Speaking at a Melbourne summit on the green economy, Australian National University Professor Will Steffen criticised the media for treating climate change science as a political issue in which two sides should be given a voice and called the coverage ‘almost infantile.’

A science advisor to the federal government and executive director of the university’s Climate Change Institute, Steffen argued that while there were uncertainties about the pace and impact of climate change, the core the science should be accepted with the same confidence as the laws of gravity and relativity, according to a report in The Age.

”It’s a no-brainer. If you go over the last couple of decades you see tens of thousands of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, and you have less than 10 that challenge the fundamentals – and they have been disproved,” Steffen is quoted as saying after an address at the Australian Davos Connection’s Future Summit.

”Right now, this almost infantile debate about whether ‘is it real or isn’t it real?’, it’s like saying, ‘Is the Earth round or is it flat?’ [Climate change] is a hugely important question and yet we are not having a rational discourse in the media in Australia on this question. That is my biggest frustration.”