Andrew Bolt: Our noisy climate experts don’t know up from down

As our dams fill and energy prices soar it’s clear we’ve been conned by noisy climate experts, who don’t know the difference between up and down.

When will you dare admit to yourself the experts lied to you? How about now, when Australia’s consumer watchdog says household electricity bills jumped another $300 since April?

Impossible! Wasn’t going green supposed to make your bills go down?

In fact, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese still babbles that “renewables are the cheapest form of new energy”, even as the Alinta energy company warns retail electricity prices will soar another 35 per cent next year as we switch to green power.

Hey, what a coincidence – the more wind and solar energy we get the more power prices go up. It’s almost like there’s a, you know, connection.

See, you’ve been conned. Surely you must realise that now when even Australia’s Climate Council airily admitted on Tuesday there will be more “disruption” to come but you’ll be cool with it once experts “explain to people the severity of the climate crisis” we’re pretending to stop.

Tim Flannery in 2007 claimed dam levels would go down. Picture: Liam Kidston

Pardon? Are these the same experts who said green power would make prices go down? Experts like the Climate Council’s own Tim Flannery, who in 2007 claimed dam levels would also go down, because “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams” – the dams that have instead filled from Brisbane to Melbourne?

Wait – you actually believed them? You didn’t realise many noisier experts don’t know their up from their down, especially when many are paid big bucks not to notice the difference?

For example, before the election, Labor told you a thousand times its experts’ models confirmed its green schemes would make your electricity bill go down by $275 a year.

Now even Labor must secretly realise they’ll go up. That’s why Treasurer Jim Chalmers this week rattled off excuses why you’ll suffer “pressure on household budgets for some time”.

Oh, the excuses for bills going up, not down! One of Chalmers’ favourites is that Liberal governments did nothing about green energy for a decade.

Wind and solar power supplies should supposedly have cushioned us from higher gas prices caused by the war in Ukraine.

Not true. They wasted billions to help cut our emissions since 2005 by nearly 20 per cent.

Another pet Chalmers excuse is that we’ve been hit by the fallout from the Ukraine war. But electricity bills were rising before that, as were the wind and solar power supplies which should supposedly have cushioned us from higher gas prices caused by this war. But the catch with wind and solar is that we must pay for a second electricity supply to kick in when there’s no wind or sun. To make it worse, our politicians also restricted gas exploration and new coal mines, while driving a third of our coal-fired generators out of business.

I get it. You’re still probably too scared to doubt “experts” who must know 10 times more about climate and electricity than you or me.

But surely we’re all expert on the difference between up and down? So we must know the experts who said green power would make power bills go down were wrong.

Likewise, we must know that experts who said the number of cyclones would go up were also wrong, since the number has gone down, if anything, and certainly in Australia.

We must also know experts like Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg were wrong when they warned coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef was going down, because it’s instead gone up to record levels.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers this week rattled off excuses why you’ll suffer ‘pressure on household budgets for some time’. Picture: Gary Ramage

How many more examples do you need of climate experts confusing up with down?

In 2012, the Australian Conservation Foundation warned food supplies would go down, making it “less likely that we can feed the human population if climate change continues”. In fact, harvests of grain crops went up, setting global and Australian records.

In 2009, a Bureau of Meteorology climatologist claimed rainfalls would stay way down from half a century ago: “We are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.” The Water Services Association of Australia in 2007 said the same: “The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return.”

Instead the rains have gone up again, causing massive floods and giving Sydney its wettest year.

Atoll islands were also going to go down, sinking into rising seas. University of Auckland researchers instead found the size of 43 per cent of islands it measured went up, and just as many stayed stable.

No, don’t be too scared to doubt the “experts”, while you still can tell up from down.

Just look at your electricity bill. Is that really what those warming experts promised?