So the Washington Post reports that bin Laden is still furious about the U.S. causing global warming.

Al Jazeera, which originally broke the communiqué story, did so with a headline drawn from the Tiger Beat school of style: "Obama deplores climate change". AJ writes, "In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations."

Oh, dear. We're still on that kick again, one I think even the Post has dropped.

In 2002 Obama similarly parroted the Western media rant fashionable at the time that we "refuse[d] to sign the Kyoto agreement ", four years after Clinton signed it. Even the New York Times issued a correction, in November 2006.

Indeed the Post notes that "Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic." OK. So he's losing it. At least he didn't invoke Haiti.



But then the Post loses me, with "The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants." I can think of at least two things wrong with this analysis, and will just address the second one, that bin Laden apparently hasn't seen the latest polls indicating there may be better wagon to which one ought hitch his star.

So, in sum, bin Laden has found common ground with Obama's State of the Union speech, in part, accepting what Obama claimed is "the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change" -- a material slip-up betraying ignorance, incidentally; the artful advocate sticks with "consensus, which is about prophesying, not "evidence" which is about observations and which is easily checked.

Bin Laden is just not so sold on the "green jobs" rhetoric. As the Post writes, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring the wheels of the American economy' to a halt."

Hey, even busted clocks get the odd point right. The big problem I return to is that bin Laden and the fundamentalists among the green movement share more than just global warming fervor and rhetoric. They seem to share an objective.