Andrew Bolt: COVID-19 modelling provides important lesson on global warming

Global warming alarmist Tim Flannery is writing a book that his publisher claims will show how we could apply lessons from coronavirus to climate change. But the only lesson to be learnt about relying on modelling is how politicians and the media play into the alarm, writes Andrew Bolt.

Global warming alarmist Tim Flannery is writing a book that his publisher claims will show how we could apply lessons from coronavirus to climate change.

Global warming alarmist Tim Flannery is writing a book that will either be his shortest or most stunning backflip.

That’s because his publisher claims Flannery will “show how we could apply what we had learned from coronavirus to climate change”.

That should be a bombshell, because what Australia has learnt is: DON’T TRUST THE MODELLING.

I’m talking about the mathematical models that persuaded the Morrison Government that between 50,000 and 150,000 Australians would die from the virus.

As the Sydney Morning Herald gasped: “Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said that the number of infections would range between 20 per cent to 60 per cent of the population … ‘The death rate is around 1 per cent. You can do the maths.’”

Well, I can at least count. The death toll has reached just 103. Half the dead were 80 or older, and many already sick or dying.

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly claimed up to 60 per cent of the population would get coronavirus.

But our economy was meanwhile crashed by politicians freaked into ordering shutdowns.

So there are lessons to learn about modelling and how politicians and the media grab the most alarming, and make bad situations worse.

Flannery is the perfect man to write of exactly that danger.

How often has he himself trusted rubbish climate models to scare us into embracing cures far worse than the disease?

In 2007, for instance, Flannery claimed “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”, and “in Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.” But the rains returned.

In 2008, Flannery wrote: “Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, when there is no more ice over the Arctic.” But the ice stayed.

In 2015, he said we’d get severe cyclones “more frequently in the future”.

But the very next year, Australia for the first time recorded no severe cyclones, and has had fewer cyclones over four decades.

There are so many other false predictions from climate models. Crops would shrink, we were told, and islands drown.

The opposite happened, yet look at the billions we’ve spent on useless global warming schemes.

So Flannery is just the man to tell us of lessons learnt.

Or is he still dead to the evidence? In that case, one page and he’s done.

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