  — today’s editorial, “An inconvenient cost” reads:

The problem, according to Dr Lomborg, Danish author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, is that even if you accept the warming thesis, today’s best climate models show immediate action will do little good. The Kyoto Protocol is designed to cut industrial nations’ CO2 emissions by 30 per cent of what they would have been in 2010, and by half in 2050. Yet even if every country adhered to the protocol’s rules through this century, Dr Lomborg asserts, the change would have slowed global warming by just six years in 2100.

And seems Terry McCrann missed the memo too, he devotes today’s Herald Sun column to scoff at Gore and his Inconvenient Truth:

For the purposes of this comment we’ll — broadly — leave aside the basic question of whether global warming is actually taking place; and if so whether it’s ‘our’ fault.

On both counts, we’ll only find out in about 1500 years, maybe 1000 if we are lucky.

Aside from noting even in its own terms, Gore’s presentation is a mix of scary exaggeration and rebuttable factoids.

And he ends with this zinger of a fart joke: “I wonder what Al does to offset his airconditioning? Donate money to reduce flatulence?”

Makes The Sun look positively intellectual.