Hysteria Heats Up ,00.html 28th September, 2005 Andrew Bolt
WE MUST admit we're in real strife when even Tim Flannery says Hurricane Katrina proves global warming can destroy us.
"These hurricanes have been a catastrophe just waiting to happen," Flannery warned last weekend. We're breeding such disasters by heating the world with our exhausts -- and "these big changes in the atmosphere can threaten civilisation as we know it".
Yes, the end of the world is nigh. But I'm afraid Flannery cannot be ignored as I ignored Greens Senator Christine Milne only last week, for instance, when she said much the same thing.
I can't ignore Flannery when he's a leading paleontologist. When he's so credible that he runs the South Australian Museum. When he's so admired that he's our Australian Humanist of the Year. When he's so influential that his Wentworth Group of scientists convinced the Howard Government the Murray was "dying". When he's so popular that his book The Future Eaters is a best-seller.
So I read the lavish excerpts of his new book, The Weather Makers, in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday.
And I repeat: Flannery cannot be ignored. When even such a man can repeat so many exaggerations, untruths and distortions to "prove" man-made global warming is a menace, reason is dead. Facts no longer matter. Supersbreastion rules.
But let's first state what we know to be true about global warming. Over the past century, the world has warmed, cooled and then warmed again by 0.6C. Most -- but not all -- scientists think carbon dioxide emissions caused some -- but not all -- of this.
The rest is argument -- or a green hatred of our industrialised society.
But where experts in climate doubt, Flannery, an expert in bones, is as sure as a man who has found God. And his faith counts for more than any facts. Check for yourself his wild claims.
Flannery says: For the past 10,000 years, Earth's thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius.
Fact: This is standard green hype to persuade you our climate was stable until we fumed up the world.
In fact, we had a Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300, followed by a Little Ice Age until around 1900. Says Philip Stott, London University professor emeritus of bio-geography: "During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today." It was nice.
Flannery says: By late 2004, my interest had turned to anxiety. The world's leading science journals were full of reports that glaciers were melting 10 times faster than previously thought . . .
Fact: More booga-booga to scare you into believing. But as glacier researcher Roger Braithwaite noted in Progress in Physical Geography, some glaciers are growing and "there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years".
Flannery says: There were also reports of extreme weather events . . .
Fact: There is no agreed link between warming and extreme weather. As a House of Lords committee said in July, after grilling dozens of climate experts, "there is uncertainty and controversy about the underlying data required to substantiate this claim".
Flannery says: As it has warmed over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Nino ever recorded (1997-98), the most devastating hurricanes in 200 years (Mitch 1998, Katrina 2005), the hottest European summer on record (2003) and the first South Atlantic hurricane ever.
Fact: Most powerful El Nino ever? Henry Diaz, research meteorologist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the 1997-98 El Nino was big, but one in 1877-78 was "equal to this one", causing a famine in India that end eight million.
Katrina the "most devastating" hurricane? The US National Climatic Data Centre says "other storms have had stronger sustained winds when they made landfall", including one in 1935. It adds: "The most deadly hurricane to strike the US made landfall in Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900 . . . claiming more than 8000 lives." A century ago.
If anything, hurricanes are weaker. Says the World Meteorological Organisation: "Reliable data from the North Atlantic since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."
Hottest European summer? Warns a study in Nature, "almost any such weather event might have occurred by chance".
First recorded hurricane in the South Atlantic? Yes, but according to records going back just 50 years.
Yet as a paper accepted last month by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society notes: "Globally there has been no increase in tropical cyclone frequency over at least the past several decades . . ." And, besides, "no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behaviour of hurricanes".
Flannery says: There are disturbing signs that hurricanes are becoming more frequent in North America.
Fact: False. "There is no long-term trend in the number of landfalling hurricanes since 1900," says the National Climatic Data Centre.
Flannery says: Australia too is suffering the effects of climate change. Many impacts have been documented, including an increase in the number of very hot days . . .
Fact: Any period has odd weather. Says our Bureau of Meteorology: "Six years: 1954, 55, 56, 59, 71 and 74, stand out as the major flood years of the (20th) century." Were the wet 1950s proof of global warming then, too?
Flannery says: (A)round Alice Springs . . . experienced an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius over the 20th century.
Fact: Tricks with stats. Go further back and you'll see the weather at Alice Springs for much of the 1880s was actually hotter than now. The town even recorded its two hottest days in 1883 (46.7C) and 1879 (46.6C). They weren't so stupid then as to think this proved the world was doomed.
FLANNERY makes many other errors, such as claiming even US President George W. Bush now agrees man-made emissions "caused" global warming. But who cares about the truth? The Age sure didn't in running pages of this unchallenged.
How did Flannery come to write such stuff? Is it because he didn't care enough to check? Or because he -- like so many now -- thinks the truth isn't sacred when the world needs "saving" from wicked humans?
Whatever. We are in danger when myths rule men's minds. You should be scared when even a Flannery seems to lose his reason to our new green gods.
Ed. Evolution has its fair share of "Flannery's" also. Even though science destroys their mulbreastude of theories time and again - no transitional fossils, fabricated exhibits, instant or gradual uncertainty, miscontrued examples like the Pepper moth and fruit fly - if you can get someone like Flannery on to argue up is down for long enough then all the evidence against his idea being a reality somehow de-materialises...intellectual fraud they call it...
-- Jim Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
