Mark Mann, Piers Akerman, and the Sisyphean challenge of pushing News Corp rubbish up hill on daily basis ...

(Above: screen cap of an actual front page online splash at the Daily Terror).

You could have knocked me over with a loon's feather.

It turns out that the Daily Terror actually has a green eco blog attached to it, provided by one Mark Mann. You can cut to the chase by heading here, wherein you will find assorted green issues presented with a green tinge - take for example Go vego for Australia in which lamb and beef production are berated as major contributors to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, and a tofu burger once a week is offered up as more useful than trading a gas-guzzler for a hybrid.

Not unexpectedly, Mann's work seems mainly to have attracted the eccentric fringe element usually seen dancing at Tim Blair's blog, who like the itinerant migratory loon, occasionally wander over to give the greenie a sound thrashing.

There weren't many comments, but they were uniformly negative.

Perhaps my favourite comment?

Pull the other one, I’ve had it with Green Escathology.

Ah, the fatal 'h'. But if you take a look at eschatology, or perhaps even Christian eschatology, I think you'll catch the drift.

My own sense of end times is to wonder, nay to marvel at a green blogger turning up at the Daily Terror.

Talk about a snowball in a furnace. And it seems it's been going in an intermittent way since at least June of last year. But in such a low key way that even a dedicated reader might miss the occasional pearl.

Was I wrong or what. Talk about a well rounded news service or what. And here I was thinking that the tone of the rag was set by the regular, reliable honking, braying and squawking that comes from the likes of Piers Akerman, who as usual presents his standard climate rant in UN's dead deadline exposes Rudd scam.

Apart from sounding like a character in a Monty Python sketch, Akker Dakker isn't above referencing the surrealist comedy as he celebrates the end the massive global swindle, melting more rapidly than any Himalayan glacier:

This is not a deadline, not even a soft deadline. It is a dead deadline, a non-deadline, a meaningless deadline. It is not a line in the sand, a line in the mud or a line in the air. It is a non-existent line.

Aw, he could have worked in a reference to the parrot.

As for climate change, it's same old same old, as Akker Dakker harps away at his favourite theme song, with a reliability as tedious as predictable, and as accurate as a two bob watch with a buggered main spring:

It (the UN) has decided that Copenhagen and the hysterical approach to climate change promoted by Rudd and a few others bent on transferring the wealth of the Western nations to the developing world was an over-the-top solution to a problem that increasingly appears to have been based on phoney figures, manipulated data and dodgy science.

Huh? Chairman Rudd and a few others are behind it all? By golly, as conspiracy theories go that's as fatuous a folly as the fat owl has managed in recent times in his always foolhardy parroting of the party line.

But wait, there's more, there's always more:

US President Barack Obama had already signalled that he would not be pushing for any drastic measures before he was given a drubbing in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

The vote that saw the Democrats lose the Senate seat held by John F.Kennedy and his brother Ted for nearly 50 years was seen by some as a referendum on Obama’s crippled healthcare program.

But that was not the only issue that drove voters to the polls in record numbers.

Many were objecting to every aspect of the Obama approach to politics, including his embrace of multilateral forums such as the UN and its policies on matters such as global warming.

Oh dear god. Only an Australian could write such drivel. Even the greenies in America could duck for cover on the matter of Brown and climate change:

The Brown victory is anticipated to pose other difficulties to the democratic agenda, namely the healthcare bill, the partisan debate over which only served to shove climate legislation further into the shadows even as Obama hoped it would bring energy to the largely anti-climactic Copenhagen climate talks last month ...

... Massachusetts supporters of the climate bill were quick to point out that the Brown victory was not a negative mandate on the climate bill, as it was never the subject of debate between him and his opponent Coakley. (here).

Sure Brown is on a level of fatuity that Akker Dakker can understand:

“It’s interesting. I think the globe is always heating and cooling,’’ he said. “It’s a natural way of ebb and flow. The thing that concerns me lately is some of the information I’ve heard about potential tampering with some of the information.’’

Brown continued, saying: “I just want to make sure if in fact . . . the earth is heating up, that we have accurate information, and it’s unbiased by scientists with no agenda. Once that’s done, then I think we can really move forward with a good plan.’’ (here)

Well it's not quite Steve Fielding, but at least he has his eye on moving forward with a good plan.

Meanwhile, back to Akker Dakker:

Last week, it was revealed that the IPCC had also relied on unscientific claims of Himalayan glacial melts to make its case.

Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong constantly cited the IPCC as the source of their wild claims about increasing extreme weather events.

The IPCC said the prediction on glacial melt in its landmark 2007 report was “poorly substantiated” and resulted from a lapse in standards.

Well of all places, you can head over to The Australian - don't think. again, just try thinking - for Glaciergagte threatens a climate change:

Graham Cogley, the Canadian scientist who trekked a decade-old paper trail to expose the Glaciergate error in a crucial UN-backed document on climate change, says there is one certainty about what will happen next.

An expert on glaciers at Trent University in Ontario, Cogley is an instinctively cautious scientist who opposes any leaps to unproven conclusions but he is prepared to bet that climate change sceptics and deniers will pore over the report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change more closely than ever to try to find more errors.

"Sceptics have already started using this incident for their own purposes by saying that somehow the whole IPCC document is now in doubt," he tells Focus in a telephone interview from Canada.

It was Cogley's meticulous attention to detail and his resistance to "sexing up" research that exposed the wildly exaggerated claim in the IPCC's most recent assessment of climate change that Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt away as soon as 2035.

"I'm confident that the document as a whole is authoritative and the reliance placed on it by policy makers is not misplaced but I suppose you always had to expect that people would try to use this to shoot down the overall evidence on climate change."

Yep, cue Akker Dakker, who is no more interested in the truth than a wolf is interested in the cosmological aspects of the moon he spends all night baying at.

Bob Ward, a geologist and former journalist who has published academic papers on the misrepresentation of climate-change evidence by environmentalists and climate-change sceptics, says the Cato Institute's response is predictable. "People who have an axe to grind are trying to use this incident to undermine the credibility of the whole IPCC," he says.

"But in order to do that you have to enormously exaggerate the significance of the paragraph about the Himalayas," says Ward, who is now policy director at the London School of Economics' Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

"We are talking about one error in a three-year-old 3000-page report that was clearly a rather glaring mistake. Groups who don't want to see any action on climate change are using anything like this they can get their hands on to try to undermine the science. It is happening particularly in Australia and the US where there are political debates going on about domestic legislation related to climate change.

"Cogley exposed this 2035 date as inaccurate not because he disputes the fact that glaciers are receding -- he doesn't -- but because he genuinely wants all the science to be as accurate as possible. But a lot of the people who are leaping on to it just want to raise as many doubts as possible to try to slow the whole process down."

According to Ward, the most concerted opposition to climate-change action "is coming from ideologically driven right-wing groups like the American think tanks that oppose any sort of restrictions on the market" and fossil fuel companies "that are trying to delay any new restrictions on their business for as long as possible".

Ah well, where were we, what with all this talk of the ideologically driven? Why, back with Akker Dakker of course, and his final rhetorical flourish about Chairman Rudd:

Perhaps his claims about global destruction were merely first drafts of his next book for children. The UN is certainly treating them as such.

Perhaps what Akker Dakker meant to say was this:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Because when you think as a child, you certainly write as a child, and you end your column with a childish flourish. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Me? I'm more inclined to pity Mark Mann, trapped in the Daily Terror and writing an eco green blog. Why on a daily basis he could be tackling two of the greatest dangers to human understanding - Piers Akerman and Tim Blair - as they fill the already overflowing intertubes with more wretched rhetoric.

Poor old Graham Readfearn regularly takes on the wild beasts of News Corp. He's currently taking a break, his body battered by encounters with Janet Albrechtsen (Would you take your climate "facts" from this man?) and Tim Blair (Tim Blair the data analyst?)

Well if Mann is serious, it's time for him to step into the octagon, and go mano-a-mano with Akerman and Blair. No need to write anything else - just correcting the false impressions, treading in the bile, and sorting out the mis-truths propounded by these News Corp demons will be a full time job.

Well good luck with that, and don't hold your breath, because no matter what you hear about Avatar, blue isn't green, but should Mann choose to stand tall and proud, and face up to what a man should do, as he embarks on his mission, here's that other bit of Corinthians 13, King James version to go with him:

For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Just don't expect any of it from Akker Dakker, or quaint chivalrous notions of quarter. To the breach, Mann, and death or glory ...

(Below: think of Akker Dakker as spam - of an electronic digital kind delivered regularly and reliably by News Corp over a series of tubes, rather than by email - and soon enough you'll be humming spam to the manor born).