Just two years ago, a phone-hacking scandal seemed to be metastasizing within the worldwide conglomerate of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. As things turned out, he excised it by closing down his oldest and most profitable tabloid, The News of the World, whose editor was sentenced just weeks ago to 18 months in prison for his complicity in that scandal.
But it appears Murdoch is trying a little too hard now to disassociate his name from it. After all, just last week he had hounds on Wall Street licking their chops when he floated the prospect of his 21st Century Fox buying Time Warner. And this came just days after he had disciples of Al Gore’s gospel of climate change emitting more greenhouse gases than Chinese smokestacks.
With respect to the latter, here’s why:
Murdoch dismissed the alarming reports coming from scientists about the devastating impact that climate change is causing to the planet.
‘We should approach climate change with great skepticism,’ he said.
‘The world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years, it’s just a lot more complicated today because we are more advanced.’
(London Guardian, July 13, 2014)
Disciples of this weblog could be forgiven for thinking that Murdoch and I are singing from the same hymnal – at least when it comes to this purportedly apocalyptic issue. After all, here’s what I’ve been saying for years about climate change (or global warming as it was called until “an inconvenient truth” about global cooling made that term scientifically and politically unsustainable):
I am convinced that all of the preaching about global warming is just hot air. Of course the planet is getting warmer (although only by a sweltering 1°F every 100 years … ouch?). Moreover, I have no doubt that humans (especially Americans) are marginally to blame. But I also have no doubt that this warming is simply due to natural climate variations (i.e., a cyclical phenomenon).
(“My Final Word on Global Warming,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 8, 2006)
Except that, far from being my last word, many commentaries followed. I have always taken pains to note, however, that I have never denied the existence of climate change. I have only ever argued that, to the extent it exists, it is a cyclical phenomenon – as a subsequent commentary, “Global Cooling? Yes!” October 21, 2008, duly attested.
But I’ve never expected anyone to take my word as gospel. Here, for example, is what you’ll find on nothing less than the home page of NASA’s Earth Observation – Where every day is Earth Day:
Using this ancient evidence, scientists have built a record of Earth’s past climates, or ‘paleoclimates.’ The paleoclimate record combined with global models shows past ice ages as well as periods even warmer than today.
Just bear this in mind when you hear myopic twits sounding alarms about the hottest month or year in relatively recent history.
That said, the reason I refer to my take as the “Third Way” is that I never bought into the gospel of global-warming alarmists or that of global-warming deniers. It’s a riff on how the purportedly conservative Murdoch endorsed Tony Blair’s synthesis of traditionally Conservative and Labour ideas to make a third way for his “New Labour” platform, which carried him to a landslide victory in the 1997 UK parliamentary elections. Of course, Blair was only emulating Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” of traditionally Republican and Democratic ideas to make a third way for his “New Democrat” platform, which carried him to a landslide victory in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. But I digress.
In truth, though, I see no point in sermonizing any further on this issue. Except that I can never overstate my contempt for the hypocrisy inherent in so much preaching about climate change – as I fumed here:
To hear most of these rich folks lamenting about the depletion of the ozone, the increasing gap between haves and have nots, and the almost criminal waste of non-renewable energy, one would think they jet-pooled to Davos on ethanol-fueled airplanes; whereas they all flew in on gas-guzzling, air-polluting private jets.
(“More CO2 than Solutions at World Economic Forum,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 29, 2007)
And more directly against Al Gore, the prophet of climate change, here:
I take umbrage at rich Americans and Europeans lecturing us about the uses of what little energy resources we (in the Caribbean and others throughout the developing world) have to fuel our economic growth. Because, try as we might, even the most profligate amongst us cannot emit as much CO2 in a year as Al Gore emits in a week from fueling everything from his Tennessee mansion to the private jets he travels in to spread his ‘convenient truth’ all over the world.
(“Mother Nature Makes UN Report on Global Warming Seem Like a Flaming Hoax,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 12, 2007)
Incidentally, if Gore really wanted to preach the gospel about climate change, he would be railing against people in developed countries for eating (methane-emitting) livestock to become fat like cows, instead of railing against people in developing countries for burning dirty fuels (like wood, shit, and coal) to cook their food and heat their homes.
In any event, I have no doubt that Murdoch flies around in a gas-guzzling, air-polluting private jet of his own. But at least he’s not a hypocrite about it.
Amen.
Related commentaries:
Polar ice caps…
Mother Nature…