Osama's help not wanted

It's been a tough couple of months on the public-relations front for people who cite the menace of climate change as an argument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Flaws in scientific data used to make the case for global warming have been revealed. So have bipartisan spending excesses by members of Congress who attended the U.S. climate change conference last month in Copenhagen, where it was quite cold.

And though Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election and a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, he can be both an overbearing know-it-all and a blatant exaggerator as the poster boy for climate change.

Yet now comes an even worse P.R. debacle: The newest global celebrity sounding the global warming warning apparently is Osama bin Laden.

In an audiotape on Al Jazeera's English-language Web site, a man who seems to be bin Laden decried the lack of an effective international accord on emissions reduction: "Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality. All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis."

He even hailed some typically anti-American observations from wildly left-wing MIT Professor Noam Chomsky: "Chomsky was right when he pointed to a resemblance between American policies and the approach of mafia gangs. Those are the real terrorists."

And there are real reasons to be wary of greenhouse gas emissions' impact on our planet's climate.

But taking Osama bin Laden's advice is not one of them.