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Life

Living in denial: Unleashing a lie

By Jim Giles

12 May 2010

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Think diseases spread fast? Lies are faster

(Image: Saturn Stills / SPL)

IN November 2006, the conservative columnist Piers Akerman published a scathing attack on climate science in Australia’s Daily Telegraph. Akerman contended that warnings about warming were deliberately exaggerated. To back his claim, he , a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying: “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”

Early the next year, Lee Morrison, a conservative Canadian journalist, reused the quote in an opinion piece in the Calgary Herald. That summer, a scholar at the Acton Institute for the…

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