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 quoted John Houghton, 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 …