AND so the great global warming scare dies.
Around Australia,
bruised taxpayers will ask each other: "What the hell was that about?"
The 10 signs of the death of the scare are unmistakable. Now it's time to hold the guilty to account.
Just why did we spend the past year paying the world's biggest carbon tax, which drove our power bills through the roof?
Why were our children forced to sit through multiple screenings of Al Gore's dodgy scare-flick
An Inconvenient Truth?
Why did we scar the most beautiful parts of our coast with ludicrously expensive windfarms?
And
why did so many people swallow such bull, from the British Climatic
Research Unit's prediction that "children just aren't going to know what
snow is" to ABC science presenter Robyn Williams' claim that 100m rises
in sea levels this century were "possible, yes".
Yes, we may yet see some warming resume one day.
But we will
be wiser. We have learned not to fall so fast for the end-of-the-world
sermons of salvation-seekers and the tin-rattling of green
carpetbaggers.
And here is why.
1st sign: The world isn't warming
Yes, the planet warmed about 0.7 degrees last century, but then halted.
Professor
Richard Lindzen, arguably the world's most famous climate scientist,
has argued for two years that "there has been no warming since 1997".
Others date the pause as late as 2000.
Even the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted in its latest draft
report that while its usual measurements of global temperature found
some warming trends since 1998, "none of these are statistically
significant".
2nd sign: The warming models are wrong
The
weekend papers screamed alarm: "The level of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere has surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in
human history."
But wait. Lots more carbon dioxide, but no more warming? This isn't what we were told to expect.
See,
predictions the world is heating dangerously are based on mathematical
models of how the climate is meant to work. Add our emissions to the
equation, and scientists are meant to figure how much the world should
warm. But as Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and
Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a US
Congressional committee last month, those models guessed too high, and
didn't predict pauses in warming longer than 17 years.
Ed Hawkins,
of the University of Reading, found the global temperature since 2005
on the very lowest end of the widest range predicted by influential
climate models.
3rd sign: Warming disasters aren't happening
In
2007, Chief Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery predicted "even the rain
that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems".
But it did.
In 2001, the IPCC predicted "milder winter
temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms". But the US National Snow
and Ice Data Center this year tried to claim global warming had now
increased snowstorms in the US.
In 2008, Greens leader Bob Brown
claimed data showed "drought is the new norm across Australia's greatest
foodbowl", the Murray-Darling basin. But the drought quickly broke.
Same
story with so many other scares. Al Gore was wrong - the critical
glaciers of the Himalayas are not vanishing, with Bristol University
researchers now finding "negligible mass loss". Nor are we getting more
cyclones, bigger floods, worse diseases or greater famines, as some
predicted.
4th sign: People are relaxing
People are now less prone to panic, as a Lowy Institute poll confirmed.
In
2006, two in three Australians thought global warming was so serious we
should act now, even if it cost us plenty. Five years later, just one
in three Australians thought that.
5th sign: The rest of the world is chilling, too
The
Gillard Government told us it was not ahead of the world with its
carbon tax. Other countries were just as scared of global warming and
keen to stop it.
Rubbish. The US still won't agree to a national
carbon tax, because voters won't wear it. China, the world's biggest
emitter, doesn't have one either.
And Europe, home of the world's
biggest carbon trading system, is now so broke and bored with global
warming that the price of its permits has fallen to under $5, a fraction
of our own $23 a tonne, leaving us looking like mugs.
Blog with Andrew Bolt
6th sign: Even Labor hardly seems to care now
If
the Gillard Government still believed "climate change is the great
moral challenge of our generation", would it have tied our own carbon
trading system from 2015 to Europe's, so permits could fall as
pathetically low as $5?
Would it now be considering hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to green schemes in tomorrow's Budget?
7th sign: A bit of warming seems good for us
Global
production of wheat, rice and corn have all doubled since 1970, when
man-made global warming is said to have really taken off.
Perhaps
it's because of better farming. But more warming also means more rain in
most places, and more carbon dioxide means more plant food.
8th sign: Warming seems worth the price of getting richer
More
carbon dioxide is what we get when lots more people become rich,
helping themselves to more electricity and all things that use it.
That
is why China's carbon dioxide emissions soared as it dragged hundreds
of millions of people out of poverty. China now produces a quarter of
the world's man-made gases and rising. It's the price of progress.
9th sign: "Stopping" warming isn't working
Australians pay a $9 billion-a-year carbon tax and billions more in subsidies for "green" technology.
If
we keep paying these billions for the next seven years, what difference
will we make to the world's temperature by the end of the century?
Australia's
Professor Roger Jones, a warmist, says no more than 0.0038 degrees, and
that's even assuming the climate models are right.
10th sign: Sceptical scientists now get a hearing
In 2007, ABC staff protested when the ABC decided to finally show one documentary questioning the warming scare,
The Great Global Warming Swindle.
The ABC compromised. The screening was given a hostile introduction and was followed with an even more hostile panel session.
That's how hard it was for sceptical scientists to get a hearing.
That wall is now breaking. Dissent is being heard, with Professor Ian Plimer's sceptical
Heaven and Earth alone selling more than 40,000 copies here.
Yes, the world may start warming again. Yes, our emissions may be partly to blame.
But, no, this great scare is unforgivable. It's robbed us of cash and, worse, our reason.
Thank God for the 10 signs that this madness is over.
heraldsun.com.au 13 May 2013
Once again the Australian government has fraudulently extruded finances from the masses under false science.
Juila Gillard's corrupt government should be expelled.