It was only after it happened that I realised what a happy serendipity it was. Last Monday we released to the public the first episode of our new five-part documentary podcast series Their ABC and then on Thursday we launched our daily email update on what is happening at Glasgow. You can guess the IPA's attitude to the conference from the title of the email – SayNoToGlasgow.

Any discussion of climate change policy can now not be disconnected from the barracking for 'net zero' of practically every media organisation in the country. And of course for more than two decades there's been no bigger spruiker for climate catastrophism than the ABC. And the ABC's treatment of climate change is a focus of the second episode of Their ABC that's now available on all your podcast platforms.

I've been pondering about when it was that the media stopped pretending that its coverage of climate change was in any way balanced. I'd argue that even during the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years although there was obviously a bias in one direction, the views of those who didn't subscribe to some of the more alarmist predictions did get a hearing. I think that changed in 2013 with the election of Tony Abbott as prime minister as some journalists saw the opportunity to not only prosecute the case of extreme Green policies but do so in a way that damaged the Liberal Party.

The Guardian has an excuse – it's never claimed to be anything other than left-wing and so I'll largely ignore the email I received yesterday from Katharine Viner, which said this:
Dear Reader

I'm the Guardian's editor-in-chief and I am writing to you to tell you about the work we do to cover the greatest crisis of our generation, the climate crisis, in the hope that you'll consider supporting us to power our current and future efforts.

Two years ago, the Guardian pledged to give the emergency the prominence it deserves. That means reporting every week from the climate frontlines around the world. And we've been there for it all: the unprecedented heatwaves of the Pacific west; the dramatic floods in China, Germany, India, England, Greece, Thailand…The wildfires in Australia, the United States, Canada, Europe, recurring with greater intensity, and greater destruction.

As world leaders gather at the crucial UN climate summit, Guardian reporting – independent, rigorous, science-led and open to all – has never mattered more.

'Science-led' sounds nice but describing something as 'the greatest crisis of our generation' is not the sober language of science – it's the rhetoric of politics. The Guardian's coverage is many things, but 'science-led' it is not.

As Graham Young, the executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress in Brisbane points out in a terrific article in this week's The Spectator Australia, we do well to remind ourselves of some basic facts. Yes – the temperature is increasing, as Roy Spencer (a contributor to the IPA's Climate Change: The Facts 2020) has identified. Since 1979 the linear warming trend is 0.14 degree Celsius per decade. That's forty years of evidence that doesn't fit the narrative.
The coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef is at record-high levels (as IPA Senior Fellow, Dr Peter Ridd has talked about), and rainfall in Australia has increased. And as IPA Senior Fellow, Dr Jennifer Marohasy wrote in her chapter 'Wildfires in Australia: 1851 to 2020' in Climate Change: The Facts 2020, there is no evidence, contrary to Katharine Viner that wildfires in this country are 'recurring with greater intensity, and greater destruction'.

The Age here in my city of Melbourne is now, when it comes to climate change, indistinguishable from The Guardian. This is some of the email I received from the editor Gay Alcorn last Friday:

Dear subscriber

To say The Age is committed to excellent and thorough coverage of climate is self-evident. COVID-19 has occupied much of our resources and energy since the start of last year, but climate change is one of, if not the most critical challenge of our times. It will affect us all.

As Australians know, the politics of climate change has crippled our federal governments for more than decade, and seen our political system fail in its duty in the interests of citizens, again and again.

There are now few out-and-out climate change deniers, even if they contributed to decades of inaction in Australia and across the world. Even News Corp, a media organisation that did more than any to confuse Australians about whether climate change was real or urgent, has flipped, almost comically, and now campaigns for net zero.
The tension now is not about deniers, but between people and countries who are wholeheartedly committed, and those who have been dragged to act on climate change because of political and business pressure but have little genuine interest in it.

That’s a political tract pure and simple. And it's wrong. It's impossible to reconcile Alcorn's claim that there has been 'decades of inaction' on climate change in Australia when this country reduced its emissions faster than nearly every comparable country. Again let's turn to the evidence. Australia's emissions are 20% lower than in 2005. For New Zealand the figure is 4%, the OECD 7%, and the United States 13%. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Alcorn's tract is her claim that people and countries must be 'wholeheartedly committed' to act on climate change – being 'dragged' to do something is not good enough. Meanwhile one must not dare ask what difference will anything Australia does make to the temperature of the world.

In the world of The Age there's no room for dissent or questioning or disagreement – because to do so might cause 'confusion'. All of this is hardly a recipe for good policymaking. Presumably Alcorn wouldn't approve of what the former editor of The Australian, Chris Mitchell said in his column in that newspaper yesterday. (Incidentally Mitchell is a guest on Their ABC.)

On October 24, The Australian published a piece by Ticky Fullerton quoting Vaclav Smil [a Czech-Canadian professor of public policy] who pointed out that since the first global climate meeting in 1992, world energy production 'had only achieved a drop from 87 per cent to 83 per cent fossil fuels'.
Presumably the reporting of such inconvenient facts cause the 'confusion' that Alcorn talks about.

And so back to the ABC. What The Guardian and The Age say is up to them. If they want to campaign they can – that's the nature of a free press – just as long as we remember that a 'free press' does not mean it is a balanced or objective press. The ABC should be better – but it isn't – it's worse.

This is an example from the ABC yesterday from an online article entitled 'How Australia earned its climate change reputation'. The key argument of the article is this view, expressed by Bill Hare, described in the article as 'chief executive of Climate Analytics, a think tank that has worked with UN bodies on climate change'. According to Hare – 'the world is unimpressed with Australia' because 'what they see in Australia is not a single finger has been lifted to do anything to reduce emissions'.

Why that single sentence alone, repeated unquestioningly by the ABC, is not a subject for a segment on Media Watch I don't know. Again – how can anyone describe a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions since 2005 as 'not lifting a finger'. If you worked for Greenpeace for ten years, as Hare did, you can though. Not that the ABC disclosed that about Hare. And so it goes on and on and on from the ABC – as Evan Mulholland the IPA's Director of Communications explains in Their ABC.