Facts always beat insults
GLOBAL warmists are turning vicious. Now guru Tim Flannery likens me to a paedophile. Has Flannery, our former Chief Climate Commissioner and now a professorial fellow at Melbourne University, become unhinged?
For me, his outburst confirms that Flannery represents the death of reason.
In the taxpayer-funded Conversation, Flannery claims that man-made global warming and dwindling resources may wipe out most of the Earth’s nearly eight billion people.
“British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people,” he writes. “Mass deaths are predicted.”
That’s typically Flannery. In fact, Lovelock later admitted he was too “alarmist” and Flannery was, too: “We don’t know what the climate is doing.”
But Flannery, undaunted, rages over the slaughter he imagines is coming: “The climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.
“My children … will probably live to be part of that grim winnowing – a world that the Alan Joneses and Andrew Bolts of the world have laboured so hard to create.”
Then a third suggestion that I’m a child abuser: “They are threatening my children’s wellbeing as much as anyone who might seek to harm a child.”
How low can Flannery go? If I thought there was the slightest chance of our emissions killing my children, I’d work day and night to cut them.
But I don’t think they’re at all threatened by global warming. What really threatens them is the monstrous, self-righteous unreason that Flannery represents.
In 2004, Flannery, actually a mammal expert, said manmade warming would cause such droughts that “there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis”.
Yet Perth is flourishing and Professor Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, says “as far as the climate scientists know, there is no link between climate change and drought.”
In 2009, Flannery warned “this may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year”. Not even close.
In 2015, Flannery predicted more cyclones: “We’re more likely to see them more frequently in the future.” But the following year we had the fewest cyclones in decades and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees cyclones have become rarer.
In 2017, Flannery claimed global warming was drowning Pacific islands like Tuvalu and this was a “widespread phenomenon”. In fact, Tuvalu has grown by 2.9 per cent over four decades and Professor Paul Kench found 43 per cent of Pacific islands have also grown, and only 14 per cent have shrunk.
And now Flannery claims “global hunger has increased for the last three years because of extreme weather events”.
Really? In fact, the Food and Agricultural Organisation reports that world grain crops have been at record levels for the past three years.
What an extraordinary record of false claims, yet Flannery is still treated as an oracle by the Conversation, the ABC and Melbourne University.
But the worst of it is that this false prophet has cost Australians so much.
In 2007, Flannery falsely claimed our dams would run dry: “Even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams and our river systems.”
He added: “In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.”
State Labor governments freaked and raced to build desalination plants not just for those cities, but Melbourne, too.
The cost was massive – some $12 billion. But this was another Flannery fail: the rain kept falling and those desal plants were essentially mothballed. What a waste.
Here’s another example of the cost of Flannery’s flummery. Flannery also urged us to scrap our reliable coalfired electricity plants and use more geothermal power instead.
“There are hot rocks (underground) in South Australia that potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run Australia’s economy for the best part of a century,” he said.
“The technology to extract that energy and turn it into electricity is relatively straightforward.”
The Rudd government believed him and gave a $90 million grant to a geothermal plant in which Flannery was a shareholder.
Yet another Flannery fail. The plant was a technological nightmare and was scrapped.
So how should I describe Tim Flannery, who misquotes experts, misstates science, makes dud predictions, urges us to waste billions of dollars and scares children with absurd claims of “mass deaths”?
I won’t do a Flannery and call him a “predator”. I’ll stick to the facts.
The man is a crank. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights