Climate-change clots have well and truly lost the plot

Blaming the Coalition for the floods is just about as dumb as politics gets.

There is precious little questioning by our media about record maximums posted from weather stations that are barely three years old, or temperature records that are revised downwards and ignore all readings before 1910

Why wouldn’t we expect governments to get rid of natural disasters? After all they keep us safe from the virus, ensure our kids don’t eat junk food, send us vouchers for meals and holidays, check our stools for bowel cancer, make sure we are buckled up, stop us from smoking, and tell us when we can cross state borders.

Governments install roof insulation for us, send us set-top boxes, subsidise our solar panels and electric cars, give us free schooling and healthcare, tell us when we can sing and dance, provide our broadband, promise to eradicate domestic violence, and they’ve got sexual harassment and assault next on their list. Calling an end to droughts, floods and fires just makes sense.

No wonder Labor and the Greens are leading in the polls. While Coalition governments have fiddled around with silly reforms like lowering taxation, liberalising trade, securing borders, and restoring the integrity of our immigration system, the big reforms have gone begging.

Even Bob Hawke and Paul Keating missed the boat with their trifling financial deregulation, floating of the dollar, and legislating native title rights for Indigenous Australians. The game changer was too hard even for them to tackle.

But Anthony Albanese – the man who fights Tories but emulates John Howard – has got it in hand. Together with Adam Bandt, he will transform a land of droughts and flooding rains into a land of milk and honey.

Protesters rally outside an event held by Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a visit to the Emergency Operations Centre at the Council Chambers in Goonellabah in the flood affected town of Lismore in northern NSW. Picture: Elise Derwin / News Corp

Their biggest problem will be the terminology; they will have to disavow any connection to biblical passages and the claims of the Jews over Israel. Perhaps they will modernise the phraseology and call our newly protected continent the land of soy milk and acai – that ought to do it.

Anyway, those are mere details. Albanese and Bandt have a plan, and with at least 20 of their fellow Australians dead, thousands homeless, and tens of thousands dealing with damage and hardship, the Labor and Greens leaders have decided life would be better without floods – in fact, without any natural disasters.

As Bandt tweeted during these floods: “Let’s be clear, this could have been avoided. The Liberals are supercharging climate disasters with new coal and gas mines and have failed to prepare for the devastating impacts.”

It makes you question the patriotism and humanity of Scott Morrison and the Coalition doesn’t it? Because what sort of callous ideologues would refuse to dispense with natural disasters if they had the option?

The Greens leader said: “Nothing is natural about this. And nothing will save this climate-wrecking government this election.” You have got to admit, he has a point – if you could stop this and you chose not to, then why would people vote for you?

Thankfully, Bandt and Albanese do not just whinge, they have solutions. Bandt says we just “have to leave the coal and gas in the ground” – which I guess makes sense.

We could lead the way, abandon fossil fuels, and then just hope we are followed by China, India, Indonesia, Russia, America, Canada, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Kuwait, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Brunei, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. You never know.

The Labor leader says, “too many Australians have first-hand knowledge of the brutality of bushfires, drought and flood – climate change is here now”. And, according to his policies, the way to fix this is to build more renewable energy generation and subsidise people to buy electric cars.

If only Morrison had thought of that. Half price Teslas for all, and Lismore stays high and dry.

The good news is that, according to the politicians and esteemed oracles of the fourth estate, all this can be fixed. All voters need do is use the election to switch from the Coalition’s net zero by 2050 pledge to Labor’s net zero by 2050 promise. Painless.

ABC regular and NSW Senate candidate Jane Caro is on to this solution. This week she posted a video, standing under a collapsed ceiling in her kitchen – which seemed a particularly perilous place to be, given it had apparently fallen in after the torrential rain that hit Sydney.

MP Di Farmer MP, Councillor Kara Cook, Labor Senator for Queensland, Murray Watt, Member for Griffith Terri Butler, Leader of the Australian Labor party Anthony Albanese and Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles visit the Hawthorne Ferry terminal which was severely impacted by flooding of the Brisbane River. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Marshall

“Climate change is real and happening now, even in my kitchen,” she posted. In the video she said it might “take a while” to get her ceiling repaired, but selflessly she conceded many people might be suffering greater trauma.

“Stay safe, stay dry, let’s hope the sun comes out,” she implored her climate-savvy followers, “and we get a change of government”. Yep, that will do it. Change the government, and you change the climate. Barack Obama proved that in 2008 when he proclaimed that this was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.” Job done. No wonder he got that Nobel prize.

