Heated holy rollers are making the children cry

Thousands of Australian schoolchildren still suffer climate trauma thanks to doomy teachers, academics, politicians and the media, yet none of their apocalyptic predictions ever come true, and worse still, they never apologised, writes Tim Blair.

Two decades or so ago, a friend was driving his young daughter home from her Sydney school. Normally chatty, on this trip she was oddly quiet.

When my friend looked across, he saw that his daughter was actually in tears. A subsequent conversation, spoken through sobs, revealed the awful reason for her grief.

Some idiot academic from the University of New South Wales had turned up at the girl’s school to speak about climate change. It was more than likely, the academic told his terrified audience, that they would live to see their home suburb of Hornsby be flooded by rising seas.

It took several hours and numerous instructions on geography and topography – Hornsby is at least 20km inland, with a handy 190m sea level elevation – to calm the girl. Her pets would not be drowned.

Yet thousands of Australian schoolchildren still suffer climate trauma thanks to doomy teachers, academics, politicians and the media. But what about all the scary predictions – predictions that cause innocent children to weep?

None of them ever come true. The great Hornsby inundation was a non-starter and the same is true of every other pointless climate panic, summarised in brief last year by Andrew Follett in US journal National Review.

Fallacious climate predictions have needlessly scared school children, writes Tim Blair.

“In 2006, Al Gore claimed that unless his preferred policy measures were implemented ‘within the next 10 years,’ the world would ‘reach a point of no return’. That would place ‘the point of no return’ in 2016,” Follett wrote.

“In 1989, a senior UN environmental official told the Associated Press that ‘entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels’ if extreme government action was not taken by the year 2000.

“In 1982, executive director of the UN environment program Mostafa Tolba claimed that ‘an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust’ would occur in just 18 years, in the year 2000.

“And as recently as in 2019, President Joe Biden claimed, ‘How we act or fail to act in the next 12 years will determine the very liveability of our planet’.”

Nope. Planet’s just as liveable now as at any time in the past several million years. You’d think, then, that all of these climate death screamers might pull their heads in a little.

You might even expect them to feel some shame about the visions of destruction they’ve implanted in millions of young minds.

But no. Rather than recoiling from the despair they’ve caused, climate alarmists now present that despair as evidence of the planet’s ruin.

“Climate change is a mental health emergency,” a press release from the NSW branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists announced last week. “New study links rising temperatures to youth suicidal behaviours.”

In 2006, Al Gore claimed that unless his preferred policy measures were implemented “within the next 10 years”, the world would “reach a point of no return”. Picture: Joseph EID / AFP)

More accurately, alarmist coverage of alleged rising temperatures is promoting those behaviours. Without any bogus climate terror attached to it, a warm day is just a warm day. Kids tend not to kill themselves on account of it being nice outside.

That “new study”, the press release continued, “found that youth emergency department visits for suicidal thoughts or behaviours increased by 1.3 per cent for every 1°C rise in daily mean temperatures in NSW.” The study spoken of here was conducted by our old friends at the University of New South Wales. Interestingly, an earlier and better study – mentioned above – found that morbid distress in little girls increased every time a climate crank from UNSW dropped by her school.

“Young Australians are bearing the brunt of rising temperatures,” the shrink collective’s PR handout went on. “As a result, psychiatrists are increasingly concerned about the risk to young people’s mental health.”

Give these experts a horse and cart and they’d immediately have poor old Mr Ed hooked up to the buggy’s arse end. Young people’s mental health is being whacked not by the weather, but by being told about the weather in ludicrous and destructive terms.

“We’re witnessing more young Australians in crisis at the frontlines,” the press release added, “turning up to emergency departments overwhelmed and in distress.”

Sounds like a fine opportunity for some dad-style education. The car that brought you here? Warmies say it’s killing you. The medical devices and technologies we’re using here? Warmies say they’re killing you. The medications you’ve been prescribed, that were created in labs and freighted here on ships and aircraft? All deadly, say the warmies.

That should knock some sense into our gloomy Celsius goths. As for my mate’s little girl, she’s grown into a charming and brilliant young woman.

The last time I saw her was at a family event at Bondi Beach. She danced and laughed. The water was just a few feet away, being harmless and beautiful.