Frank McDonald, the environmental correspondent of the Irish Times, is a self-confident (some might say self-satisfied) journo who has succeeded in establishing a niche for himself as an expert. Long known for his blistering attacks on aesthetically crippled development projects (which often appeared–like the articles in Playboy–amidst reams of glossy hype in the paper’s property section), McDonald has, in recent years, found a comfortable seat on the climate-change bandwagon.

McDonald’s astute positioning brings to mind the recent controversial Channel 4 programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Although many of that programme’s arguments were dubious, its contention that a substantial number of people now owe their living to extolling the threats of climate change seems difficult to refute. For example, take a gander at that the “Who is Who in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” PDF to get a rough idea at the burgeoning bureaucracy devoted to the issue. And, like camp followers, squadrons of journalists are dispatched to the IPCC’s latest caravanserai as working groups and task forces convene from across the globe. McDonald, for example, is now reporting from Bangkok, having recently issued similar dire dispatches from Paris and Nairobi. The IPCC’s listing of activities indicates that diligent journalists could clock up thousands of air miles attending upcoming confabs at La Reunion, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Spain, and Japan. In the process of saving the earth, thousands of more tonnes of CO2 will be syringed into the earth’s atmosphere.

A recent febrile headline decorating one of McDonald’s most recent reports announced “We must act on climate chaos now.”

Well, one small step might be to stop jetting off to the other side of the world to attend IPCC shindigs. And can’t they use WebEx or whatever for these things?