Tim Flannery, an expert in bones, has made a fortune from books and lectures warning that we face global warming doom. He scared us so well that we last year made him Australian of the Year.
Flannery predictions.
March – Water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.
Fact - Adelaide’s reservoirs are 75 per cent full just weeks before 2009.
June last year – Flannery warned Brisbane’s water supplies are so low the need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.
Fact – 18 months later its dams are 46 per cent full after Brisbane’s wettest spring in 27 years !!
In 2005 – Flannery predicted Sydney’s dams could be dry in just two years.
Fact – three years later its dams are 63 per cent full, not the keast because June last year was its wettest since 1951!!
In 2004 Flannery said Global warming would cause such droughts there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century’s firt ghost metropolis.
Fact – Perth now has the lowest water restrictions of any state capital thanks to its desalination plant and dams that are 40 per cent full after the wettest November in 17 years.!!
Lesson – this is truly a land of “drought and flooding rains”. Distrust a professional panic merchant who predicts the first but ignores the second!!
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PREDICTION TWO – Our reef will die.
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Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of Queensland University, is Australia’s most quoted reef expert. He’s advised business, green and government groups, and won our rich Eureka Prize for scares about our reef. He’s chaired a $20 million global warming study of the World Bank.
In 1999 Hoegh-Guldberg warned that the Great Barrier Reef was under pressure from global warming, and much of it had turned white.
In fact he later admitted the reef had made a “surprising” recovery.
In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 percent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die “within a month”
In Fact, he later admitted this bleaching had “a minimal impact”
In 2007, he warned that the temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were again bleaching the reef.
Fact – The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network last week said there had been no damage to the reef caused by climate change in the four years since its first report, and veteran diver Ben Cropp said this week that in 50 years he’d seen none at all.
Lesson - Reefs adapt, like so much of nature. Learn again that scares make big headlines and bigger careers.
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PREDICTION THREE – Goodbye North Pole.
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In April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt.
“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time “ claimed Dr David Barbour of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free. “It’s hard to see how the system may bounce back” (this year) fretted Dr Ignatious Rigor, of Washington University’s polar science centre. Tim Flannery also warned “this may be the Arctic’s first ice free year”, and the ABC and Age got reporter Marian Wilkinson to go stare at the ice and wail: “Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes’
Fact – The Arctic’s ice cover was almost 10 per cent above last years great low, and has refrozen rapidly since. Meanwhile sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Been told either cool fact?
Yet Barber is again in the news this month predicting an ice free Arctic now in six years. Did anyone ask him how he got his last prediction wrong?
Lesson – The media prefers hot scares to cool truths. And it rarely holds its pet scaremongers to account.
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PREDICTION FOUR – Beware huge winds.
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Al Gore sold his scary global warming film, An inconvenient Truth, shown in almost every school in the country, with a poster of a terrible hurricane.
Former US president Bill Clinton later gloated: “It is now generally recognised that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming.. it’s going to lead to more hurricanes”
Fact – There is still no proof of a link between any warming and hurricanes. Australia is actually getting fewer cyclones, and last month researchers at Florida State University concluded that the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years.
Lesson – Beware of politicians riding the warming bandwagon.
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PREDICTION FIVE – Giant hailstones will smash through your roof.
Ross Garnault a professor of economics, is the Guru behind the Rudd Government’s global warming policies.
He this year defended the ugly curved steel roof he’d planned at the rear of his city property, telling angry locals he was protecting himself from climate change: “Severe and more frequent hailstorms will be a feature of this change” He said.
Fact even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits “decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne…”
Lesson – Beware also of government advisers on that warming wagon
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PREDICTION SIX – No more skiing
A bad ski season three years ago – right after a great one – had The Age and other alarmists blaming global warming. The CSIRO, once our top science body, fanned the fear by claiming resorts such as Mt Hotham and Mt Buller could lose a quarter of their snow by 2020.
Fact - this year another boom one for skiing with both covered in snow five weeks before the season started. What’s more a study this year in the Hyrological Sciences Journal checked six climate models, including one used by the CSIRO. It found they couldn’t even predict the regional climate we’d had already: “Local model projections cannot be credible…” It also confirmed the finding of a study last year in the International Journal of Climatology that the 22 most cited global warming models could not “accurately explain the (global) climate in the recent past”
As for predicting the future….
Lesson – The CSIRO’s scary predictions are near worthless.
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PREDICTION SEVEN – Perth will bake dry
The CSIRO last year claimed Perth was “particularly vulnerable” and had a 90 per cent chance of getting less rain and higher temperatures. “there are not many other parts of the world where the IPCC has made a prediction that a drop in rainfall if highly likely” it said.
Fact – Perth has just had its coldest and wettest November since 1991.
Lesson – As I said, don’t trust the CSIRO’s model or its warnings.
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PREDICTION EIGHT – Islands will drown.
The seas will rise up to 100meters by 2100 claims ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams. Six meters, suggests Al Gore. So lets take in “Climate Refugees” from low-lying Tuvalu, says federal labour. And ban coastal development, says the Brumby Government.
Fact – while the seas have slowly risen since the last ice age, before man got gassy, thev’ve stopped rising for the last two, according to data from the Jason –1 satellite. “There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rises” the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute declared last month.
Lesson – Trust the data, not the politicians.
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PREDICTION NINE – Britain will swelter.
The British Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, on of the top centres of man made global warming faith. In April it predicted: “The coming summer is expected to be a “Typical British summer…”
Fact – In August it admitted: “(This) summer….has been one of the wettest on record across the UK.” IN September it predicted: “The coming winter (is) likely to be milder than average.
Fact – Winter has been so cold that London had its first October snow in 74 years – and on that day Parliament voted to fight “global warming”.
Lesson – If the Met can’t predict the weather three months out, what can it know of the climate 100 years hence?
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PREDICTION TEN – We’ll be hotter
Speaking of the Met, it has so far predicted 2001,2002,2004,2005,and 2007 would be the world’s hottest or second hottest year on record, but nine of the past ten years it predicted temperatures too high.
Fact – The Met this month conceded 2008 would be the coldest year this century. That makes 1998 still the hottest year on record since the Medieval Warm Period some 1000 years ago. Indeed, temperatures have fallen since around 2002.
As Roger Pielke Sr, Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University’s Atmospheric Science, declared this month: “Global warming has stopped for the last few years”
Lesson – Something is wrong with warming models that predict warming in a cooling world.
------------------------------- _________________ Kombis Keep you Younger
Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 6:00 am Post subject: Damn those facts
There are those who must be getting really pissed that the facts keep undermining there contention.
I don't suppose the thought of reviewing their stance in view of the facts has entered their myopic mind.
Facts are usefull if they are taken in context. Both sides need to reflect that although it may be nice to win an arguement it may also be to ones disadvantage if the win happens to be flawed and something sneaks up to bite them on the bum later.
Anyone with their head up their arse has an inherent difficulty in discussing the beauty of sunlight. [ just a quip. Im definately not having a go at anyone]
cheers
col
I tend to think in a logical, scientific manner - and therefore I always seek more information to shape my opinions, which tend to change with the flow of information....
With climate change, the only way to know whether it is a misconception or otherwise is time.... but some arguments suggest time itself may be an issue....
At the moment, my logic says that the risks of not acting are greater than the risks of acting. The risks of acting are (generally) economic costs; the risks of not acting are far more worrisome..... so to me the response is clear-cut. If it is later shown that the effort was wasted or unnecessary, then the lessons learned will still be valuable. _________________ ....Woz
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[ just a quip. Im definately not having a go at anyone]