Have we finally hit peak stupid on climate and Covid?

We have arrived at a point where the elected leader of a highly educated, First World nation can tell people — with a straight face— that he intends to change the climate to a more benign setting so they will no longer be troubled by natural disasters.

A familiar sight in North Street, Windsor, NSW. Picture: John Grainger

Either we have reached peak stupid or it is impossible to contemplate the depth of inanity to which we will sink and the damage it will do to our country. The lack of logic and the deliberate shunning of rational thought in our national debate have reached a level that is obscene or absurd, depending on your mood.

Visiting the flood-devastated Hawkesbury-Nepean region of NSW on Wednesday, Anthony Albanese was asked whether he had any long-term solutions for responding to natural disasters. “Well, we are looking at long-term solutions,” the Prime Minister said. “My government has changed Australia’s position on climate change from day one.”

Instead of falling about the place laughing, the media pack stiff-armed the real world and followed up with more questions based on the fiction that natural disasters are now more common. In keeping with the digital age, nothing that cannot be summarised in a tweet is worth considering, and nothing that happened before the millennial journalists were born can be worth knowing.

Hence the easily accessible flood records of the Hawkesbury-Nepean are ignored. The data demonstrates regular cycles of flood and drought, and much higher floods long before the advent of the internal combustion engine or coal-fired power stations; but politicians and journalists prefer to see the world through the prism of their own recent experience and their commitment to the climate change narrative.

The ABC PM program interviewed Andy Pitman, one of Australia’s leading climate change experts, who previously explained our recent droughts could not be attributed to climate change (before retrospectively adding a qualifier lest he be associated with the sceptics who were quoting him). On PM, on the floods, he said there “isn’t any evidence that it’s climate change” and, despite pleas from reporter David Lipson to draw the climate link, he insisted “these weather events do occur naturally”.

But our politicians and media know better. Any natural disaster or “extreme weather event” is greeted with a chorus blaming climate change, no matter whether the “event” involves heat, cold, water or fire. We are expected to believe that the weather was once more congenial.

We have arrived at a point where the elected leader of a highly educated, First World nation can tell people, with a straight face, that it is his intention to change the climate to a more benign setting so they will no longer be troubled by natural disasters.

If he spruiked this as a commercial venture, he would be prosecuted for misleading advertising and accepting money under false pretences.

Minister for Emergency Services and Resilience and Minister for Flood Recovery Steph Cooke, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrive in the suburb of Richmond during a tour of flood-affected areas on July 6.

Before our country lost its senses, Albanese would have faced a series of matter-of-fact questions after making his claim. How can your climate policies change the climate when global emissions are rising? What possible difference could be made to global climate patterns through fiddling with 1 per cent of global emissions? How do you propose to change an entire ecosystem that has evolved from and adapted to a continent that is a land of droughts and flooding rains? Why do you pretend our weather patterns have suddenly become more threatening when the historical record does not reflect this? Even if you could single-handedly eliminate any anthropogenic climate change, would it not be the case that the Hawkesbury-Nepean would always experience flooding like we have seen this week, and worse?

Instead, most of the media swallowed his phantasmagorical nonsense and The Sydney Morning Herald lauded Albanese in an editorial for calling “a spade, a spade”. He had done nothing of the kind.

Rather, it would be more accurate to say Albanese had said his climate policies would make spades redundant because everything would grow where we wanted it and water would flow only where it was needed. Throw your spades away, he was saying, you will not need them in the thermostatically controlled nirvana of Albanese’s hydroponic Australia.

It is, of course, nonsense to suggest we can eradicate or mitigate natural disasters in this country through our own climate change policies. Anyone with a basic understanding of the scientific reality understands this; even our national chief scientist had to admit that eliminating all our nation’s emissions would have no discernible impact on anyone’s weather.

