Stridently dark green

Andrew Bolt of The Herald Sun February 18, 2009 12:00am

GLOBAL warming preachers have been crowing over the bushfires in ways not just despicable but dangerous.

Just hours after the first bodies were being recovered, Greens leader Bob Brown was already on television, lecturing us on our sins against the planet.

Rather than confess that green activists had been desperately wrong to oppose fuel reduction burns, Brown was eager to boast that this catastrophe had instead proved them right. About global warming, you know.

"(The fires are) a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority the need to tackle climate change."

Well, actually, Bob, the fires were a sobering reminder of the need to help the victims first, and to fireproof our houses and towns after that.

But Brown was soon to be trumped by far louder crows.

Freya Matthews, a La Trobe University "ecological philosopher", wrote in The Age that there was no doubt these fires were caused by our gases: "This is climate change."

ABC presenters religiously took up this lesson of the day on radio and television and declared -- falsely -- that never had it been this hot. Never had fires burned so fiercely. Global warming was here.

And -- sure enough -- former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, another preacher with no formal training in climate science, outdid all his previous exaggerations by directly blaming our gases for these 200 deaths.

"Let's hope that Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible tragedy, and change our polluting ways before it's too late," he thundered.

Or as historian Jonathan King put it hysterically, again in The Age: "We humans started this war and now the environment is fighting back."

Really? If so, I wonder whose side of this war these preachers are on?

Preaching green sermons over the dead is vile enough, of course, especially when forest experts insist that green policies on forest management helped to kill so many in the first place.

After all, not even the scientists who believe most fiercely in the theory that man is heating the world to hell are blaming the recent heat wave or the fires that followed on global warming.

Hear that even from Melbourne University's Professor David Karoly, the State Government's chief global warming adviser, who conceded: "It is not possible to attribute any single event to climate change."

But there are two more reasons to reject this crowing of the warmists.

First, the planet actually hasn't warmed for a decade, and we've faced even worse conditions than these before -- so should have prepared for these latest bushfires much better. Shouting "global warming" is just a distraction, or even ruse.

Second, blaming global warming doesn't only excuse the governments that should have learned from our past, but could mislead us into spending countless billions on a "solution" that will not spare us another such tragedy.

To explain . . .

What the preachers have seized on to blame the fires on man-made warming is that Melbourne suffered its hottest day on record -- 46.4C -- a week before the flames roared over our towns.

Global warming, right?

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.

As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.

AND despite claims that global warming is now heating this land like never before, Victoria's highest recorded temperature is still the 50.7C measured in Mildura 103 years ago.

South Australia's is also 50.7C, recorded 49 years ago. NSW's is the 50C of 70 years ago. Queensland's is the 49.5C of 37 years ago. Not much recent warming obvious there.

That's the problem with this cherrypicking of one day of weather in one place. It proves nothing except the desperation of the preachers who try to fool you.

In fact, Melbourne started this summer with snow in the mountains, and January's average temperatures were the coolest for the month in five years.

Meanwhile the US state of Maine has just recorded its coldest ever temperature, and Britain is suffering a winter so unusually severe that its National Pensioners Conference has fears one in 12 pensioners could die.

What counts is not some local freak of weather but the global trend -- and what NASA's Aqua satellites have detected is that the world has not warmed for a decade.

Don't just take my word for it. Ask the high priests of warming at The Age, which on Monday ran this attempt to disguise the fact that global warming theory is in trouble: "Last year was the coldest year around the world since 2000 -- yet it was still the 10th hottest since records began in 1850 . . ."

But then there was this other news report last week, under the doom-mongering headline: "Climate change 'worse than expected' ": "Fresh data has shown that greenhouse gas emissions have grown by an average of 3.5 per cent a year from 2000 to 2007 . . . more than three times the 0.9 growth rate in the 1960s . . ."

Sorry for all these figures, but think about those two stories for a second. We're told we're now pumping out triple the greenhouses gases that cause global warming . . . yet the world has stopped warming. Sure, it may start warming again soon. Or not. But global warming theory for now isn't quite working out as we were told.

But I don't just write all this to go nyah-nyah. Normally that's fun, I admit, but too many people are dead for such crowing of my own.

F AR more important is that the global warming prophets who now claim that the fires of Armageddon are here, thanks to our polluting ways, are also trying to make you spend more money than we have on a "solution" that won't actually save us from the next big fire.

Bob Brown, for instance, thinks we should protect ourselves by slashing almost all our emissions -- a near-impossible task that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, yet still not change world temperatures by a flicker, not least because our emissions are minuscule compared to, say, China's.

And Flannery insists "we should cease burning coal conventionally by around 2030" -- something our coal-fired generators say is impossible without driving them out of business and our cities out of power.

All this, simply so Australia sets an example to shame the big emitters into cutting their own far greater gases -- gases which might not actually cause the warming that might already have stopped anyway. And which didn't cause these fires.

Wow. Do you think those colossal green plans would leave you any safer the next time a fire screams out from the bush? Think we'll then be safer from the fires that have regularly ravaged this land since Aboriginal settlement?

Let me see if I can sell you a far smaller plan that would cost no more than, say, $4 billion.

For that money I'd build a fireproof sanctuary in every school in Australia's fire-prone areas, not just to protect the children but to give each community a place of refuge. I'd find the $20 million we need for a warning system to reach every land line and mobile phone in an area threatened by disaster.

I'd subsidise a bunker for every bush home. And I'd finally spend what it takes to make bush roads safer in fires, and to do the fuel reduction burns that every inquiry into every big fire has warned we needed to protect our towns.

WHICH plan would leave you safer, do you think: my $4 billion one or the greens' $100 billion and more to "stop" global warming?

Consult not your fears, but the evidence. Do the sums. And then scorn to shame the warming prophets now crowing, with feathers singed on mountains of ash: "But I'm right, I'm right, I'm right."

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