The SMH is continuing its strong series of articles on climate change today’s front page reports an interview with Sir Nicholas Stern who seems to have cred with conservatrive politcians because he is an economist not a climatoligist. Stern didn’t mince his words:

“We don’t start from a good place, but it’s not too late,” Sir Nicholas said yesterday in an interview with the Herald in Sydney, where he outlined a far more aggressive program for action than either the Government or Opposition proposes.

As he prepared to meet the Prime Minister, John Howard, today and the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, Sir Nicholas warned that Australia faced a bleak future of increasing droughts, storms, sea level rises and the collapse of the Great Barrier Reef if the planet kept warming.

His message will be: “The costs of acting worldwide to combat climate change are much less than the cost of inaction.”

And Peter Hartcher the Herald’s chief political reporter is even more agressive in his comment piece:

SIR NICHOLAS STERN, the man dubbed “the rock star of climate change”, is performing in Canberra today.

Kevin Rudd will be doing a pretty good lip-sync to the tune Stern is singing and he’ll copy some of the moves. John Howard will try to hum along while tapping a foot in time.

But the inconvenient truth is that neither of Australia’s major political parties is fully ready to sing all the verses, with feeling….

But with a federal election looming in the next eight months or so, Australia’s political leaders are very coy about spelling out exactly what they will do about it. Neither Rudd nor Howard wants to be the first to tell voters in an election year that we will have to make difficult, even wrenching, changes in our fat-bottomed four-lane lifestyles.

This seeming committment to education about climate change didn’t stop the Herald a few weeks back publishing a stinging attack on Al Gore’s campaign to change minds and hearts. Originally published in the NYT the crtitique has been slammed by some media commentators. In an analysis for Alternet David Roberts had this to say:

This may be the worst, sloppiest, most dishonest piece of reporting I’ve ever seen in the NYT. It’s got all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo. As usual with these things, unless you’ve been following the debate carefully, you’ll be left with a false impression — in this case, that scientists are divided over the accuracy of Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. I find it difficult to believe that Broad doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing here. (See RealClimate for a discussion of one of his previous travesties.) I could go almost sentence by sentence, but let’s just run through some of the highlights. I apologize for the length, but there’s really a lot of trash here to shovel through.