Michael Ashley of the University of New South Wales is blasting The Australian, a News Corp. paper, for “engaging in a campaign to misrepresent and distort climate science.”

Earlier this year, Media Matters noted that while News Corporation appeals to advertisers by acknowledging that climate change “poses clear, catastrophic threats” and implementing an initiative to reduce its carbon footprint, its cable channel Fox News regularly distorts the facts to obscure the problem.

Climate misinformation also infects News Corporation's Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

Ashley writes that one tactic of The Australian's “anti-science campaign” is to inflate “the credentials of their fake experts.”

Similarly, Fox News misidentified a business school professor as a “world renowned scientist” and has hosted meteorologists who lack climate science expertise to cast doubt on global warming.

Ashley provides several examples of Australian contributors who have “repeatedly misinterpreted scientific papers.” Fox also routinely misrepresents scientific findings to cast doubt on man-made global warming.

Even down to the specific distortions, Fox News has mirrored The Australian.

Ashley writes that a contributor to The Australian claimed “temperature records confirm that cooling is under way” when in fact "they don't." This is one of Fox News' favorite falsehoods.

Ashley also notes that another contributor to The Australian has claimed, “To argue that human additions to atmospheric CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, changes climate requires an abandonment of all we know about history, archaeology, geology, solar physics, chemistry and astronomy.”

Similarly, frequent Fox News and Fox Business guest Joe Bastardi has claimed that human contributions to the levels of this trace gas are too small to have an effect.

Ashley concludes that the editors of The Australian “need to reflect on their culpability,”adding:

The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change. Each lost decade greatly increases the eventual economic costs, the devastation to our ecosystems, and the suffering of future generations.

Do you think I'm exaggerating?

Read the real science, ask the real experts.