Sceptical voters weather the climate panic stirred by clickbait reporting

The word climate is clickbait to the ABC and Guardian Australia just as sex is to the Daily Mail.

Most voters just want cheap, reliable electricity. Picture: Getty Images

The word climate is clickbait to the ABC and Guardian Australia in the way the word sex is to the Daily Mail. The left media’s reporting of climate change is so hysterical it is no wonder voters, in what was supposed to be a climate election, rejected Labor’s ambitious, uncosted plans and its prevarication on the Adani coalmine.

First to Adani’s Carmichael project, the banning of which would do nothing to change the temperature in the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, no matter how many times activists falsely claim the mine could kill the reef.

Even those adult voters who were motivated by concern about climate change know there are many greenhouse gases apart from CO2 and almost all of them enter the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere.

Queenslanders knew Adani was 400km inland and farther from the reef than existing coalmines in the Bowen Basin. They also knew other coalmines had been approved by the state Labor government during the federal election campaign.

Pembroke Resources’ Olive Downs mine in the Bowen Basin, closer to the reef than Adani’s project, was approved the Tuesday before the May 18 election. It is about the same size as the Adani mine.

On April 30 Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham told parliament he had approved an expansion of Yancoal’s Cameby Downs mine northwest of Brisbane the week before.

The Adani debate was dumb and you did not need to be a “climate change denier” — a tag meant to cower people into sidelining their common sense — to think so. Queenslanders know coal is the nation’s biggest export commodity at $70 billion a year.

When Sydney tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes created a Twitter stir the day before the election proclaiming, “Coal is dead. The only question is how fast Australia realises this and transitions to clean energy,” Queenslanders’ BS detectors chimed in.

One of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett, has just invested $US10bn ($US14.4bn) in Occidental Petroleum to back its $US38bn bid for Anadarko Petroleum so he clearly sees a future in fossil fuels.

And while $200,000 a year mining jobs may not seem attractive to Cannon-Brookes from his $100 million Sydney harbourside mansion, they are enticing to families in central Queensland.

Indeed, if coal were dead how would Cannon-Brookes explain the April average thermal coal price of $US86.77 a metric tonne? This is down slightly from the start of the year but remains near medium-term highs and reflects the building of hundreds of new coal-fired plants globally.

Did conservationists really expect cynical Queenslanders to take notice of former Greens leader Bob Brown’s convoy from Melbourne to the central Queensland coalmines or Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg and the regular Friday climate strikes by Australia’s schoolchildren?

Why on earth would adult voters stoke the irrational fears of children? Do climate change alarmist editors really think adults make decisions about jobs and employment based on children’s nightmares? The Guardian may have decided to change its editorial style book to refer to climate change around the world as a “climate emergency”, but many grown-up voters would regard that as leftist hectoring.

Think about the latest 2030 climate deadline. How do ABC and Guardian journalists justify seriously repeating Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hype that the world has only 11 more years to save itself from catastrophic warming while the same IPCC allows the world’s No 1 and No 3 emitters, China and India respectively, to continue increasing greenhouse emissions until that 2030 deadline?

The answer is obvious: 2030 is hype. The IPCC is a UN consensus-based body looking to amp up action on climate while keeping all the main players at the table. If it really believed its own 2030 doomsday scenario it would not be allowing the two most populous nations on the planet to continue increasing emissions until 2030.

Followers of IPCC negotiations will know the IPCC keeps revising up its carbon budget and has a range of scenarios from mild to catastrophic. The doomsday scenario is based on worst case projections that most scientists now agree are extremely unlikely.

China and India do not believe they should be held to the same standards as the developed world, which is why developing nations agreed to a communique in Kato­wice in Poland last year that spoke of a single rule book for all nations but then immediately lodged an appeal saying they wanted to reassert their right to differentiation from the developed world.

The truth of its various projections since IPCC 1 in 1990 is that the world has proven less sensitive to CO2 and other greenhouse gases than the early models suggested, forecast temperature and sea level rises have regularly been revised downwards, and global average temperatures appear to have stabilised, albeit at almost a degree higher than at the start of the 20th century.

In political terms the environment movement has harnessed weather events to ratchet up panic. Here it is using the latest drought in eastern Australia, as it did to John Howard’s government in the lead-up to the 2007 election. Howard was forced to go to that poll with his own emissions trading system.

But that drought broke, dams filled, much to the consternation of climate alarmists such as professional anthropologist and amateur climatologist Tim Flannery, and the public lost focus on the issue. The left media deliberately feeds into such alarmism whether about drought here or hurricanes in the US and The Philippines.

Yet the IPCC makes clear that while there is a high probability of increased extreme weather events as temperature rises, no single weather event can be linked to climate change.

Those of us with long memories recall many severe droughts and many periods of more active cyclonic activity. Hence the activists’ emphasis on scaring children with short memories.

So how should media think about the issue in the wake of the federal election?

First, this is not an ideological left versus right issue for most voters and healthy scepticism is not an indicator of moral bankruptcy. Most voters just want cheap, reliable electricity.

Polls show they believe climate change is real, but they also want jobs and security. They are happy to pay for rooftop solar to get cheaper power bills but probably do not understand how that and grid-scale renewables have made the system less reliable and more expensive. Their commitment to climate action does not extend to paying higher power bills, and most polls make it clear few would be prepared to pay more than a few dollars extra a month for cleaner power.

No doubt pumped hydro storage will help grid reliability as renewables that don’t really work at night account for increasing percentages of our power.

Many voters understand the economics of battery storage at the home, but they also know large-scale battery storage such as Elon Musk’s Tesla installation in South Australia could power a state for only a minute or two.

Australia is the largest exporter of uranium with 40 per cent of world supply. If Labor and sections of the media believe the 2030 doomsday scenario, they should advocate for the French model where 75 per cent of power is nuclear.