Andrew Bolt: Five biggest lies told at Glasgow climate summit

Scott Morrison was conned out of $1 billion by the most obvious of lies at the Glasgow summit — but it wasn’t the only fib told.

I knew the Glasgow climate summit would be a festival of lies, but didn’t expect Scott Morrison to get conned out of $1 billion by the most obvious.

Here’s my list of the top five lies and exaggerations told at Glasgow – and I have a question.

If the science is so clear that humans are causing the planet to heat dangerously, why tell lies instead?

THE UN’S TALKING DINOSAUR

The United Nations started the lying by releasing a pre-summit film of an animated talking dinosaur warning delegates: “Don’t choose extinction. Save your species before it’s too late.”

Not one credible scientist would agree humans face extinction if, say, Melbourne becomes as hot as Brisbane.

And here’s what the UN’s dinosaur didn’t admit: dinosaurs went extinct as the planet got colder, not hotter. Cold, you see, is the real killer.

Prince Charles inspecting a hydrogen powered train at Glasgow Central Station. Picture: Jane Barlow

THE ROYAL DINOSAUR

Prince Charles told world leaders this Glasgow summit was “the last chance saloon” to save the planet, but he’s been setting fake deadlines for more than a decade.

In 2009, he said “we already are in the last chance saloon”, and action to save the planet was “needed now, not in 10 years’ time, or even in five”.

Nor is Charles alone in inventing doom deadlines. In 1989, newspapers around the world published this AP report: “A senior UN environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”

MORRISON FALLS FOR THE BIG LIE

Australia’s national gross debt is tipped next year to reach nearly $1 trillion, yet Scott Morrison still managed at Glasgow to find another $1 billion to blow on the most obvious of all the lies.

In his speech, the Prime Minister promised to double our “climate finance commitment” to Pacific and Southeast Asian neighbours to
$2 billion, because there was “no greater threat to our Pacific family … than climate change”.

This claim – that Pacific islands will drown as global warming causes seas to rise – was first popularised by Al Gore in his film The Inconvenient Truth and pushed again in Glasgow.

Prince Charles with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Jane Barlow

Greenpeace launched a report at the summit that quoted a former president of Kiribati claiming he’d already seen “people who’ve been displaced”, and a university student activist, Brianna Fruean, gave a summit speech to push this scare, later telling the BBC that Tuvalu could have just a decade left.

In fact, Fruean studies at Auckland University, and if she’d bothered going to the office there of Professor Paul Kench she could have read one of his many papers on sea levels, showing 43 per cent of low-lying Pacific atoll islands had actually grown and just 14 per cent shrunk.

In the four decades to 2014, Tuvalu’s total land area grew 2.9 per cent. Kiribati has also grown.

Hmm: The UN got student Fruean to speak at the summit, but not Professor Kench. Guess why.

BUT HERE COMES FLANNERY

Glasgow turned several false prophets into sages, including even Tim Flannery.

Flannery, our former climate commissioner, should be finished after all his dud predictions, including his 2007 claim that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”.

But going to Glasgow put him back in business, and in the papers on Sunday he wrote that Australians “need to slash emissions at least in half by 2030 to limit climate damage, and avoid worsening heatwaves, fires, droughts, floods, sea level rises and ecosystem collapse”. In just one Flannery sentence, several more false claims.

In fact, Australia is too small to make any measurable difference to the climate, as Flannery once admitted to me.

Second, as Australia’s top warming scientist, Professor Andy Pitman, also admitted, there is “no (direct) link between climate change and drought”. Nor have we seen “ecosystem collapse”.

Sir David Attenborough speaks during the opening ceremony of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell

ATTENBOROUGH DOES A GRETA

Filmmaker David Attenborough told the summit: “In my lifetime, I have witnessed a terrible decline.”

Really? Where? In fact, NASA says its satellites show the world getting greener, and grain crops keep setting new records.

What’s more, a recent study in The Lancet medical journal suggests global warming has saved lives.

It concluded: “From 2000 to 2019 … (there was) a large decrease in cold-related deaths and a moderate increase in heat-related deaths.

“The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce the net temperature-related deaths.”

But why bother you with facts? Glasgow shows lies sell, and not a journalist there cares to correct them.