Andrew Bolt: As the planet warms, a few more people may die from heat but many more will be saved from dying from cold

The ludicrous cherrypicking alarmism of the United Nations report on global warming is trying to scare us with obvious tricks.

Tuesday was a bad day for NSW Opposition Leader Chris Minns to take the media for a spin to the Warragamba Dam in his you-beaut zero-emissions electric bus.

You see, that was also the day the United Nations released its scary new report insisting we stop using fossil fuels – urgently – or global warming would fry us.

How I laughed, and not just because of the report’s ludicrous cherrypicking alarmism.

No, what made it even funnier is that Minns had meanwhile taken the media on a trip into the la-la land of global warming hysterics, where predictions of climate doom turn out wrong, and the new green technology meant to save us fails.

NSW Opposition Leader Chris Minns is taking the media for a spin on his zero-emissions electric bus. Picture: Jane Dempster

Minns got out of the bus at a dam still brimming after the summer months – 94 per cent full! Melbourne’s dams are also awash.

But how could this be? Hadn’t Australia’s most famous global warming doom-monger, former Chief Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery, warned in 2005 that global warming would dry out this very dam?

Indeed, he’d declared there were “only two years’ water supply in Warragamba Dam” and “water is going to be in short supply across the eastern states” because “if the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent”.

Two years later Flannery doubled down with his most famous dud prediction: “Even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams.”

Tim Flannery declared there were ‘only two years’ water supply in Warragamba Dam’. Picture: AAP

Yet it didn’t register with Minns that the full dam in front of him was proof that global warming doomsters get things badly wrong.

Instead, after giving a lecture on privatisation, he loaded the media back into his you-beaut, zero-emissions electric bus and 10km down the road it … conked. Flat battery.

Of course, if Minns had been driving a diesel bus there would have been no drama. Just send someone with a jerry can to the nearest servo.

But how do you recharge an electric bus that’s gone flat mid-trip? You can hardly send someone to fetch a pack of AAA batteries.

It’s a metaphor, really. Think of all the other you-beaut, zero emissions grand schemes that have gone bung: the wave generators that sank, the “hot rocks” geothermal plant that collapsed, the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro scheme that’s blown out, and the renewable energy “transition” that’s left us short of electricity.

Yet the UN on Tuesday insisted on more of the same – dud predictions and dodgy schemes.

Change or die, warned the UN’s secretary-general, socialist Antonio Guterres, bellowing: “Humanity is on thin ice … the climate time bomb is ticking.”

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres says the ‘climate time bomb’ is ticking. Picture: AFP

Naturally, our prime minister fell for it, calling this report he hadn’t read “sobering”.

I’ll say, but for different reasons. Guterres actually demanded we get out of coal – our second-biggest export – by 2040, and immediately ban new gas and oil, even though we desperately need the money from coal, and are critically short of gas for our homes and power stations.

Can you imagine how tough life would be if we did what he demanded? The warmists’ cures are like cutting off your arm because you’ve got dirt under your nails.

You might say, hang on, but these are IPCC scientists telling us we’re cooked.

But I simply don’t trust these experts, because I can spot obvious tricks they’ve played in their report to scare you.

For instance, this IPCC reports says: “increases in extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality”.

What a con. What this report does not say is that cold is much more likely to kill you than heat – at least seven times more, according to a Lancet study – which means that as the planet warms, a few more people may die from heat but many more will be saved from dying from cold.

In fact, Britain’s Office of National Statistics worked out that warmer weather this century had so far meant half a million lives had been saved in Britain alone.

Why didn’t this IPCC report mention this critical fact? Or that worldwide we’d had fewer cyclones and more record crops?

Why didn’t it say, relax, the International Disaster Database confirms your chance of dying from climate-related disasters has never been lower? You’ve never been safer.

Why didn’t this report mention any of this? Because it was looking only for the bad, and suppressing the good.

When you see such cherry picking – on top of so many dud predictions – how can you trust these scaremongers in their you-beaut, zero-emissions electric bus trips to nowhere?