Doomed Planet

Their ‘Truth’ is the Agenda, Facts go Hang

I was searching around to find instances where the masterminds who make up the green-left had suggested, in their usual loopy manner, that climate inaction by the previous government had caused bushfires and floods. Instead, I happened on an open letter to Tanya Plibersek from the Climate Council, dated August 31 of last year. Risible at one level. At another, it’s yet another demonstration of the tendentious codswallop which has apparently won the battle of ideas in the infantile and destructive age within which we are now doomed to live.

The Climate Council arose out of the ashes of the Climate Commission, which Tony Abbot sensibly disbanded in 2013 as a superfluous blight on sane debate. Apparently, crowd funding helped to give the old commissioners, or whatever they called themselves, a continued gig. Unlike old soldiers, old climateers refuse to do us a favour and fade away.

The Climate Council councillors are not self-effacing, as I will show. Neither is the Council. Wikipedia describes it as, “Australia’s leading climate change communications non-profit organisation formed to provide independent, authoritative information on climate change and its solutions to the Australian public.” And I look like Brad Pitt.

Next to the Council’s fanciful vision “that by 2025 Australia’s emissions are on a steep downward trajectory with projects and policies in place to see us cut emissions by 75% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2035.” Let me repeat that, so that its absurdity can be savoured, net-zero in twelve years’ time. By the way, forgot to mention, Professor – even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams – Tim Flannery is Chief Councillor. First among equal climate catastropharians, as it were.

To the letter, signed by Flannery and another 81 (on my count) others. It reminds me of Einstein’s retort about the book, One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, published in 1931. When asked to comment, Einstein reportedly replied to the effect that to defeat the theory of relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact. One fact, you’ll notice. Not a factoid. Not a tendentious proposition masquerading as a fact.

The 82 scientists who assert nothing less in their letter than they are “pre-eminent” (i.e., surpassing all others), also assert that their research is founded on “expert analysis, data and rigorous examination of the facts.” Really? Facts and the 82 are not in the same ballpark.

It’s the same tired old deceptions. “Megafires, ocean heatwaves and acidification, extensive coral bleaching, drought, and extreme rainfall and flooding,” are cited as “the scientifically predicted impacts of climate change across the country.” I don’t want to talk about oceans becoming less alkaline, it’s beyond my pay grade. But this chapter, from an IPA publication, by Dr John Abbot and Dr Jennifer Marohasy, injects a much needed balanced scientific and historical perspective into the ocean of hyperbole surrounding the misleading term ‘acidification’. In general, it can be safely said, there has been no recent extreme weather-related event that has not been bettered, or should I say worsted, in the past; well before climate change was a gleam in Maurice Strong’s eye.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Well, no, it isn’t. Extreme rainfall and flooding, we are told, is a scientifically predicted impact of climate change. Yet in 2007, the then Australian of the Year told us that even the rain which falls wouldn’t fill the dams. Bit of a contradiction there. Don’t you think? You may recall Dr David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, being equally prescient when predicting in 2000 that within a few years “children [in the UK] just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Apropos the Daily Mirror on December 12, 2022: “Everywhere it’s snowing in the UK right now as wintry blast blankets Britain.” Why, why does anyone listen to these people?

Chris Kenny does a good job of putting recent extreme weather events in historical perspective. Here he is in December commenting on the Prime Minister invoking climate change to explain the floods when visiting the Riverland region in South Australia.

The river flow levels are yet to reach the levels seen almost 50 years ago in 1974, still a long way short of the massive flood of 1956 – that was 66 years ago – or the big 1931 flood of nearly a century ago. Yet the Prime Minister turns history and these facts on their head to pretend this proves things are now more extreme than they used to be.

As are the 82. As do all whose ‘truth’ is formed not by facts but by their climate agenda. Query: if they are right why do they have to make things up?

A bit of potted history on floods and droughts. From The Maitland Daily Mercury dated June 18, 1930:

Flood waters sweep over farms and pastoral lands. Lower Hunter devastated. Worst disaster in places since 1893. Vast inland seas of water. Many people driven from their homes. Farmers lose heavily.

From the National Museum Australia. On June 24, 1852,

…a catastrophic flood swept through the New South Wales town of Gundagai … The disaster is still the deadliest flood in Australia’s recorded history.

How about droughts? Again, from the National Museum:

The Federation Drought from 1895 to 1903 was the worst in Australia’s history, if measured by the enormous stock losses it caused… South-Eastern Australia experienced 27 drought years between 1788 and 1860, and at least 10 major droughts between 1860 and 2000.

How about the reference in the open letter to megafires? Sheer humbug. Here’s Lomborg on the 2019-20 (mega) fires: “Fires burned 10% of Australia’s land surface on average every year in 20th century… this century 6% [and in] 2019-20 [less than] 4%.”