We have seen the same healing effect here. The last time Labor was in power, under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, when they were trying to impose an emissions trading scheme and then teamed up with the Greens to impose a carbon tax, the only natural disasters we had were the Black Saturday bushfires that took 173 lives and the Brisbane floods.

Oh, and cyclone Yasi, and cyclone Oswald, and some other bushfires.

But still, these must have been “natural” natural disasters rather than “supercharged” by global warming because I do not recall any politicians or media blaming the federal government for those extreme events at the time.

Climate obsessed, so-called independent candidate Allegra Spender this week noted that “three years ago we had historic drought, two years ago we had historic bushfires, now we have historic floods” and then linked these events to emissions targets.

But we are left to wonder why the highest floods in so many regions – and the worst droughts in most of the country, and many of the worst bushfires – occurred way back in the 19th century, or in the early to middle years of the 20th century.

Were the early settlers secretly driving V8s? Did those sneaky convicts have a coal-fired power plant running on the sly? Best ask Bruce Pascoe.

The blaming of floods on global warming makes more sense than the finger pointing about droughts, given anyone with a basic understanding of climate science understands a warmer planet is a wetter one.

But this just makes us wonder why the very same people blaming climate “inaction” for the floods were doing the same in recent years for fires and droughts.

In 2005, the former climate commissioner Tim Flannery said, “if the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia”. I am no climate scientist but a quick gaze around the Nepean-Hawkesbury these past two years would struggle to find evidence of a permanent drought – perhaps he was misquoted, and actually referred to “drowning” conditions.

A couple of years later, Flannery told the ABC that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”. Maybe he was right, it has not so much filled them, as overfilled them.

These inconsistencies and this opportunism cannot be easily dismissed, even if the only media Flannery speaks to never question him on it.

This permanent drought fearmongering, backed up by other climate alarmists, led to the mainland state governments spending a total of more than $12bn building desalination plants.

Only Perth’s was necessary and has been useful; the others are expensive white elephants kept on standby, chewing up money and energy in the hope they will be required some day.

In NSW and Queensland, the money spent on desal plants would have been better spent on flood mitigation dams.

Another one of the climate-­obsessed so-called independents, Georgia Steele, is running in ­Hughes, in Sydney’s south. She reckons the evidence is clear that Morrison has “botched” climate policy because it fits a pattern of him botching the bushfire response, Covid quarantine, Covid vaccine supplies, submarine deal, religious discrimination bill, federal integrity commission, making Parliament House safe for women, and the flood response. Wow, that is some list; it leaves you wondering who is putting the Prime Minister’s pants on in the morning.

All this politicking, fact-free partisan abuse and phantasmagorical opposition promises of kinder, gentler natural disasters are undone by plain facts and logic. As Alan Finkel – the nation’s chief scientist at the time – told a Senate committee in 2018 that if all of our country’s carbon dioxide emissions disappeared overnight the impact on the global environment would be “virtually nothing”.

At that time we contributed about 1.3 per cent of global emissions; we now account for even less, about 1.1 per cent – while China, India, Indonesia, in fact, most of the world’s 10 most populous nations continue to increase emissions.

The fear, alarm and unquestioning coverage is every bit as astounding as the loopy claims of the activists.

Every hot day, dry day, cold day, wet day or fire day is cited as evidence of global warming.

The Guardian Australia’s Katherine Murphy leads the charge; her fringe views are elevated as mainstream commentary by the ABC.

“If every country acted with the abject derangement that ­Australia has exhibited for a decade,” she ranted this week, “then the planet will most decidedly cook.”

You will have to ask her whether that cooking will lead to floods, droughts, fires or snowstorms. But I reckon she would be likely to bet on the lot.

There is precious little questioning by our media about record maximums posted from weather stations that are barely three years old, or temperature records that are revised downwards and ignore all readings before 1910, and rainfall records that disregard detailed measurements from the 19th century.

Curiosity and facts have lost all value – ideology and narrative reign supreme. Presumably we will see the eyes of the world descend on this nation in May, because the global climate and the fate of the planet are going to be decided at our federal election.

For the green left and the media, it has become a simple world with simple solutions. None better than the flood mitigation strategy proposed by ACTU boss Sally McManus.

“I know there must be a really obvious answer to this, but a question for the hydrologists,” she tweeted last week.

“When Warragamba Dam is near capacity, why doesn’t Sydney Water suspend billing and ask people to turn on all their taps to take it down a bit before more rain comes?” Yep, and if that doesn’t work, I suppose the unions could just picket the rain.

The climate arguments are so simplistic and stupid that mainstream voters surely could not swallow them, no matter how ­disenchanted they are with the government.

Still, if they do, it will only ­confirm that the climate is the least of our problems.