Andrew Bolt: Don’t expect Q&A panel to get answers on dud Tim Flannery predictions

THE ABC finally has a chance to confront global warming alarmist Tim Flannery with his astonishing record of dud predictions. Andrew Bolt asks if anyone on the Q&A panel will dare hold him to account?

Will anyone on the Q&A panel hold Tim Flannery to account for his predictions? Picture: Sam Mooy

THE ABC finally has a big chance to confront global warming alarmist Tim Flannery with his astonishing record of dud predictions.

But will anyone dare hold him to account when he appears on the ABC’s Q&A panel?

Unfortunately, the omens are bad. Not one panellist tonight is a sceptic who might ask the Climate Council chief tough questions.

Even host Tony Jones has been MC or moderator for four CarbonExpo conferences for the warming industry.

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But here are the most important predictions Flannery should be asked to explain:

FLANNERY in 2007 said global warming was so baking our Earth that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”.

Instead, dams for Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney later filled to overflowing.

FLANNERY in 2015 said we’d see severe cyclones “more frequently in the future”. But the very next year, Australia for the first time recorded not one severe cyclone, continuing a pattern over four decades of fewer cyclones.

A paper in the Nature journal said: “Studies project a decrease in the frequency of tropical cyclones towards the end of the 21st century in the southwest Pacific, southern Indian, and Australian regions.”

FLANNERY in 2005 predicted Sydney’s dams could be dry in as little as two years, leaving the city “facing extreme difficulties”. In 2008, he said: “Adelaide … may run out of water by early 2009.” In 2007, he claimed: “In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.”

All three cities — and Melbourne, too — then built hugely expensive

desalination plants, convinced by the likes of Flannery that the rain would not return. All four plants have essentially been mothballed since.

FLANNERY in 2007 urged us to invest in “green” geothermal power — pumping water on to hot rocks underground.

He claimed hot rocks in South Australia “potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run Australia’s economy for the best part of a century”, and “the technology to extract that energy … is relatively straightforward”.

The Rudd government gave $90 million for a test plant in SA’s Cooper Basin, but a well collapsed, the site flooded and the project was abandoned.

I could add more dud predictions, but these are the most important and costly.

So will Q&A tonight demand Flannery explain?

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