Professor Tim Flannery, who achieved notoriety for his apocalyptic, spectacularly wrong global warming predictions, boasts of bailing up former News Corp director James Murdoch and accusing him of destroying ‘people’s faith in science’. Clearly, Professor Flannery flunked irony at university.

In his recent book, The New Climate Wars, ‘hockey stick’ inventor Michael Mann wrote that News Corp’s amplification of a false conspiracy, known as ‘climategate’, helped derail the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, setting back global efforts to rein in warming by crucial years.