The fading National Post chose sides today: in a snarling attack on the Nobel Committee decision to award a Peace Prize to Al Gore, The Post went on to condemn other Nobel recipients, dismissing the work of Mother Teresa, the goals of nuclear disarmament and the heroism of UN peacekeepers – among whom Canadian soldiers have always played a major role.

Which leaves me wondering: has Post business editor Terence Corcoran finally and completely taken leave of his senses? I mean, I can understand someone debating the lifetime record of a Nobel Prize winner like Yasser Arafat, but how can Corcoran dismiss as “obscure and absurd” the work of UNICEF or the (Canadian-led) activists who forged the international land mines agreement?

The Post, which seems as hostile to science as it does to Al Gore, also devoted nearly a full page to a two-day-old story about a UK court case that – the Post would have you believe – was critical of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. In this, the Post finds that the truth is no inconvenience whatsoever. Instead, it freely misrepresents the fact that the judgment was a resounding vindication of the movie.

Any fair or forthright coverage of the court case would note:

1. That a suspiciously well-financed bus-driver named Stewart Dimmock brought the suit in an effort to block the showing of An Inconvenient Truth in U.K. schools on the grounds that the movie was biased and inaccurate; and

2. That the judge rejected Dimmock’s position out of hand. He called the movie “broadly accurate” and endorsed its availability to school age children.

Terence Corcoran has been fighting for more than a decade to keep climate science out of Canadian newspapers. He has been working, tirelessly and, for a while, effectively, to keep readers confused. But ultimately, he has failed. The science, according to the (Nobel Prize-winning) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “unequivocal.” And, at Angus Reid’s last count, 77 per cent of Canadians have accepted that humans are affecting our climate in a dangerous way.

The Post, apparently, is content to talk only to whomever is left over – even if that conversation deteriorates into a rant against every good cause the Nobel Peace Prize committee has lauded in the last two decades.

We have talked before on the DeSmogBlog about the dinosaurs who still walked the earth in the days after the meteor strike that finally ensured their extinction. Given the intelligence of dinosaurs, most of them probably didn’t know that they were the last revellers in a party that was well and truly over.

Terence Corcoran and the other leading lights at the The National Post may actually understand their current status. They may be smarter than your average dinosaur. Or maybe not. But their time in the sun is running out fast.

Sorry Terry, but you’ll have to face one more inconvenient truth: in any contest with you on one side and Mother Teresa and Al Gore on the other, Al Gore wins.

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