We have reached peak stupidity

Andrew Bolt again right on the mark:
"How could Turnbull voters believe five such stupid warming claims, all at once?

Andrew BoltOCTOBER302015(6:20am)


Malcolm Turnbull will makes a big mistake if he takes his electorate as a measure of Australia - and if he thinks voters who’ve bought the warming gospel will actually welcome the consequences of the “fix” they support:
Six out of 10 voters in Malcolm Turnbull’s leafy inner-Sydney seat of Wentworth would back a global ban on new or expanded coal mines… Voters in the nearby seat of North Sydney have also registered their disapproval of coal as an energy source…
The finding in Wentworth reveals the particular character of the many well-to-do constituents of the country’s smallest and wealthiest seat in which voters remain welded to the Liberal Party but also tend to be socially progressive on issues such as same-sex marriage and asylum seeker treatment, and alive to the problem of global warming…
The two surveys were conducted by ReachTel for the Australia Institute with 694 electors of Wentworth polled on Wednesday evening and 679 electors in North Sydney the same night.
The rich can cope with explosion in power prices by getting rid of cheap coal-fired electricity. But for many workers in heavy industry it will mean their jobs. For the poor and pensioners it will mean limiting the heating in winter and the air conditioning in summer.
And for governments it will mean a huge drop in the revenue for schools, hospitals and pensions:
PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s new top scientist would punch a $100 billion hole in the national economy if his dream of phasing out fossil fuels came to fruition…
The liquefied natural gas industry is forecast to contribute $55 billion to GDP by 2020. Cumulative capital and operational expenditure within the LNG sector is set to grow 41 per cent to $363 billion by 2020, providing jobs and economic benefits across the eastern seaboard, including in rural and regional centres…
The coal industry contributed $43 billion to GDP in 2011-2012 — 3.1 per cent…
About 2 per cent of the nation’s energy needs are now produced from solar, while wind accounted for about 4 per cent and hydro-electricity 6 per cent.
It is astonishing that so many Australians have bought the kill-coal message.
They somehow believe the world is heating fast - when there’s actually been no significant warming of the atmosphere for some 17 years.
They somehow believe the world is heating dangerously - when crop harvests are generally increasing, cyclones numbers are stable or falling, 80 per cent of low-lying atoll islands aregrowing in size or stable.
They somehow believe that Australia spending many tens of billions of dollars to “stop” global warming will avert damage even more costly - when our crops are actually thriving with man’s extra emissions and the damage caused by warming is impossible to detect from insurance losses.
They somehow believe that cutting Australia’s emissions will make an important difference to the world’s temperatures, when our total emissions are just 1.3 per cent of the world’s total, and when reaching Labor and the Coalition’s shared target of 5 per cent cuts by 2020 will, by the most generous possible estimates of an IPCC expert, cut the world’s temperature by an unmeasurably small 0.0038 degrees by the end of the century.
They somehow believe that scrapping our own coal industry will cut total coal use, when in fact huge consumers such as China desperately need coal, have no intention of giving it upfor many decades to come and will simply use someone else’s if it can’t have ours. Japan, our biggest coal customer, is meanwhile building 48 new coal-fired power plants.
How could so many Australians have come to believe not just one of the above improbabilities, but all five?
The media, of course, bears a terrible responsibility. I mean, the propagandising, repetition of baseless scares and manipulation of misleading and cherrypicked statistics is so obvious that you wonder why some editors don’t shrivel with shame.
We have reached peak stupid."