HELL AND HIGH WATER ON ABC

ONCE you’d see some preacher on a street corner with a sandwich board: “Repent, for the end of the world is nigh.” Now such wild-eyed catastrophists are welcomed as oracles on to the ABC. Take Avril HannahJones. You couldn’t get a more fashionable Uniting Church priest — female, avowed bisexual and a preacher of the Left’s new global-warming religion.

Last week, she was on the ABC’s The Drum, frocked up in priests’ robes to preach to the electors in Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat of Wentworth.

Repent, she urged. Send the Morrison Government a signal in next Saturday’s by-election because “we as the population would really like the government to do something about this before we all drown or melt”.

Or take Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins, from Woollahra’s Emanuel Synagogue, smack-bang in Wentworth. Kamins, too, is the kind of cleric preferred by those weak in the old faiths. He’s a Californian Leftist who held our first Jewish same-sex marriage ceremony, and likewise preaches the warming faith.

He also urged Wentworth voters to save the planet: “In light of the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showing the urgency of the climate situation, people need to vote to protect creation.”

Oh, dear. Why are so many salvation seekers so blinded by this new cult?

Why are they so quick to believe the worst garbage of last week’s IPCC report, which urged us to save the planet by eating less meat and banning coal?

If only the priests and rabbis of global warming read this report, they’d see very good reasons to doubt we face warming doom.

Go back a decade. Remember Al Gore in his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, claiming we faced a “planetary emergency” in which “hurricanes are getting stronger due to global warming”? Remember Tim Flannery, appointed our chief climate commissioner, claiming that “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams and our river systems”?

But the IPCC now admits we’re instead getting fewer cyclones, and not bigger ones: “Numerous studies … have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy.” As for Flannery’s old scare, the IPCC admits it has “low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at global scale”.

Then there are the dud predictions the IPCC has stopped mentioning at all. It once warned that polar bears faced “increasing risks of extinction” as the ice melted away, but there’s no mention of bears this time.

No wonder. The polar ice is still there, and bear populations are growing.

Yet there’s Avril Hannah-Jones, fretting we will “all drown or melt”, so let me reassure her we’re not getting a second Noah’s flood.

See, another thing this IPCC report failed to mention is that the definitive research on sea level rises at low-lying Pacific atoll islands — by Professor Paul Kench — found that 43 per cent of such islands were growing, and only 16 per cent shrinking.

Nor will we all “melt”. The world was warmer in Roman times and people thrived. And world grain crops in the past decade kept setting records.

But the worst con in this IPCC report comes right at its start: “Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1C of global warming above pre-industrial levels …

“Global warming is likely to reach 1.5C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.”

Wait. This is the first time the IPCC claims that all the warming of the past century was caused by man’s gases, which allows it to then predict much more such warming as our emissions rise.

Yet just six years ago, the IPCC agreed that the big burst of warming before 1950 was caused not just by humans but natural factors, too: “It remains difficult to quantify the contribution to this warming from internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing.”

Here’s how the IPCC changed its story: by including only new studies which blame man for all the warming, and excluding those which don’t.

One paper it excluded was by a former IPCC co-ordinating lead author, Professor Gabriele Hegerl, who this year concluded that “natural variability also made a large contribution” to pre1950 warming.

That may explain why we’ve had almost no more warming this century, contrary to IPCC predictions. Global temperatures last September were just 0.14C above the 30-year average, according to NASA satellites.

So preachers on the ABC may warn of hellfire, but Armageddon seems as distant as ever.