Andrew Bolt: Dam issues prove climate alarmists wrong

Global warming alarmists should say sorry for the bungling that’s let so much water run to waste in the sea.

What rains we’ve had. Our global warming alarmists should say sorry for the bungling that’s let so much of it run to waste in the sea.

We already know Sydney put the lie to the 2007 claim by Tim Flannery, later chief climate commissioner, that “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams”.

Warragamba Dam in NSW has since spilt about half a dozen times, and today is 98 per cent full. Brisbane’s dam also overflowed.

But even more amazing – and largely ignored – is what’s happened with the dams of Melbourne, capital of the global warming cult.

In 2009, Melbourne was in a warming panic.

Its dams had never been so empty – just 26 per cent full.

The Bracks Labor government switched off public fountains and banned people from watering their gardens, unless they dragged out their bath water.

Thomson Reservoir, Melbourne's largest dam is sitting at 96.7% capacity.

As I argued then, governments and water planners around Australia had been complacent. They’d treated dams as sins against nature and stopped building them to droughtproof our cities.

Melbourne had not built a new one since the Thomson Dam in 1984, despite then adding a million people, many with gardens, washing machines and pools.

But global warming became the politicians’ excuse for failure. So when I campaigned for a new dam on the Mitchell River, politicians and warmists like Flannery warned new dams were useless, they’d never fill.

The Water Services Association of Australia agreed: “The inflows of the past will never return.”

So did Melbourne Water: “Investing billions of dollars in another rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky.”

In fact, the Labor government hastily converted the dam reservation upon the Mitchell to a national park and later commissioned a hugely expensive desalination plant instead, to produce a third of the water of a dam at three times the price, not including the expensive electricity Victoria is now running short of.

Other governments built desalination plants, in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, many of which were essentially mothballed for years when the rains returned.

But look today at Melbourne’s dams: 93.5 per cent full, more water than the city’s had for 26 years, despite adding 1.7 million people.

So let’s hear the warmists apologise for not building the new dams that would now be filling, guaranteeing another decade of cheap supply.

But if they admitted they were wrong then, who’d trust their global warming scares now?