In an editorial on Saturday, the Weekend Australian defended the News Corp paper’s climate coverage in response to criticism that it had underplayed the bushfire crisis and chosen to highlight concerns about arsonists and hazard reduction rather than explain the climate change drivers of the horrendous season.

The editorial said: “In our coverage, the Australian’s journalists report facts about how to tackle bushfires and about how to deal with the impact of climate change. Second, we host debates reflecting the political division that exists in Australia about how to address climate change without destroying our economy.”

It said its coverage of the bushfires had been “wilfully and ineptly misrepresented by the New York Times and Guardian Australia as climate denial”.

The Australian newspaper’s editorials, like its news stories, accept the basic premise that humans cause climate change and that action should be taken. The newspaper also covers diligently the news around the climate policy debate and the implications of climate change for business.

But its defence of its bushfire coverage ignores its prolonged willingness to expose readers to a regular diet of misrepresentations on climate change science on its opinion page, as well as outright denial of the breadth of science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

In November, as the bushfire crisis was unfolding, News Corp’s executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, told his annual general meeting: “There are no climate change deniers around, I can assure you.”

The next day the Australian ran a column from the mining industry figure and geologist Prof Ian Plimer, who wrote: “It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.”

The organisation Climate Feedback asks climate scientists to fact-check articles and opinion columns.

Like three previous Plimer columns, the group gave the article its lowest rank for scientific credibility, saying it was “a mixture of misdirection, misleading claims and outright falsehoods”.

Last month, two days after the Bureau of Meteorology declared that 17 December 2019 had been Australia’s hottest day on record, the Australian published a story quoting a long-time critic and climate science “sceptic” questioning the bureau’s methodology.

The story quoted “climate scientist” Dr Jennifer Marohasy but did not mention that Marohasy works at the Institute of Public Affairs, a Melbourne thinktank heavily financed by the mining billionaire Gina Rinehart and known for promoting climate science denial.

The story reported Marohasy’s criticisms of a widely used technique known as homogenisation that corrects for known errors in data, even though the data used to calculate the hottest day record is not homogenised.

The Australian has a long history in this space.

There have been lots (understatement alert) examples of climate science denial at The Australian over the years. I have written about lots of them. A thread. — Graham Readfearn (@readfearn) January 11, 2020

In 2009 it published a column that dismissed climate science as a “fraud” pushed by “warmaholics”.

In response, an exasperated Dr Michael Coughlan, then chief climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said: “The Australian clearly has an editorial policy.

“No matter how many times the scientific community refutes these arguments, they persist in putting them out – to the point where we believe there’s little to be gained in the use of our time in responding.”

In 2013 a study of News Corp’s coverage of climate change found it was a dominant voice in the country’s media on the subject. The Australian wrote more on it than any other outlet, and almost half its comment pieces expressed doubt about the science, including 100% of seven editorials analysed. Only 18% of news stories expressed doubt, the study said.

In 2013 the newspaper ran a front page story with the headline “Sea rise ‘not linked to warming’ ”, based on a study which it later admitted it had “misinterpreted”.

The same year it ran a news story claiming that “experts” were worried about a coming ice age. The article relied on five-year-old quotes lifted from a blog by a group that has claimed carbon dioxide is a “coolant” and not a greenhouse gas.

The Australian has also published stories sympathetic to claims that wind turbines make people sick.

In 2012 the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against the newspaper after it ran an article by a British climate science denier, James Delingpole, in which he quoted an anonymous sheep farmer who had compared the wind energy industry to a paedophile ring.

After the press council’s judgment, Delingpole returned in the Australian to say he stood by “every word” of his story “especially the bit about paedophiles”.

One of the Australian’s most flagrant and regular deniers has been Maurice Newman, the former ABC chairman and adviser to Tony Abbott who believes climate scientists are part of a global socialist plot.

“The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,” Newman has written.

On checking one column, a scientist Newman had quoted to back his argument that global cooling was on the way said the claims were “scientifically ludicrous”. As recently as last week Newman referred to “the media left, Hollywood and the rest of the global warming cult”, comparing them to “ancient druids”.

Even while covering the topic of hazard reduction, the Australian has turned to climate science deniers.

On New Year’s Eve it ran an opinion column by Viv Forbes that advocated a revival of traditional fire management techniques, while blaming the intensity of the fires on a lack of hazard reduction and the creation of national parks.

The column did not mention climate change.

Forbes spent more than 40 years in the coal industry – a connection not disclosed in the column – and leads a project against the Paris climate agreement that says fossil fuel emissions are not changing the climate, and that increasing concentrations of CO2 are “improving the environment, not harming it”.