Even if you accept the alarmist versions of climate change activism, you know that our climate policy objective should be about Australia doing its bit, in concert with other countries, to lower global emissions and limit future human-induced climate distortions. It does not suit the political imperative to be frank about these aims – lest anyone notice the futility of our efforts or that increased worldwide emissions show there has been no gain from our pain.

A debate that is supposed to be about “following the science” turns out to be the opposite. We are fed anti-science, anti-factual lines by a political/media class swept up in the zeitgeist.

Renewable energy and storage can power the world. There will be a green energy jobs bonanza. Electricity will be cheaper. Australia will become a “renewable energy superpower”. Floods will not be so high, nor bushfires so fierce or droughts so dry. Coastlines will no longer erode. If they could throw in an Adelaide Crows premiership, I would sign up.

An SES volunteer stands at the edge of floodwaters in Windsor, Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

The fearmongering about what is happening and the promises to dispense with it all conjure images of some pagan king keeping his people frightened and transfixed. While the Aztecs sacrificed virgins, Albanese (and his red, green, teal and blue comrades) will appease the angry climate by sacrificing affordable, reliable power, and countless jobs and opportunities.

This triumph of global warming rhetoric and virtue signalling over hard reality has led to daft policy priorities and choices. Prompted in part by predictions of “permanent drought” from former climate commissioner Tim Flannery, the governments of NSW, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia spent more than $12bn constructing desalination plants. None of them have ever been needed and they still cost millions of dollars a week to keep on standby lest Flannery’s prognostication ever eventuate.

And while we have overstocked on desal plants, we repeatedly have rejected dam projects including the raising of the dam wall at Warragamba to turn it into a flood mitigation tool that would have prevented or significantly lessened the flooding this week. The higher wall was first proposed and rejected in the 1990s, and three decades later, after objections on environmental and Indigenous cultural grounds, work has not yet begun.

NSW Minister for Western Sydney Stuart Ayres drew attention to the project while the drought extended into 2019 by saying: “Noah built the ark before the flood.” Opponents scoffed at him – there have been four serious floods since.

While the digital media age should, in theory, enable maximum access to factual information and therefore encourage rational and practical policymaking, the opposite seems to be true. The digital age has amplified kneejerk and emotive reactions, encouraged misinformation, accelerated political and media response times, and led to irrational decision-making as politicians bow to the mood of the mob, driven by emotion and a slavish deference to the fashions of the moment.

We see the same in pandemic management where, despite Australia’s high vaccination rates, excellent healthcare and a case-fatality rate of about 0.12 per cent, the hysteria continues. Millions of Australians are subjected to vaccine mandates, not just in health and aged care but also in banking, retail and local government.

Until last week professional and volunteer surf lifesavers in NSW were subjected to a vaccine mandate. This came to light with reports lifesavers had lost their jobs at Bondi Beach because they were not vaccinated – imagine fighting for your life in an ocean rip and worrying whether your rescuer was vaccinated against Covid.

The medical evidence and countless experts have exposed vaccine mandates as redundant. We are one of the most vaccinated populations on the planet and yet the virus is everywhere.

Instead of celebrating our success and moving on, most state governments still impose emergency powers. Western Australia has them locked in until January.

We have politicians, media and some medicos calling for the reintroduction of mask mandates, while people fuss over vaccines for children under five, who face no serious threat from Covid-19. We have lost the plot.

Perhaps the digital age has inverted public debate in a kind of reversal of natural selection. Where once we elected and were led by the smartest and most rational, to whom we outsourced key decisions, we now expose our leadership to constant and instant assessment from the digital mob, whose ignorant and febrile responses drive our leaders in the wrong direction.

We are almost ungovernable, and therefore almost ungoverned. It is likely that all this will get much worse before it improves.

It seems that for a time we will spend all our energies trying to eradicate a virus and entrench perfect weather while our def­ences and economy wither, our most disadvantaged fall behind, and we leave our nation weakened and vulnerable.

Might be time to build an ark.