Caravan of gloom slowing down
Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
April 02, 2014
REALLY, if journalists must terrify us about the end of the world, they shouldn’t be this damn lazy.
Take the ABC, which on Monday waved a vague arm in the general direction of the planet: “Climate change will impact everything everywhere.” Come on, guys. That’s not even trying.
Put some pep into it. If the world really is ending I want gory details. I want screaming. I want children held up to the pitiless sky by wailing mothers as fathers curse their fate. But, no, even reporters of The Age, Australia’s most fervent global warming newspaper, sounded listless this week as they promoted the latest scare-report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Irreversible and severe damage is to be inflicted on the planet from climate change,” plodded writer Tom Arup before he sighed. “I know, this does feel familiar doesn’t it? You are a little bored, I can sense your eyes glazing over.”
But that’s odd. If you were told your children would soon die in a ghastly fireball, you wouldn’t be yawning. Not if you believed it. And death and doom is exactly what we’re told to expect.
Take Professor Helen Berry, a University of Canberra health academic who helped write this IPCC report and told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Unless we get control of (this warming), it will mean our extinction eventually.”
Extinction? Yes, indeed. Two other IPCC co-authors, Australians Tony McMichael and Colin Butler, agreed “human-driven climate change poses a great threat ... perhaps even to human survival.” Gosh, that’s stuff you usually get from street preachers in sandwich boards black with quotations from the Book of Revelation: “There were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”
Professor James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory of a living planet, used to do that apocalypse shtick, too. In 2006, he thundered: “Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” But Lovelock now admits he and alarmists Tim Flannery and Al Gore just lost their heads and the warming scare is a beat-up. “It’s become a religion,” he said last week, “and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” [At least not Flannery's. Ed.]
How true, as we saw again this week. How many journalists did you hear this week mindlessly repeat the IPCC’s latest claim that “no one will be untouched by climate change”? How few did you hear add that past IPCC predictions of warming catastrophe proved hopelessly wrong and the world’s atmospheric temperatures had shown no real warming in 16 years?
Instead, watch them again buy the latest IPCC claims that we really are warming the planet dangerously. Example: the ABC’s 7.30 asked a key IPCC author, Professor Chris Field, to identify “the changes to the climate that have already occurred”. Field gave as his first example the “impacts on food systems” which sure surprised me. You see, back in 2001 the IPCC was already banging on about how warming would “adversely affect wheat and, more severely, rice productivity in India”, only to see India repeatedly break harvest records. In fact, world harvests of three major crops — maize, wheat and rice — continue to grow.
True, Field admitted to the ABC that, yes, “year-on-year, yields have increased by something like two per cent”.
But then he claimed: “For at least two of the world’s major food crops, wheat and maize (corn), the increases in yields year-on-year have slowed, partly as a consequence of climate change.” Oh, really?
That slowing is not obvious from recent record harvests and it’s not obvious either to Andrew Lake, head of Pristine Forage Technologies and author of peer-reviewed papers on crop yields.
“There is not the slightest supportable evidence of a global downturn in actual yield increases,” says Lake, a former chief scientist who investigated crops for the South Australian Research and Development Institute.
“In fact, the rate of increase has been the same for at least 30 years; at 33kg/ha per year.” Lake says that suggests the very opposite to the IPCC’s scare: man’s emissions of carbon dioxide, a plant food, mean “future global food security is being enhanced”.
“That an increasingly idiotic non-science nonsense consensus would seek to have us believe otherwise is nothing short of an alarming abuse of scientific process and analysis.” But the great caravan of IPCC alarms has now moved on again. It will return, of course, with another end-of-world sale of scares, but buyers next time will be even warier.
They bought that cheap stuff last time and see how it keeps falling to pieces.
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