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According to reports in the Australian press, Rupert Murdoch’s , whose outlets, of course, include Fox News, is about to start an editorial campaign to promote a carbon-neutral climate policy. Murdoch appears to have decided that climate change is real after all, and that human activity is to blame.

This will shock a lot of people who rely on Murdoch for a reliable supply of clippings to fire off to their tree-hugger friends. But it’s just one more indication of the extraordinary times we live in.

A lot of the scientists who’ve been Murdoch’s targets don’t believe this is sincere.

But I’m tempted to think that whether it’s sincere or not, the mere act of Murdoch’s media empire actually embracing climate science might, in itself, solve the climate problem because it’s the equivalent of hell freezing over.

So, why the sudden change of heart?

I guess it finally got too embarrassing to watch his own news outlets running video of waterfalls in the Manhattan subways, unending wildfires, and vanishing glaciers, even as his commentators keep arguing that there’s nothing to see here.

I admit to not being much of a climate crusader myself. I accepted climate change a long time ago, but I admit– I assumed it would happen a lot more slowly than it has. I thought it would happen over generations, so that we would have had time as a species to evolve into amphibious lizard people. And develop smartphones good to a depth of 20 feet.

But, as usual, the laws of nature don’t care what any of us think, and it’s here now.

I just hope Murdoch understands the economic consequences of converting millions of deniers into believers.

You have a whole generation of waterfront property owners in sea-level cities who assumed that there’d always be plenty of deniers to sell to when they retired.

But maybe there’s still time. Murdoch’s campaign doesn’t start until the end of October.

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