Predictions of climate disasters a lot of hot air
The below comes from the Climate Council.
“We all deserve somewhere safe to call home. Yet Australia’s summers are getting hotter and more dangerous.
“Extreme heat is one of the most direct consequences of climate pollution. It is also one of the most harmful, with more Australians dying as a result of heatwaves since 1890 than from floods, bushfires and all other climate-fuelled disasters combined. Extreme heat harms our health, our livelihoods and our economy.
“But there is good news! We can significantly reduce this harm by taking the necessary action to cut climate pollution this decade. We still have time to course-correct and get us on a safer path but we need to act urgently. The choices made this decade will substantially shape the kind of world our kids and grandkids inherit.”
So if Australians make the right choices today they can expect cooler days and nights tomorrow. What’s to lose?
This Climate Council boasts Professor Tim Flannery as chief councillor and includes “some of Australia’s leading climate scientists, energy, health and policy experts”.
This is the Tim Flannery who won notoriety for his many apocalyptic, but shamelessly unscientific, global warming predictions.
Like his 2006 opinion piece for The Age, headed “Climate’s last chance”, in which he asked readers to “Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof”.
With Australia’s sea levels rising by about 10mm a year, his rational readers would have concluded it would take thousands of years for his prophecy to be fulfilled.
In 2004, Prof Flannery predicted “Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis”, and the following year he said that Sydney could run out of water in as little as two years.
Then, in 2013, Prof Flannery asked us to “imagine a world five years from now, when there is no more ice over the Arctic”. Last January Arctic sea ice climbed to a 21-year high, its 24thhighest level in the 45-year modern satellite record.
Clearly, when fear is the objective, facts are inconvenient. Like the Climate Council now arguing that more Australians are dying as a result of heatwaves than from floods, bushfires and all other climate-fuelled disasters. This ignores the reality that extreme cold is by far the greatest climate-related killer. It’s why extreme cold is disingenuously defined as weather, not climate.
In a move that may lift its standing, the Climate Council has appointed Reserve Bank director Carol Schwartz AO as chair.
Her family company, Trawalla Group, has committed $100m to investments in carbon reduction initiatives, with millions more to advocate for policy and regulatory change. Trawalla Group “expects a full commercial return on its investments”.
Ms Schwartz wants Australia to become “a renewable energy superpower and to keep influential voices and human stories at the forefront of the climate conversation”.
The Climate Council’s advocacy aligns closely with Ms Schwartz’s aspirations.
Another factor conveniently ignored in the race to “cut climate pollution” is the reality that China’s contribution to global emissions is greater than all developed nations combined.
Notwithstanding, and while they generate a declining 1 per cent of total global emissions, Australians are being told that by accepting further cuts in living standards, they will limit the number of extremely hot days and warm nights.
This is a preposterous proposition and Australians are becoming aware that no matter how much is poured into billionaires’ pockets, it will never be enough. Indeed, on a per capita basis, Australia is already deploying wind and solar energy 10 times faster than the rest of the world.
And while becoming a “renewable energy superpower” sounds appealing, particularly if your investments depend on it, the resulting asset misallocations and institutional rigidities would destroy productivity and jobs. Australia’s remaining manufacturing industry, agriculture and certain mining industries would be particularly threatened.
But like the boy who cried wolf, the time is coming when some journalists, climate catastrophists and renewable energy promoters will have lost all credibility.