ClimateMadness

Climate of fear dooms rational decision-making


JUDITH SLOAN


Last month I wrote a column about overblown environmental prophecies that pique the attention of the progressive media, particularly during quiet news periods.

You know the sort of thing: parts of Sydney will become uninhabitable in the coming decades. The rise in sea levels will be even bigger than expected, with parts of Melbourne to be flooded out this century. These dubious projections were picked up by a small number of media outlets.

Mind you, there have been some similar doozies when it comes to epidemiological predictions. Last year, one academic had the number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia at 138,000. Another estimate put the figure at 250,000.

The ABC’s Norman Swan had the number of cases in Australia at between 70,000 and 80,000 for just April last year.

Given that the actual numbers have been tiny fractions of these estimates — just more than 900 deaths and less than 29,000 cases in total — you may think an apology is in order. But doomsayers tend not to apologise.

In the main, the purpose of putting out truly scary forecasts is not to be accurate but to induce responses — preferably the responses they advocate. They want people to be scared. They want governments to take notice. They want bureaucrats to take their chilling projections into account when making decisions and advising ministers. And here’s the tragic thing: it works. While those proselytisers standing on the boxes in Hyde Park corner declaring the end is nigh provided good theatre but were easy to ignore, these modern-day doomsayers mean business.

Take the famous prediction that mammalogist Tim Flannery made in 2007, that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”. Just a few years later it was clear this was utterly wrong. Indeed, I’m told residents of Tully in Queensland — a very wet place — now call inches of rain “Flanneries”.

But here’s the key: Flannery’s bravado contributed to real impacts. In particular, the Victorian government was dissuaded from constructing any new dams, including one in Gippsland that could also aid flood mitigation, but invested instead in a ruinously expensive desalination plant.

This plant has never been needed since it was completed at extraordinary cost. Victorians continue to pay for its existence — more than $600m a year — because of the take-or-pay arrangements in the contract.

The desal plant has been turned on from time to time for political purposes, but that’s about it. Rats have eaten through the pipes and costly repairs have been required. It was recently flooded out. Now that’s ironic.

When it came to the Brisbane floods of 2011, the failure of the managers of the Wivenhoe Dam to release water earlier in the year was one factor contributing to the devastating outcome.

Obviously these examples were not Flannery’s errors but those of the Victorian government and the dam operators, but it’s not a stretch to imagine his words — the dams will never fill again — must have been ringing in their ears. Is it surprising their professional judgment was impaired?

Then we have all the predictions of rising sea levels and the impact this will have on properties close to the coast. This is notwithstanding that some of the strongest climate change advocates are more than happy to live in expensive waterfront houses.

Local officials have taken up this cause with gusto, egged on by some Green-left council members. Restrictions have been placed on developments and values of properties have been reduced in some cases. Rarely is any distinction made between localised erosion and the presumed impact of climate change.

In Victoria, local governments have been instructed to take into account a rise of 0.8m in sea levels by 2100 when considering planning applications. It is being proposed that this number be raised to 1.1m. But one council in western Victoria has got ahead of the game. The Moyne Shire uses a sea level rise of 1.2m by 2100 in its coastal strategy.

That a country such as The Netherlands is able to survive and thrive with land below sea level and the possibility of various engineering solutions are rarely taken into account.

Of course, local government actions go well beyond restricting developments because of presumed rising sea levels. In the Melbourne CBD, with its ostensibly pro-business mayor, the city is completely hostile to cars, with bike lanes turning once wide twolane roads into choked, singlelane thoroughfares.

The insurance companies also have got into the climate change game by warning us all of the potential damage caused by extreme weather events and the need to raise premiums to cover this eventuality.

This linking just might be a convenient excuse to put up prices and become more profitable given that extreme weather events, worldwide, have not become more common. Indeed, there is evidence that the incidence of cyclones, for instance, has declined in many parts of the world.

A careful reading of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports points to only low to medium confidence in the future path of extreme weather events. But promoters and followers of the climate change cause tend not to worry about details: they probably don’t even bother to read the dense and lengthy periodic reports put out by the IPCC.

(Here’s a warning: it’s not enough to read the executive summaries of the reports; the hands of other authors, possibly not trained in science, are easy to detect.)

There’s also the recycling religion. Apart from a small number of products — aluminium cans and possibly lithium car batteries

— the most efficient and environmentally sensitive means of dealing with rubbish is to use wellmanaged landfills.

But that doesn’t meet the requirements of the climate change urgers, including the CSIRO. (Check out its recent abysmal report on the circular economy, a current trendy term.)

For some media outlets, doomsaying climate prophecies no doubt attract readers, particularly if it is linked with the evils of capitalism. Indeed, a few hot days are now regularly reported on as if they are newsworthy. That’s what summer throws up.

The more fundamental problem is that too many ill-advised government decisions are made on the basis of dubious projections while ignoring the scope for offsetting actions and adaptation. Mind you, there has never been a better time for unelected, activist bureaucrats.