Piers Akerman: Crystal ball for climate change is cracked

The cracked climate catastrophe crystal ball was on display again at the UN’s Glasgow COP26 gabfest, writes Piers Akerman.

As COP26 wound down, there were flood warnings out for NSW’s Lachlan River, providing even further proof – if any was needed – that the global warmists’ catastrophic predictions are unscientific humbug.

The heavy rainfalls recorded in areas of South Australia, Victoria and NSW over the past fortnight totally undermine former Australian of the Year and Climate Council chief Tim Flannery’s 2005 predictions that drought conditions would become “permanent in eastern Australia” and that “the rain that comes won’t fill our dams”.

On Saturday, WaterNSW’s website showed Sydney’s main dam, Warragamba, was filled to 97.8 per cent of capacity and the dams in the greater Sydney catchment were at 94.6 per cent.

The palaeontologist is still regarded as something of a guru by the unthinking fully paid-up members of the climate cult however, and he and the left-wing Climate Council are go-to commentators on the COP talks for the ABC and the Nine media.

Climate Council chief Tim Flannery. Picture: AAP

Last month, Peter FitzSimons, ignored the evidence and asked Flannery whether he felt “tragically vindicated”.

“Most sensible people will now concede you were right on warning of the dangers of climate change and the denialists were wrong” said the author, best known for the red bandana he used to wear to distinguish himself from the rest of the bizarrely garbed activists.

In reality, no sensible person could concede that any of Flannery’s doomsday predictions about climate change had any validity.

Glasgow’s COP26 brought out the false prophets by the thousands and the Nine media and “our” ABC couldn’t get enough of them.

Outgoing Radio National activist Fran Kelly conducted a long and sympathetic interview with Simon Kofe, Tuvalu’s foreign minister, who had presented a video address to the Glasgow gabfest from a podium where he stood knee-deep in the waters of the Pacific.

Promoting the notion that Tuvalu is sinking because of global warming has been a constant theme of the Pacific nations’ attempts to blackmail the West to send more cash to their leaders, even though the ABC’s own (rarely used) fact-check department found in December 2018 that Tuvalu’s total land area grew by 2.9 per cent in the four decades to 2014.

Kelly didn’t mention her own organisation’s findings during her sharing-caring luvvy discussion.

Instead, she focused on how much money would be needed to bail out Tuvalu in the (unlikely) event its islands sank.

Like Flannery, Kelly is long on doom but short on facts and the default position of both and all in the global warming activists’ camp is to demand that Western nations suspend the powerhouses of their economies – the coal and gas-fired plants – and inflict brutally high prices for unreliable solar and wind energy on their citizens.

China, meanwhile, is building more coal-fired plants to power manufacturing, outsourced from the West because energy prices have made it too expensive, to build things in nations that have drunk the green Kool-Aid.

Activists ignore the science which shows that CO2, which is demonised, makes up 0.04 per cent by volume of the atmosphere and 95 per cent of it comes from natural sources, such as volcanoes and the oceans.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison arrived at COP26 with a 2050 net-zero emissions target. Picture: AFP

Humans – whom the Extinction Rebellion mob would like to see become extinct – are responsible for about 0.0016 per cent.

If anyone at COP26 pointed out that the Canary Islands’ Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma has been spewing the usual toxic gases and some CO2 for six weeks, the comment must have been lost in the screaming from the ill-educated schoolchildren shrieking their support for Greta Thunberg.

Not only was COP26 a flop like the previous 25 COPs, even the “big” story such as the soft US-China accord was not much more than a recycling of the Obama-Xi deal to ratify the Paris Agreement five years ago.

But what the heck, COP27 will be held at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort next year, an altogether more pleasant place than Glasgow and COP28 is scheduled to take place in the UAE (not such a great place).

So, fuel up the private jets, ramp up the rhetoric and strap yourselves in for more crap from the world masters – the global warming catastrophists.