"We've already established that..."

There's an old story, variously attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, involving a dinner party and female diner. The male asks whether the woman would sleep with him for a million pounds and is told, "yes." He then asks if she would sleep with him for five pounds, and gets an indignant "what kind of woman do you think I am?" And responds, "we have already established what kind of woman you are - now we are haggling about the price."

Well, now we've established, once and for all, what the "independent" news media is:

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted...

And the price is cheap. They may actually be paying for it...