Rabid doomsayers revel in fear, ignorance and deceit

Leaders who want to change public behaviour and pretend they can vanquish natural threats are using a tired old trick.

A Los Angeles County firefighter, using only hand tools, keeps fire from jumping a fire break at the Bobcat Fire in the Angeles National Forest in California Picture: Getty Images

We know fear and ignorance have a powerful and deleterious influence on human behaviour and we have tended to think that our age of instant knowledge and communications might have rendered them impotent. Now, confronted by pandemic and climate catastrophism, and deceptions, we can see that fear and ignorance are alive and amplified in the digital age.

From the deserted streets and shuttered houses of Melbourne to the Californian towns razed by fire, we see how fear and ignorance do enormous damage and distract us from practical protections. In both cases an ideological approach pretends a natural threat can be eliminated by grand government interventions; and alarmist tricks are used to frighten people into compliance.

No one should pretend that pandemics or wildfires are not worthy of legitimate concern. We know they are age-old natural threats that our ancestors endured repeatedly without the knowledge, contraptions and accoutrements that assist us now.

We need to overcome fear, keep our challenges in perspective, confront our dilemmas with rational approaches and avoid, rather than embrace, panic. We all need leaders that can be calm in a crisis, but increasingly we have leaders advancing political arguments with hysteria and hyperbole

It is instructive that the scare tactics and fearmongering come from those who want to change public behaviour and pretend they can vanquish, rather than manage, natural threats. This is a grand deceit based on a conceit — believing humanity can control the natural environment as though with an app.

Examples of fear and ignorance abound. This week Joe Biden stood in a park near his home in Delaware — while people were still battling devastating wildfires in California and Oregon, and battening down for hurricanes and flooding in Florida and neighbouring states — and read words from a teleprompter, with feeling, into the camera.

“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” he shouted. “If we give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?”

Climate arsonist? This is the feral and unhinged language used by Greens senator Jordan Steele-John in this country while trying to leverage our bushfires for his climate change agenda. But Biden is running for president.

The core case presented here, that re-electing Trump will lead to more bushfires and flooding in the US, is so unscientific, irrational and blatantly false that it would not and could not be supported by any scientist. It calls into question the intellectual capacity of the man delivering the words.

The corollary is that if they elect Biden, Americans will be spared bushfires, hurricanes and floods. This is an insane proposition, made and amplified only to scare people into thinking climate policies can eradicate natural disasters, including an annual bushfire menace that predates human settlement of the American continent.

That public debate should be so base and false in this age of knowledge is perhaps the most frightening revelation of our time. Yet stuff like this is seldom interrogated by mainstream media — it is only those who challenge the catastrophism who have their claims fact-checked.

In a spiteful interview this week on the ABC’s 7.30, Leigh Sales harangued former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how Donald Trump has misled the public “on everything from the coronavirus to climate change” — fair enough, Trump often contradicts himself. Then Sales zeroed in on comments Trump made when visiting the fire-ravaged West Coast this week about how temperatures “will start getting cooler” and how, when challenged on the climate science, the President said he doesn’t think “science knows, actually”.

The easiest and most common game to play is the inane one that amuses Twitter every day; testing the President’s meandering statements against a literal standard not applied to other politicians. Or we could recognise that, banal as it was, Trump was right to say cooler weather will ease the fire situation sooner or later, and that the science about the interplay between climate change, drought, floods and wildfires is far from certain or complete.

In his recent book, Apocalypse Never, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger detailed the latest science on fuel loads rather than climate change being the most telling wildfire inputs. Trump’s typically contrarian and unscripted remarks demonstrated a much closer relationship to reality than the maniacal claims from Biden.

Yet most media report Biden’s lunacy straight, as legitimate rhetoric, while slamming Trump’s reflections as madness. Trump’s arguments centred on forest management and fuel reduction — the pragmatic and proven way to reduce bushfire damage to people and property no matter what happens to climate — while Biden holds out the insulting silliness that his climate policies can relieve people of the fire-and-flood burden.

It is a reprise of the inanity we saw in Australia before, during and after last summer. Journalists even reported the fires were so severe that the bush might never recover. How horrible (note the fear) but diametrically opposed to the reality of how our sclerophyll forests have evolved to be dependent on fire for rejuvenation (note the ignorance).

The disingenuous rhetoric is designed to marshal the masses behind radical climate change policies. Those making rational arguments such as managing fuel, the only fire input we can control, are either ridiculed or given short shrift.

Former climate commissioner Tim Flannery segued from climate alarmism to pandemic pandemonium this week. “But the coronavirus also travels unseen through the great aerial ocean,” he wrote in The Guardian Australia in a testing metaphor, “insinuating itself in lung after lung, killing person after person, until it threatens our health system, economy and society.” Well, the dams are full, so I guess he had to find another angle.

Our early, sensible, national pandemic strategy to flatten the curve, slow the spread and ensure we have the medical capacity to deal with infections has been usurped by state governments determined to see every infection as both a horrific threat to their communities and a blow to their political standing. What began as a task of balancing medical, economic and social impacts has morphed into an obsession with eliminating all infections.

It has been clear since March that only the sick and elderly have much to fear from this virus and we needed to be clever about protecting the vulnerable while allowing society to operate as freely as possible. Absent the most dramatically effective vaccine ever produced in the shortest-ever time, we will eventually have to resort to that approach anyway — it is just that in the meantime we will have inflicted enormous damage on our communities and economies.

Again, the tools to deliver these crazy state policies have been fear and ignorance. In August, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said people needed to “acknowledge that this is a virus that affects everyone” — I guess you could say he has made sure of that.

“It can be deadly and it has been deadly here and around the world in people of all age groups and, indeed, people that are in otherwise good health,” said Andrews, looking to ensure everyone was petrified. Yet the blessed reality is that the young and the healthy, with allowance for the rare exceptions that prove the rule, are virtually immune from serious effects. Fewer than 2 per cent of our deaths have been people under 60, about 80 per cent were over 80 and about 90 per cent of all deceased had comorbidities (heart, immune system or respiratory disease, diabetes and others). About three-quarters of all deaths have occurred in aged-care facilities and overall deaths from all causes in Victoria and nationally are no higher this year than usual.

Despite speaking on the pandemic daily, many politicians fail to share these facts, preferring to create a different impression. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has warned of the “danger on the doorstep” — referring to NSW. “Our borders will remain closed for as long as the risk remains,” she said last month.

In April Andrews said, “No round of golf is worth someone dying.” The premiers keep telling us they are determined to keep their states “safe”.

Yet clearly their states are safe. The coronavirus is a worrying new disease that is highly infectious and, like many ailments, can be life-threatening if it afflicts the old or the sick. Premiers do not say their states are unsafe when there is a severe flu season. They did not say their states were unsafe during swine flu or avian flu or, god forbid, at the height of the HIV-AIDS trauma.

The catastrophists are having one of their best years, even though nothing is ever bad enough for them. They love to predict Armageddon and, if we listen to them, that is exactly what we will get.