There's a new axis of evil in town:
Ottawa (AFP) - Canada and Australia's conservative prime ministers said Monday economic concerns trump climate action, with Ottawa's Stephen Harper insisting any nation claiming otherwise is lying.
Both leaders have faced increased criticism over their climate policies after US President Barack Obama last week unveiled the first major regulations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States.
"Increased criticism"? Why, yes, The Guardian's mad at them:
Climate Unity Dealt Blow As Australia And Canada Take Issue With US Stance
As we saw during the Bush years, The Guardian is well-known for demanding that medium-rank powers immediately fall into line with whatever America does.
Anyone else? Oh, yes. Crikey Down Under:
There's a certain inevitability about Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an effort to stymie international action on climate change. That's not just because they're middle-aged white conservatives, which is defining demography of climate denialism...
You mean just like the Chinese Politburo? But Bernard Keane isn't done yet:
That's not just because they're middle-aged white conservatives, which is defining demography of climate denialism — if CO2 caused baldness and erectile dysfunction climate change would have been addressed decades ago...
It's good to know opposing climate change is, like everything else, totally racist. Like most people who drone on about middle-aged white men, Bernard Keane is a middle-aged white man. He doesn't appear to be bald, but the erectile dysfunction of hockey-stick climate alarmism seems to be getting to him.
What to do about it? Dame Julia Slingo, the Brit climate honcho, thinks we need to ditch this graph-type science rubbish and move toward interpretative dance and free verse:
"We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us …," Slingo said recently to a gathering of leading climate change scientists. "We increasingly recognize that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication.
"And it's not through tables and graphs. Sometimes it is through art, through music, through poetry, and storytelling and that is increasingly something we have to think about – how we communicate in a more humanist way."
When I headlined my recent piece "I'm Gonna Quash That Mann Right Out Of My Hair", I didn't realize it was actually a song from South Pacific Decadal Oscillation - The Musical, along with the showstopper "There Is Nothin' Like A Dame Julia Slingo Awareness-Raising Speech".
This is good news for Michael E Mann, who's been having a bit of trouble with all those "tables and graphs". Having appointed himself Nobel Laureate, he can easily appoint himself Poet Laureate:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree-
Ring.
Meanwhile, why not get out of those boring climate-change peer-reviewed papers and into the climate changing room?
Exeter University, the Met Office, the London College of Fashion and the Victoria & Albert Museum have collaborated on the "Climate Dress" – a project looking at how clothing can be used to communicate ideas about global warming, for example by using moving pictures of melting ice-caps and related data projected across the dress.
You mean, it's like that boring hockey stick, but you wear it on your body? Gee, why didn't I think of that?
I give it six weeks and, in his latest amendedly amended complaint, Michael Mann will be claiming to have been exonerated by the Paris spring collections.
~Tonight, Tuesday, I'll be checking in with Dana Perino on Fox News after 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific. Tomorrow morning, I'll be joining Toronto's Number One morning man, John Oakley, on AM640 - at 8.30am Eastern, live from the black heart of the Denialist Dominion.