Piers Akerman: Warming fanatics’ bushfire claims a model of uncertainty
There’s nothing like certainty and no one is more smugly certain when it comes to climate change than the true believers, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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There’s nothing like certainty and no one is more smugly certain when it comes to climate change than the true believers. The science is in.
If you dare question, let alone challenge, their increasingly shrill claims of the approaching apocalypse you are a denier, if they are borderline polite, or a pox on humanity if you’re a member of Extinction Rebellion or any one of a number of extremist activist groups.
That’s perhaps why it is a little surprising David Haslingden, chairman of the Australian Geographic Society but not a scientist, was so adamant his opinion is the only correct one that he wrote an open letter to Energy Minister Angus Taylor, published in The Australian on Friday.
That’s right, a climate warmist given generous space in a newspaper which, according to the climate activists who target News Corp publications (of which this is one), is biased and bigoted on this issue.
“I’ve read the reports and understand the debate,” he wrote to Mr Taylor. “When you cut through it, it’s not complicated. The human race is burning far too many fossil fuels and has for a long time. As a result of this and other human activities we have increased average global temperature by 0.8C from pre-industrial levels. The extreme weather events we are seeing all over the world are the direct result.”
Well, what’s simple for Mr Haslingden and his noisy cohorts is not so straightforward to scientists who actually study this stuff.
In fact, a team from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, the Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter, the CSIRO, and the Department of Life Sciences and Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, Imperial College, London, looked into links between climate change and fire risk and found insufficient evidence of anthropogenic climate change in Australia to form a firm view.
In their words, “impacts of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather extremes and fire season length are projected to emerge above natural variability in the 2040s”.
The problem for Mr Haslingden and others who blindly rely on modelling is that none of the doomsday projections about rising sea levels, glaciers melting, islands sinking and so on have actually come to fruition.
Speaking of which, did you see the CNN report on Glacier National Park in Montana, USA, where rangers are removing signs suggesting modelling shows all glaciers will be gone by 2020 after those pesky glaciers refused to bow to the wishes of the Greta Thunbergs and Haslingdens of the world?
The original signs, titled “Goodbye to Glaciers”, said the glaciers were shrinking due to “human-caused climate change”.
MORE FROM PIERS AKERMAN:
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Those who put such store in models might inform themselves of the unreliability of such material when it comes to climate change — if they dare have their sole argument shattered.
The paper they should read is Propagation Of Error And The Reliability Of Global Air Temperature Projections, prepared by Patrick Frank, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in California. Published last September in the journal Frontiers In Earth Science, it includes this statement: “The unavoidable conclusion is that an anthropogenic air temperature signal cannot have been, nor presently can be, evidenced in climate observables.”
This paper was edited by Jing-Jia Luo, at our Bureau of Meteorology, and reviewed by Carl Wunsch, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Davide Zanchettin, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. The references alone run to more than 3000 words.
Who knows — or cares — whether they are “believers” or “deniers”?
The point is they are true scientists doing what real investigators do — explore hypotheses and present conclusions based on the hard evidence and not on wishful thinking.
Apart from the illogic displayed by most of the aggressive climate change activists, there appears to be an appalling ignorance of the need for a healthy economy as well as affordable, reliable and dispatchable power.
That last point is important because so many of those clamouring for government action actually want taxpayers to cough up even more for inefficient solar and wind power and the necessary rebuilding of the distribution networks, which indicates that they are either on the dole, as so many of the alternate lifestyle demonstrators are, or they are wealthy enough to support climate change tragics such as Zali Steggall, who seems yet to reduce her own carbon footprint.
There has yet to be any honest, civil, debate on this issue.
Interestingly, on the massive fire ground this summer, much of it in Mr Taylor’s electorate of Hume, no one raised the topic of climate change with their local MP.
What the volunteer firefighters talked about with their neighbours was the massive fuel load that had been permitted to accumulate, hazard reduction, backburning and containment lines.
They weren’t actually interested in modelling, proven to be flawed, or the rantings of teenage Scandinavian girls, and they didn’t have their hands out for subsidies.
The unavoidable conclusion, Mr Haslingden, is your view appears as inaccurate as the modelling upon which it is based.