Climate Change - Global Warming..

FAIRFAX SLUDGE NOW NINE’S

Oh dear, you can take the Fairfax name out of the company — as even Fairfax, sorry, now Nine, journalists write (that Fairfax is “defunct”). But you surely can’t take the climate sludge out of the Nine broadloids.

That is to say, out of two of the Nine (as in the company not the number) broadloids — The Age and the SMH. The third broadloid, the AFR, retains some links to sanity.

Did I write sludge? Veritable mountains and mountains of deep, deep carbon-infused verbal climate sludge, every day, day after day. If the soaring temperatures ain’t enough to fry you, the rushing rising seas will surely drown you.

But every now and then, totally unwittingly and decidedly unintentionally, there’s a (very small) diamond of truth buried in all the sludge. As there was in The Age yesterday.

Its editorial was demanding that we, Australia, did more to “fight climate change”.

The Pacific needed “more from us” lamented the headline.

The simple truth is that we cannot “do more”.

We could close Australia down, ship all 25 million of us somewhere else and so cut our emissions of CO2 to zero, and this would make zip, zero, nada, absolutely no difference to global climate, regional temperatures or a centimetre of the Pacific.

China would make up the difference with more CO2 in a matter of weeks. You might say, thank goodness, the world’s plants could literally breathe easy.

And so to the unintended diamond for, as The Age unwittingly observed, that the “cost of failure” was “beyond calculation”.