Alan Jones: Extinction Rebellion activists are alarmists who thrive on scare campaigns
The Extinction Rebellion activists who buried their heads in the sand at Manly beach are the latest in a long line of alarmists who ignore facts in favour of scare campaigns, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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- Extinction Rebellion: Saints or serial pests?
- Climate protesters literally put their heads in the sand
I can’t say I was surprised when I read in The Sunday Telegraph last Sunday a story about these climate protesters as part of the Extinction Rebellion campaign, lined up at Sydney’s Manly beach with their heads literally buried in the sand.
There were 150 of them, singing and chanting about the death of mother Earth. What an appropriate metaphor, heads buried in the sand.
Of equivalent significance was a comment by one: “A lot of our group have become middle-class white people who are quite privileged. To be honest, activism is a privilege.”
The protester went on to add, “I’m on Centrelink”.
That’s the real privilege.
Their heads are buried in the sand at our expense. But, to be fair, they’re not the only ones.
David Attenborough, the documentary maker, used an interview with the ABC last month to slam Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his support of coal-fired power.
He said that our Prime Minister’s record on climate change was concerning. Mr Attenborough, so is yours.
In Attenborough’s most recent documentary known as Our Planet, there are images of walruses falling to their deaths off massive cliffs in northeast Russia.
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Of course, the documentary blames the deaths on global warming and the melting sea ice which, according to Attenborough, had ruined the walruses’ natural habitat and migration patterns.
Except that leading zoologists claim the footage is misleading and fake.
Walruses regularly fall off cliffs, not because of melting ice but because of their poor eyesight. But even Attenborough has form.
In 2017, his documentary Blue Planet was found to have used images of the Great Barrier Reef that were taken with specialist lights and cameras to make the coral bleaching appear worse than it was.
But of course if you’re trying to perpetuate a hoax, you most probably have to go to extreme lengths.
Remember in March 1998, scientists declared, if we believe in scientists, that a two-kilometre wide asteroid called 997XF11 was on a near-collision course with the Earth.
That’s what the scientists told us.
We later found that the asteroid missed the Earth by at least a million kilometres.
Remember Halley’s comet. The scientists told us it was going to clean us out. In the end you needed high-powered binoculars to even see it.
Remember during the Gulf War we were told we were going to run out of oil, so everyone raced for LPG.
Remember Y2K, the year 2000.
If you had a computer you were made to panic. The scientists told us.
And now, every day, it’s carbon dioxide, the global warming scourge.
Except that carbon dioxide is about .04 per cent of the atmosphere.
Some worry!
In October last year we were treated to another 400-page report from the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. It was supposed to be the most politically charged document in its history, talking about “climate mayhem” and “a swift and complete transformation, not just to the global economy but of society too”.
We were told that to meet the carbon budget (of course they meant carbon dioxide) renewables would have to go to “at least 50 per cent by 2050”.
The share of coal-fired power would have to go from 28 per cent to between 1 and 7 per cent.
And then other measures to suck up CO2 from the atmosphere would involve consumption habits such as eating less meat because, you see, we don’t want cattle breaking wind, emitting carbon dioxide, so let the cattle die in the drought.
Is that the current agenda?
Put that all together, reduce coal-fired power to next to nothing, have trees and grass absorb carbon dioxide, which means massive Vegetation Acts which steal land from farmers, and then eat less meat which means fewer stock so that they won’t break wind!
Forget agriculture as a means of national wealth because it will be illegal to touch large tracts of land and trees.
Well, that was a 2018 IPCC report.
Let’s look at another report which gained widespread currency.
It told us there were ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns had begun to change dramatically.
We were told the changes may portend a drastic decline in food production. There would be serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The evidence in support of these predictions, we were told, had begun to accumulate.
And we were told meteorologists were hard-pressed to keep up with the evidence. We were told the regions destined to feel the impact of these changed weather patterns were the great wheat-producing lands of the world. There would be a loss of grain, up to 100,000 tonnes annually.
And scientists, we were told, saw this as advanced signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather.
The scientists were unanimous that the trend would reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
And we were told a major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale.
We were told that scientists saw few signs that government leaders anywhere were even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.
And we were told the longer the plan is delayed, the more difficult it would be to cope with climate change once the results became grim reality.
Well, what do you make of that?
It was part of a story in Newsweek magazine.
The only thing is, the story was headed “The Cooling World”. Not global warming, the cooling world.
Written when?
April 28, 1975.
We weren’t averse to overstating the case then. We’re not averse to promoting hoaxes now.
But, you see, these people are the modern day rent-seekers. There is money in it.
And if, as has happened, governments swallow this nonsense, they, including our Australian government, are pledged to contribute $100 billion a year to so-called developing countries that are going to be destroyed by global warming!!!
This is the price we pay for the hoax.
The moral of the story is, you’d better believe in global warming today or you won’t get the money.
I have been reading an article from the Canberra Times from September 26, 1988.
“Sea levels are threatening to completely cover the Maldives’ 1196 islands within 30 years.”
Well, it’s now 30 years on. The Maldives are still there, all 1196 islands.
How much longer are we going to be stupid enough to put up with this rent-seeking rubbish.
Listen to Alan Jones on the Alan Jones Breakfast Show on 2GB, Monday to Friday, 5.30am to 9am