No, seriously, WTF????

Climate Change – ka-ching

At last, we’re back to square one. There will be no climate change.

At first, the argument was that climate change was a myth created by the Weather Channel to boost ratings. Then, there was the argument – later disproven by the mere fact that Stephen Fielding agreed with it – that climate change might be happening but it’s more likely caused by passing spaceships than humans.

Now, the problem of climate change is so bad that there will be no change… out of about $500 billion per year in adaptation measures. That is the conclusion of the newly minted report Assessing the Costs of Adapting to Climate Change.

Authored by widely respected economists from a number of authoritative institutions, the report attacks the U.N.’s prediction that adaptations will cost $170 billion a year as a gross underestimation.

The authors blamed this on the U.N.’s failure to include key industry sectors within its estimates – in particular energy, manufacturing, mining, tourism and ecosystems.

How much money Australia will save by neglecting these sectors remains to be seen, but it is almost certain that we will hear in coming weeks that it is now just too expensive to even think about doing anything about climate change… especially since it may not even exist.

No News Like Corporate News

“There is an inescapable conclusion. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”

That’s right – the only way to know that you are being told the truth about reality is if somebody is making a bunch of cash out of it. That little nugget comes from James Murdoch, spawn of Rupert.

The full text of his dissertation on Media in the UK is so positively insanely awful and blind to the context of his father’s media empire that it has gone viral across news and media blogs both in and outside the UK. Some commentators have reviewed it as the reappearance of Gordon Gekko – Michael Douglas’ endlessly greedy character from the movie Wall Street.

The thrust of Mini-Me Murdoch’s argument is that the BBC is a positively vile institution that distorts the media market and completely undermines the principles of quality journalism and the free market by giving away, or “dumping”, quality news that some ruthless media moguls probably would fund but would certainly charge people to read.

Bastards. The BBC, that is. Of course.