AS THE panic ends, check out the shocking price we’ve paid by treating global warming scaremongers like Tim Flannery as our gurus.
Listening to these preachers cost us billions. In fact, we’re still paying the bills — just as some climate scientists are waking up to themselves and saying, “whoops”.
Haven’t you heard? It turns out the science was not settled, after all, and sceptics were right to laugh at Flannery (pictured) and his richly paid **ble of Chicken Littles.
A landmark paper by warmist scientists in Nature Geoscience now concedes the world has indeed not warmed as predicted, thanks to a slowdown in the first 15 years of this century. One of its authors, Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admits his past predictions of runaway warming were too alarmist.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. We are in a better place than I thought.”
Another author, Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford, confessed that too many of the mathematical models used by climate scientists to predict future warming “were on the hot side” — meaning they exaggerated.
“We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”
That is actually not news to sceptics. Dr Roy Spencer, who runs one of the four main measurements of world temperature from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has pointed it out for years, but most journalists ignored him. Likewise, they’ve largely ignored that the predicted climate catastrophes have not happened, either.
We have had not more cyclones but fewer; not less rain in Australia but more; not fewer polar bears but more; and not worse crops but record ones, here and overseas.
So why have we wasted a fortune to cut the emissions we now learn aren’t actually causing a warming catastrophe — or certainly not as fast as first said? Why do we have horrendously expensive and mothballed desalination plants in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, still waiting for the drought we were told would be permanent?
Why have we also destroyed our cheap and reliable electricity system, replacing “dirty” coal-fired generators with so much dodgy wind and solar power that we now face blackouts and world-record prices?
True, it’s not all Flannery’s fault. It obviously takes more than one panic merchant to create such mayhem. But Flannery’s career should stand as a reproach to us all, particularly to hypsters who promoted him — the ABC, above all — and to the sheep who believed him.
Flannery is the mammologist who somehow emerged as our high priest of global warming, warning of Armageddon unless we repented our sins against Mother Earth. Our emissions had caused the rains to fail, he proclaimed. Perth could become the world’s first “ghost metropolis”, he warned in 2004.
