The Australian backs down on its climate change denial stance
At the same time that hundreds of Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists met in Hobart in January, the Australian’s environment editor Graham Lloyd was making the claim that “the latest science on sea level rises has found no link to global warming”. The story cited a paper which ran in the Journal of Climate last year, co-authored by the CSIRO’s Dr John Church.
Fairly unhappy about having his work misquoted like this. Church then said that this claim was inaccurate.
IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri also weighed in, saying that“sane and rational voices must respond to…this scepticism”.
A correction appeared in the Australian on January 17th, and Lloyd's original story has been taken down.
This might not sound as groundbreaking as you think, but look at the Australian's track record for climate change denalism, it's a major development.
Let's take a look at the Australian's track record for reporting climate change over the last six years:
On 12 January 2006, the Australian argued that "climate change may be a mirage", and two days later it claimed that "for the prophet's of gloom... it is an article of the green faith that the world's climate is changing for the worse, because coal-fired power plants pump greenhouse gases into that atmosphere...while environmental activists say science shows fossil fuels are responsible for a global warming crisis, which may be right, they could just as easily be wrong"
On 15 March 2007, the Australian responded to the Martin Durkin documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle with enthusiasm, celebrating "the emergence of renewed scepticism within the scientific community" in "a debate that appears to have been hikacked by non-scientists, political advisers and bereaucrats"
Then on 29 November 2008, the Australian claimed that "if climate change is real – and 'if' is the operative word - every aspect of the phenonemon needs to be picked over and analysed with the utmost rigour"
On 18 April 2009, the Australian argued that "as Professor Plimer demonstrates, expert irritation does not disguise the fact that the science is anything but settled".
And it goes on and on. So by 2010, Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell inherited a newspaper that had an accepted editorial policy of undermining the science behind climate change. And throughout the years that Mitchell ran the newspaper, it ran a concerted effort to dissemble all science about climate change, and sow seeds of doubt in the minds of their readers that they had anything to do with the raising global temperatures.
As Robert Manne said in his 2011 essay "Bad News', published in the Quarterly Essay, "on one question the editorialists at the Australian were completely consistent – their loathing and contempt for anyone who thought radical action on climate change was needed"
So this albeit small admission of untruth does start to look like a milestone.