How about cyclones? Here you’ll find a graph I constructed for a blog on another site. This shows a downward trend in the number of cyclones in the Australian region since 1971. And the number of severe hurricanes north of the equator has fallen too. How about that bottomless sink, forever sucking in taxpayers’ money for so-called research, the Great Barrier Reef? Never been healthier. I’ll end there.  However best to realise: the fact is, facts don’t matter anymore.

To the Climate Council and its ilk; to the Greens, the Teals and to leftists generally, it’s their agenda that matters. And their agenda has swept all before it; all but buried the truth. It’s a waste of time setting out facts. Chris Kenny and Bjorn Lomborg might as well howl at the moon. Still, gotta keep howling.

 

ON JANUARY 2 my local newsagent RAN out of copies of The Australian. I wanted to sip my coffee and read my paper in the nearby café so, in desperation, bought a Sydney Morning Herald rather than go farther afield. Inside was one of those flashbacks; this time to 1956. “Fifty houses at Kurnell are in danger of toppling into the sea,” it read:

Huge seas at the weekend, for the second time in seven months, tore away sections of the seafront. One hundred yard long sections of Prince Charles Parade have fallen into the water and the seas have reached the front fences of some homes.

Mr Ted O’Connor of Prince Charles Parade, said, people in scores of homes in this street are living in fear of each heavy sea.” And all of this without a mere mention of climate change?

Can you imagine anything like that happening now without it being pimped as rising sea levels caused by climate change? Anti-science mendacity now dominates the public square; not to forget, aided and abetted in the past three years by tyrannical COVID hysteria.

Can someone please explain why the times in which we live can’t be fittingly labelled as a resurgent Dark Age?

25 thoughts on “Their ‘Truth’ is the Agenda, Facts go Hang

  • Botswana O'Hooligan says:

    Why did that great man, that nice Mr. Professor Flannery man and small mammal expert(?) buy a property on the shores of the Hawkesbury River and not a tree house in Katoomba when he forecast among other things that the sea level would rise by 30 metres, rain wouldn’t fill the dams, the ice would melt, and it was useless fleeing for the hills, Perth would be a desert, and goodness knows what. The reality of it all is that the various governments have heeded the advice of these people and that, Mr Smith, tells us about the calibre of our elected representatives and also tells us about the calibre of the people who elected them.

  • Daffy says:

    Part of the game these guys play is to pretend that, because ‘climate’ is arbitrarily defined, as I understand, as the average of the previous 30 years, then we only need to plot weather parameters for the past 30 years. Thus most are misled to panic. However, if one examines plots that extend back over 100 or more years, it is clearly that the ups and downs of weather since the little ice age are, 1. decoupled from CO2 atmospheric concentrations, and 2. the past was generally much worse than the present. But that would send the wrong message and the rent-seeking grifters (only slightly the wrong word) would be out of business.

  • padraic says:

    Why is it accepted that the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 impacted the weather by making it cooler than usual but the under water eruption last January in Tonga near Ha’apai has no effect??? Apparently the Tonga eruption was just as powerful as Krakatoa but being under water the amount of ash that reached the mesosphere and circulated the globe was not as much as with Krakatoa. Nevertheless volcanic gases and large amounts of water vapour did encircle the globe, so you’d think that such an event would impact our weather. “Global Warming” has been replaced by “Climate Change” which means whenever the weather changes it can fit in with the catastrophism of this new religion.

  • Michael says:

    “The Left’s dependence on catastrophism can’t be overstated. Without some looming or present catastrophe to use as a pretext for their interventionist schemes, leftists would have nothing.”

    Michael Rectenwald.

  • Michael says:

    There is no climate emergency. Elites have declared war on us and use climate and other pretences as a justification.

    • mrsfarley2001 says:

      Nup – and there was no COVID emergency either. Swimming in a sea of lies #2 = massive floods in the Kimberley region of WA – so here comes Elbow, jetting in to lecture us about climate catastrophe. I can’t wait. Should one move to Prince Charles Parade? Nah: have to cop the idiotic pet peeves of Harry Pot-head. And, I hear, there’s a re-make of “Mother & Son” in the TV pipeline, complete with colour-blind casting.
      What a world.

  • STD says:

    8/1/2023 Jan 11.26am
    Peter,
    I think comrade in babe’s arms Timme, needs a capitalist base ball cap for the length of his nose,and perhaps some hirudoid crème to obscure the swelling and colour on the inflammation front ( a warming – commonly thought of as porky pie syndrome or for those who embellish themselves with nuance, an allergic reaction to inner sense.

  • ianl says:

    Although I’ve used the phrase “howling at the moon” here earlier several times, I’ve nuanced it my own view of the world to “howling in the moonlight”. This seems somehow so much more pointless and alone.

