IN October last year, it was Al Gore who came under a cloud, on the eve of his Nobel Prize, for exaggerating his claims about the dangers of impending climate change. A British High Court judge took his film, An Inconvenient Truth, to task over nine significant errors. The film was labelled alarmist and one-sided.

Now we have another high-flying climate change warrior, no less than Sir Nicholas Stern, under similar attack for his 2006 review on global warming's exaggerated claims by another high-ranking critic, Australia's Productivity Commission. The nub of the commission's problem: Stern's claim that global warming will cost anywhere between 5 and 20 per cent of GDP is ``as much an exercise in advocacy as it is an economic analysis of climate change''. In other words, what the media refers to as a beat-up. Which, incidentally, is what earlier critics, enviro-economists Richard Tol and Robert Mendelsohn, said as well. And what other critics called biased and alarmist.