Andrew Bolt: Climate scaremongers not held responsible for falsehoods

Tim Flannery, like many climate alarmists, has been proven wrong about his scaremongering predictions – yet he hasn’t paid a price.

Tim Flannery still hasn’t paid a price for being wrong. Sydney’s Warragamba Dam is flooding again — which our former chief climate commissioner once said couldn’t happen.

In 2005, Flannery predicted Sydney’s dams could be empty in just two years because global warming was drying up the rains, leaving the city “facing extreme difficulties with water”.

In 2007, Flannery stepped up the scare, claiming global warming made the soil so hot that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”.

Yet for the second time in two years, Warragamba is overflowing. It also spilt over in 2012.

But where is Flannery?

He’s sure not saying sorry. Far from it; he’s just been named as a speaker at the taxpayer-funded Sydney Writers’ Festival, to lecture us on what “may be the last chance” to save ourselves from “the climate crisis”.

That’s how it goes with these climate catastrophists. Even when they’re wrong, the politico-media class forgives them because they were wrong in a sacred cause. They scare us into righteousness.

Check for yourself. Have you heard a single ABC presenter mention that Warragamba has again made a fool of Flannery? Or that Melbourne’s dams are now twice as full as they were when he made his dam-draining prediction?

Former Chief Climate Professor Tim Flannery.

Flannery is, of course, easy to mock. It’s hard to think of a global warming preacher who has been wrong so often.

This is the scaremonger who in 2008 warned of “a world five years from now, when there is no more ice over the Arctic”, who predicted Perth would become the world’s first “ghost metropolis” through lack of water, and who claimed we’d see cyclones “more frequently in the future”.

In fact, the Arctic ice and Perth are still there, and we’ve had fewer cyclones, not more.

Yet Flannery is only one of many climate catastrophists whose dud predictions are not held against them.

Take Robert Watson, a former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Last month he co-wrote a United Nations report that warned us to cut our consumption because global warming was one of the man-made “climate emergencies” that had reduced “the Earth’s capacity to sustain current and future human wellbeing”.

His alarmist report was hyped by the media and especially by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who claimed we “might not thrive, even survive” because we’d waged a “suicidal war on nature”.

But why was anyone taking Watson seriously?

Never mind that even his own report admitted world prosperity had actually doubled over the past 50 years.

Just consider his record. In 2004, this same Watson promoted a report on global warming that had been commissioned by the Pentagon and which predicted doom by 2020.

As The Guardian reported then, without a skerrick of scepticism, this “secret report” warned that “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020”, when “nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the word”.

None of that happened last year, or was ever likely to. Yet Watson had praised these off-the-wall predictions, claiming “it’s going to be hard to blow off this sort of document”, which was “hugely embarrassing” to then President George W. Bush.

Watson paid no price for peddling this trash. Instead, this British chemist was knighted in 2012.

And what price did Al Gore pay?

Former US Vice President Al Gore. Picture: Glenn Hunt / The Australian

In 2006, the former US vice-president claimed in his Academy Award-winning “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth that global warming was drowning Pacific islands under rising seas, and “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”.

Labor fell for this “drowning islands” scare, producing a “Pacific climate change plan” promising to take in such global warming refugees, with Anthony Albanese, now Labor leader, piously declaring we couldn’t “sit by while people literally drown”.

In fact, Gore was preaching porkies. No global warming “refugees” were evacuated to New Zealand then or since, and low-lying Pacific island nations are actually much more likely to grow than shrink.

Professor Paul Kench and Dr Arthur Webb studied 27 atoll islands in the central Pacific and found 43 per cent had actually got bigger over recent decades, and just 14 cent — not the most populous — smaller.

But what does Gore care? Scares sell, and he’s now hailed as the world’s first “climate change billionaire”.

If he was wrong, it was only for our own good, you see. And his.