Tim Blair: Warmists’ snow job on climate change makes no sense

NO snow, more snow; no rain, more rain. Doomists continue to move the bar when it comes to climate change, writes Tim Blair.

Never happy ... Picture: John Tiedemann

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Back in July 2007, a near-naked climate activist named Josh Brown rushed at John Howard during the then-prime minister’s election campaign visit to Bega on the NSW south coast.

We know Josh was a climate activist because he’d helpfully written “climate change” in large letters on his bare chest, as might a mental patient. Also, he was shouting all manner of crazy things at Howard, including: “What are you doing about global warming? There is no snow, there is no snow!”

Brown’s Speedos-clad protest and subsequent arrest caused little fuss, possibly because his no-snow thesis was by then so widely accepted among the climate panic set — which, back then, included almost everybody. Some even swooned over their new climate hero. “Sweet baby Jesus,” wrote Marieke Hardy, later to feast on your taxes as an ABC Book Club unwatchable. “When did having a political conscience suddenly get so hot?”

Tim Blair. Picture: John Fotiadis

Cool your jets, girl. Elsewhere, snow’s vanishing was regarded as an obvious consequence of our terrible disregard for fragile mother earth. “Snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture,” the UK Independent claimed in 2000.

“According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event’. ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ he said.”

The “climate change will destroy snow” line remained an article of faith with the doomist crowd for some time. “We are already seeing the snow season shortened,” then-Greens leader Christine Milne told the National Press Club in 2014. “The snow dumps have become smaller.”

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During the same year, the New York Times ran an opinion piece below the inquisitive headline: “The End of Snow?” It featured a bleak and sun-blasted shot of Germany’s Fichtelberg mountain, looking globally warmed and totally absent of ski bunnies.

Well, judging by the latest images from Fichtelberg’s multiple mountaincams, the answer to that New York Times headline is “No”.

The joint is totally snowed up. So is New York, for that matter. Even southern states in the US are copping snowfalls. In Florida, chilled iguanas are dropping from trees due to six-degree cold. Having got their snow predictions wrong, the same way every other warmist prediction (empty Australian dams, cities becoming ghost towns, thousands of climate refugees all over the place) also turned out to be false, you might think our alarmist friends would enter similar states of iguana-like catatonia.

Keeping it cool in New York City this week.

But no. Contrary to their previous no-snow claims, they’ve lately shifted to a new position: all of this extra snow is also caused by climate change. Penn State University professor and leading climate catastrophist Michael E. Mann — who I’d describe as beady-eyed, except beads are usually larger — explained in an interview last year: “There are various ways in which climate change can make weather more extreme. Some of them are fairly obvious — if you warm up the planet, you’re going to have more frequent and intense heatwaves.

“Warmer planet, you’re going to have more extremely hot days. You tend to see more flooding events, because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so when it does rain or snow, you actually get more precipitation.

“The rain and snowfall in larger amounts, and that’s something we’ve seen as well in recent years.”

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Then: no snow. Now: more snow. Then, as claimed by former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery in 2007, certain areas of Australia were suffering a 20 per cent decline in rainfall and “even the rain that that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems.” Now: rainfall is greater. All because of climate change, no matter what the outcome. And these people tell us the “science is settled”. Please.

John Maynard Keynes may have been a rubbish economist, but on the matter of consistency he was right on the money. “When events change, I change my mind,” he once said. “What do you do?” In the case of climate activists, they change their arguments. Within just one decade, they’ve moved from “there is no snow!” to “snow falls in larger amounts” — and blamed both on the same cause.

Events have changed, but religious beliefs are eternal.

.Bill’s legacy painful and delicious

In one of his final acts of kindness, following a lifetime of generosity, Bill Leak last year bought me a cricket bowling machine.

Actually, it may not have been an act of kindness. Bill, Australia’s finest cartoonist, might have simply grown tired of me telling him how fantastic a batsman I used to be and wanted to test this plainly dishonest claim. So the bowling machine arrived.

The late editorial cartoonist Bill Leak.

Tragically, Bill died last March before either of us could face this electric Lillee. And then I moved to a yardless place that didn’t easily allow proper use of it. I ended up giving Bill’s gift to former neighbours Gavin and Belinda, whose backyard seemed perfect for bowling machine antics with their two athletic young children.

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Last week I dropped in on Gav and Belinda. The machine was hooked up and humming with malevolence, set to speed level six, which turned out to be plenty lively.

In the spirit of Bill, however, we soon cranked it up to 10 — the maximum. I swear I heard Bill laughing every time I was hit. Which was frequent, painful and delicious. God bless you, great man.