Science will beat coronavirus, but not warmist alarmism
Medical science will rein in the spread of the coronavirus but it won’t cure warmist alarmism. The spread of the virus is an attention-grabber but the real decline in reliable power is the greater danger to Australia, writes Piers Akerman
Opinion
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Global warming zealots are a far bigger threat to the Australian economy than the coronavirus outbreak. Based on so-called scientific modelling, which has been proven time and again to be wildly inaccurate, global warming activists are the most destructive force the nation faces today.
Whether it is tourism, farming, manufacturing or simply a matter of keeping the lights burning and dependable heating on tap, the policies of enviro-activists led by groups such as Climate Revolution, backed by virtue-signalling heads of corporations (the most recent being Telstra’s CEO Andy Penn), the Labor Party and their allies in the Greens are set to kill jobs and wind back the lifestyle once guaranteed by our country’s access to formerly cheap energy.
Medical science will rein in the spread of the coronavirus but it won’t cure warmist alarmism. The spread of the virus is an attention-grabber but the real decline in reliable power is the greater danger to Australia.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has wisely avoided following Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s look-at-me stunt of declaring a policy which would deliver a net zero emissions nation by 2050.
Mr Albanese cannot say how this goal will be achieved nor what it will cost. It doesn’t matter to him. If he’s still alive in 30 years he will be 87 and hardly likely to have to answer for his extreme folly.
Nor is it likely that any in his cheer squad at the ABC and within the Nine (formerly Fairfax) Media will be around to admit their error.
Just as wildly off the mark were the Bureau of Meteorology officials who told a meeting of state and federal ministers gathered in Moree on December 11 that there would be no significant rain until at least April.
We are still a month away from that deadline but most of NSW has received rain. Some areas have flooded. Officially, 51.4 per cent of the state is still drought-affected but over the past three weeks the 36 per cent that was in “intense drought” has halved to 18.4 per cent.
It is almost as if the BOM was joining with the climate activists and wishing anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was real and measurable, which it isn’t according to an authoritative paper by Patrick Frank of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in California and edited by one of BoM’s own staffers, Jing-Jia Luo.
In his paper, Propagation Of Error And The Reliability Of Global Air Temperature Projections, Frank states “any impact (from greenhouse gases) will always be lost within the uncertainty interval. Even advanced climate models exhibit poor energy resolution and very large projection uncertainties. The unavoidable conclusion is a temperature signal from anthropogenic CO2 emissions (if any) cannot have been, nor presently can be, evidenced in climate observables.”
But those calling for zero emissions can’t get even the basics right. The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, using the UN’s IPCC protocols, has decided the CO2 released during a bushfire shouldn’t count in our National Greenhouse Accounts yet emissions from hazard reductions should be included.
This illogic is based on the doubtful methodology used by the IPCC, which “smooths the impact of emissions variability due to natural disturbances by reflecting the long-term carbon storage in forests, which generally, over time and in the absence of new disturbances, reabsorb carbon to balance that carbon emitted during the fires (and therefore no direct impact on progress towards international emissions reduction targets)”.
Under this tortured logic, emissions from bushfires are considered to be neutral because when forests regrow after fires, they absorb a similar amount of CO2 as they did when they burned.
This ignores the fact that bush burnt during infrequent hazard reduction exercises also grows back, which is why areas should be burned year after year as Aboriginals traditionally did.
So today we have elitists claiming without any evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming (though the CSIRO has reluctantly admitted finding no link between bushfires and climate change) while that assertion is statistically impossible to demonstrate because the margin of error in the models most frequently cited is actually greater than the degree of global warming attributed to humans.
Further, we have the same idiots demanding we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions while they won’t include the CO2 emitted when a hectare of bush is burnt yet they will if it is released during a hazard reduction burn.
Religions are based on faith in unknowns and unknowables. The cult of global warming is based on similar abstracts and that’s why there’s only modelling, which — as the former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery demonstrated — is useless when used to make predictions about our climate a decade out, let alone 30 or more years hence.
There is one certainty, however, and that is Australia’s contribution to global emissions is irrelevant. The Chief Scientist, Professor Alan Finkel, said so.
The global warming climate fear merchants are marketing anxiety and preying on the vulnerable in their hope of destroying our economy through the greatest wealth transfer scheme the world has ever seen. Building energy-intensive windmills and solar plants or sending cash to Swiss bank accounts via African despots and Pacific chieftains to offset emissions is going to do nothing to stop or even pause the natural changes to the climate.