Andrew Bolt: Did panic-mongers even read ‘death sentence’ climate report?

Many journalists hit the panic button after the latest climate report, while Greens leader Adam Bandt declared it a “death sentence”. But how many of them actually read it?

Adam Bandt has declared the IPCC report a “death sentence”. Did he even read it? Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

Greens leader Adam Bandt was the most shameless hysteric, shrieking that this week’s big global warming report was “a death sentence for Australia”.

Many journalists also hit the panic button.

They claimed this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of worse cyclones, huge fires and “deadly heatwaves”, and the ABC aired vision of cars swept away in raging floods.

First the virus terror and now this. Why this addiction to frightening people out of their wits?

I’m guessing almost none actually read the IPCC report.

True, it says the world has warmed by 1.3 degrees since the industrial revolution really took off some 200 years ago, and insists man’s emissions are to blame.

It also claims that if we don’t slash our emissions harder, we’ll hit 1.5 degrees by the 2030s.

So far, it follows the script.

Yet recent satellite measurements confirm the world isn’t warming as fast as predicted, and a paper in the journal Science just last week noted that the mathematical climate models used for those predictions had a history of exaggerated predictions.

And note the good that the slight warming since the Little Ice Age has brought. We’ve never lived longer and healthier, and now have record grain crops around the world.

Indeed, this IPCC report admits there has been a “greening trend” – not surprising with more rain, warmth and carbon dioxide, all great for plants.

The IPCC concedes it can’t actually blame floods on humans.

“Changes in vegetation productivity have also been observed, as well as longer growing seasons,” the IPCC report says.

More greenery and bigger crops has to be good for us. And if a warming world is better for plants, why not for humans?

But let’s check what the IPCC prefers to look at – the predicted climate disasters we’re supposedly creating. This “death sentence”.

Take floods. The IPCC concedes it can’t actually blame floods on humans.

As it puts it, “confidence is in general low in attributing changes in the probability of magnitude of flood events to human influence”.

It also has trouble finding any “peak flow trends over past decades on the global scale”, although “there are regions experiencing decreases, including … Australia.”

Oh, fewer floods here. Have the Greens been told?

This IPCC report also has trouble blaming humans for droughts.

“There is low confidence that human influence has affected trends in meteorological droughts in most regions”, although the IPCC still claims it has “medium confidence” that humans have “contributed” to “agricultural droughts”.

With extreme winds, more good news.

They are “becoming less severe” exactly where the vast majority of humans live. There’s also little evidence for more tornadoes.

The report found there’s evidence we’re getting more “agricultural droughts” and “fire weather”

The IPCC does say there’s more “heavier rainfall” around the world, but isn’t that good?

Didn’t professional alarmist Tim Flannery once scare us with claims that the rains were instead drying, so “even the rain that falls will not actually fill our dams”.

Seems to me more heavy rain is better than less.

The IPCC also admits it’s “a challenge” to identify trends in tropical cyclones, yet still claims a higher proportion may be more intense.

Oops! This suggests IPCC scientists – hand-picked by governments – are cherrypicking data to keep the scare going.

Check a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Climate on landfalling hurricanes and cyclones in the north Atlantic and our western Pacific, where they mostly strike.

You’ll find no increase in the number of intense cyclones.

The only reason there’s a higher proportion of them is that overall we’re getting fewer cyclones. And that’s more good news.

I don’t want to hide the bad bits in this report. It says there’s evidence we’re getting more high temperatures, more heatwaves, higher seas, more “agricultural droughts” and more “fire weather”, including in Australia.

But even here I struggle to see our “death sentence”.

That’s not just because NASA data shows that even with more of this “fire weather”, less land is actually being burned around the world: “The total acreage burned by fires each year declined by 24 per cent between 1998 and 2015.”

Take also the increased heatwaves the IPCC claims we’re getting – or, as the media prefers, “killer heatwaves”.

In fact, we’re 20 times more likely to die of cold than heat, as a study in Lancet of 74,000 deaths in 13 countries confirmed.

So if more people die of heatwaves in a warming world, we can assume many more will not die from cold.

So don’t panic. Stressing over this “death sentence” may kill you sooner than climate change ever will.