    If one wishes to understand the source of this despair, simply review the last 20 years of current German history. Absolutely nothing deters these ideologues – nothing whatsoever.

  • Davidovich says:

    These zealots are useful idiots, as Lenin would say, but the real agenda is not to save the planet from catastrophic climate change but to bring about world government. This is not a conspiracy theory as the movers and shakers at the top are quite brazen in stating that is the intent. Christiana Figueres (Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2016 stated:
    “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”

    • STD says:

      Yes, and once they have total control of once what was known as free enterprise, we will have centralised bureaucratic corporate monopolies running every living inch of our lives.
      A bit like Coles and Woolies employing the consumer who buys the goods to check themselves out- the perfect paradigm of productivity, no cost – a con.
      And how about healthcare, big biz and gov will be telling us how to run our affairs- or else – for example the Marxist inspired communist Covid, gifted to the entire world to kick off the big reset.
      Oh and don’t hold your breath waiting for powerful apologies. They won’t be least bit sorry but I guarantee the rest of us will live to see the day where we will regret being born.

      • Rebekah Meredith says:

        January 9, 2023
        For now, we can at least refuse to use the self-checks at Coles and Woolies–even when that means waiting out a line to buy one thing, because my local Woolies has removed its quick-checkouts (to put in more self-checkouts, of course). For the record, this mad decision was not the choice of the shop, itself. Shortly after the change was made, the shop briefly reopened a quick-check line. When my dad asked them why they had closed it, he was told that someone had “turned us in”–whatever exactly that meant. Surprise, surprise, some high-ups in an office, who probably never deal with customers, think that they know better than the workers who actually know their clientele. The line that the shop tried to use as a quick-check is, instead, some kind of a click-and-collect, or some such nonsense–and our family has seen it used less than a handful of times in the months it has been open. The amount of times that just OUR family would have used it, had it been a quick-check, would be more than that; and we’re certainly not the only ones.

      • john mac says:

        Too true , STD , and I would add the greatest threat to our freedom , the “Cashless Society” . Wherever I go , I try to pay cash especially at small businesses , often get a surprised look from the cashier and proceed to tell them of the perils of said “Society” . Convenience , like “safety” trumps freedom and we know where that ends !

  • Brenden T Walters says:

    I don’t know about ‘regret being born’ STD but some people are so afraid of dying that they willingly take a vaccine that, arguably, has injured and possibly and killed people.

  • hartpaul says:

    Came across a video on youtube from Dr Ed Robson which lists predictions of arctic being ice free by
    2000
    2004
    2013
    2014/2015
    and 2016 all of course failed.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftmkgsrfDNs
    and it showed a site where lists of failed predictions on arctic ice and other predictions have failed.
    https://extinctionclock.org/

  • lbloveday says:

    “I have no fear of death, it brings no sorrow” – Roger Whittaker’s words have ever resonated with me.

  • Alice Thermopolis says:

    PS: Can someone please explain why the times in which we live can’t be fittingly labelled as a resurgent Dark Age?

    Agreed. Driven by the rise of pseudoscience in all its forms, the proliferation of utopian movements, the destruction of the West from within, the mad quest to control the “climate” of an entire planet, the monetization of a beneficial trace gas, the emergence of a bogus market in “carbon” credits an “independent” past Chief Scientist reassures us today is not corrupt. Not on your life, sir or madam. And so on and so forth. All swallowed hook line and stinker by the gullible in PS’s public square.

    As for Chief Councillor Flannery, who could have predicted the now sixty-seven-year-old mammalogist, palaeontologist, discoverer of the great monkey-faced bat (Pteralopex flanneryi) and environmental activist would appear as a guest of the Perth Writers Festival a decade ago? He spoke on the themes of “truth and fiction” and “science is the new art”.and launched his book, Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope?

    At the opening night party later, and after at least one glass of Watershed 2007 Shades shiraz merlot cabernet, Flannery was adamant that real climate scientists would never claim their models had genuine predictive power. When had he decided to use this subject in the discussion about truth and fiction? “I actually had no idea of what I was going to say when I reached the podium,” he replied. “But when I saw Julie Bishop in the third row, I thought it was a good time to tell her something about models.”

    Arthur Schopenhauer defined hope as “the confusion of desire for a thing with its probability”. The Flannery phenomenon illustrates another insight of the late German philosopher, one worth remembering at this strange-disposed time: “It is natural to believe true what we desire to be true, and to believe it because we desire it.”

    For the full book review, go to: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2011/04/mammoth-fantasies/

  • bomber49 says:

    Adelaide has a gilt edge desalination plant that cost much but much to maintain and has never been needed brought on by the hysteria created by Prof Flannery.

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