No evidence of ‘global warming’ in droughts

THE drought in New South Wales has been terrible, and here they come – flap, flap, flap – the global warming vultures to feed on the disaster.

Sadly, the Chief Vulture is our Prime Minister, frightening farmers with wild cries that this drought is just the start of the global warming hell to come.

“I think everyone agrees that we’re seeing rainfall that is, if you like, more erratic, droughts that are more frequent,” Malcolm Turnbull warned on Monday.

Flapping behind him was Kevin Rudd, who seemed upset that Turnbull was first to this feast.

“So Turnbull recognises the drought is influenced by climate change. Hold the phone!” screeched Rudd, who had as a Labor Prime Minister called global warming “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Rudd now pecked at Turnbull: “The world burns while Turnbull remains captive to the mad right and Murdoch the climate change denier. Put a price on carbon and lead global climate action.”

Joining Turnbull’s kettle of vultures was the Climate Council of Professor Tim Flannery, famous for his dud prediction in 2007 that “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams and our river systems”.

Now Flannery’s council cawed that “climate change [is] contributing to extreme weather events including record temperatures and low rainfall, hitting the Australian agriculture sector hard.”

How often we see this – warmist ideologues feasting on a natural disaster, adding to the fear when people are at their most vulnerable.

And how often we’ve seen tellers of the reassuring truth cried down.

This time it was Agriculture Minister David Littleproud who was jeered by the audience of the ABC’s Q&A show when he dismissed as a “big call” host Tony Jones’s suggestion that “man-made climate change is causing droughts like the one we’re seeing now”.

Yet the evidence is that Littleproud is right and those vultures flapping above the dusty paddocks of NSW are full of untruths.

This drought in fact seems like many past droughts – and Turnbull, Rudd and Flannery are just spreading needless fear, guided more by their warming faith than by science.

(Aren’t the Liberals embarrassed to have Turnbull, their leader, perched on the same branch as Rudd and Flannery?)

But those of you interested in science and evidence should check the records of NSW rainfall over the past century on the Bureau of Meteorology’s website.

As you’ll see, the first half of the century had many more dry spells than now. There is no evidence of global warming giving us more droughts.

In fact, look at the bureau’s record of rainfall in Australia generally. It seems we are getting more rain, not less, in complete contradiction to what Flannery once predicted.

Indeed, the bureau last year agreed that “nationally-averaged rainfall was 8 per cent above average”, and the Turnbull Government-funded National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility admitted that “in eastern Australia … up to around 2030, natural variability is expected to dominate over any [rainfall] trend due to global warming”.

In other words, before this drought, even the usual global warming suspects wouldn’t claim you could see evidence of global warming in NSW’s rainfall. Yet now Turnbull can see it in a single drought.

And a further thing. Yes, this drought in NSW and parts of Queensland has hit Australia’s total grain harvest over the past year. But our wheat harvests over the past decade have been consistently well above the average for the past 60.

If there is man-made global warming, it is giving us more rain, not less, and bigger harvests, not smaller. What’s true of Australia seems also true of the world. World grain crops have set records over the past decade, and the most recent summary of the United Nations’ Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change concedes “there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought”.

So: yes, we have a bad drought in one state, and farmers there are really suffering. But welcome to Australia, this land of “droughts and flooding rains”. Welcome to NSW, whose terrible droughts in the 1940s should be remembered still through the iconic paintings Russell Drysdale gave us then of the skeletal roots of dead trees.

We’ll get through this drought, like we have so many before. Governments are pitching in to help the farmers with cash, loans and aid.

More may be needed, but one thing we don’t need are global warming vultures spreading not comfort but fear. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights