Yasi: media madness

Stirring up the gullible

TC Yasi has brought all the gullible hysterics out of the closet, especially in the Fairfax press, which has had a field day cynically cashing in on the oh-so-obvious link to “climate change”. Mike Carlton first, whose ranting piece oh-so-wittily entitled “Flat earthers [that’s us, by the way – Ed], it’s time for a cold shower”, sums up the idiocy of the warmists who have no concept of Australia’s (or the planet’s) climate history:

PARDON me for pointing out the bleedin’ obvious but for those who have not been paying attention much of the planet has been devastated by extraordinary weather in the past year.

We have had our floods in eastern Australia and, as the doughty Anna Bligh called it, the most terrifying cyclone of all [since the last one, that is – Ed]. Floods have also swept China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and southern Africa, killing thousands and leaving tens of millions homeless.

Kenya is suffering a long drought that threatens widespread famine. A vast area of South America is also in severe drought, although record January rains in Brazil triggered mud slides that killed more than 700 slum dwellers near Rio de Janeiro.

Massive and unseasonally early snow storms pummelled Europe and North America before Christmas, taking more lives, and this week again the US has been hammered by what the US National Weather Service called ”a historic killer blizzard”.

Given this catalogue of global disaster, would now be a good time for the climate change flat-earthers to shut up and listen, do you think? Just for a day or two, or even five minutes?

They won’t, of course. The global warming denialists ignore the great body of world scientific opinion. When the Queensland catastrophe leaves the headlines the local lot will be at it again, barfing up their crackpot notions. (source)

What more can you say about that? Life is too short. Next up is The Age, or Pravda on the Yarra as it is less than affectionately known, writing a sombre editorial about how we have “created a fierce new climate”, and using the clever trick of claiming that they are not making a link to climate change, and then immediately make a link to climate change!

THE debate has already begun over whether climate change and global warming caused cyclone Yasi, or somehow made it worse. It is an oversimplification. No direct link could ever be proved. This week is likely to see the longest sustained period of temperatures above 30 degrees since records have been kept. Is that proof climate change is happening? By itself, no, it is not. Weather statistics cannot prove a link. But as the government’s adviser on climate change, Ross Garnaut, says, as global warming continues, larger cyclones will become more frequent. There will be more cyclones, and more of them will be as big as Yasi. There will be more long hot spells. Australia has just emerged from a long drought. There will be more of those, too, and longer ones, as weather becomes harsher around the world. The extreme events seen in the past 12 months in Europe and the US will become more common. Even if, as seems rather unlikely now, the world manages to keep the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere below its current target of 450 parts per million, the world’s average temperature will still rise 2 degrees, with untold environmental consequences. (source)

Again, because man-made global warming is the current scare, and because The Age is desperate to push the climate change agenda, it rushes to link it to current events, ignoring the obvious fact that more severe events like this have happened in the past. I guess if they had happened in the early 1970s, The Age would have linked them to global cooling. They always need to blame something – they just don’t understand that as the saying goes “shit happens” and has done so for thousands of years.

Even The Australian isn’t immune:

Meanwhile, as attention returns to the immediate dangers of these natural climatic systems, there is more trouble on the horizon because of global climate change. Scientists stress that a single event such as Yasi cannot be attributed to global warming.

However, Walsh says sea surface temperatures in tropical waters, typically about 27C, will continue to rise, maintaining a 50-year warming trend due to global climate change.

However, air in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures currently reach about -50C, will warm more rapidly, and this will decrease the temperature gradient between the sea and the atmosphere, lessening the frequency of tropical cyclones.

“In the Australian region, the prediction is for a decline in the number of tropical cyclones, but the most intense cyclones are likely to become even more intense,” he says. (source)

So whatever happens, be it more frequent cyclones, less frequent cyclones, more intense cyclones, less intense cyclones, you can be sure of one thing. Man-made climate change is the only explanation. The belief is that climate is static and only man-made influences can possibily change it – the reality is that climate change happens for a whole raft of natural reasons, but those are studiously ignored…

And The Oz also regurgitates an AAP scare piece as well:

QUEENSLANDERS should brace for more ferocious storms and floods in the wake of Cyclone Yasi, climate researchers say.

Warmer temperatures are expected to produce more intense torrential downpours, particularly in the state’s tropical north.

“For Queensland, this is likely to spell storms and floods of increasing ferocity over a greater part of the state,” The Climate Institute says in a fact sheet released today.

The think tank’s chief executive John Connor is calling for urgent measures to arrest global warming as north Queensland recovers from the category five cyclone.

“Sadly, Australia must prepare for more of these types of catastrophic events and even greater extremes as climate change drives more frequent and more intense wild weather,” he said. (source)

The Climate Institute isn’t a think tank, it’s an environmental advocacy group which has made up its mind on climate change, which, like The Age, demonstrates that it has no concept of history, believing that what we have seen in the last few weeks is somehow “unprecedented”.

But the public aren’t buying the hype any more. It’s telling that all five letters in The Australian’s Talking Point are critical of Ross Garnaut’s latest pronouncments:

ROSS Garnaut tells us that climate change has played a large part in the recent extreme weather events in Queensland.

There is nothing to support this scientifically. It is more scaremongering and pressuring for a repressive, controlling carbon tax. Some could equally conclude that the weather events are due to Australia and Queensland having leaders that are openly atheist and are being punished by God.

The proof for either conclusion comes down to personal perception.

And for today’s best rebuttal of all the hysterical Yasi nonsense, head to Andrew Bolt’s column:

IT HADN’T even hit yet, and already a gibbering horde was shrieking that Cyclone Yasi proved we’d warmed the world.

There was Christine Milne, of course, deputy leader of the Greens, the most deceitful party to shame Parliament. How fast she flapped up the microphones to crow: “It is a tragedy of climate change.”

Then there was ABC Melbourne 774 host Jon Faine, snapping that sceptics should finally “join the dots”, and inviting alarmist scientist Graeme Pearman to say we’d never had such cyclones before.

Oh, and here comes John Hewson, the former Liberal leader and sniffer of business opportunities, saying warmists had predicted “more frequent cyclones” and “that’s what we’re seeing”.

John, give up the green, mate. The colour doesn’t suit and that market’s set to tank.

Add to them the Gillard Government’s warming guru, Professor Ross Garnaut (actually an economist), who groaned that “a warming climate does lead to intensification of these sorts of extreme climatic events that we’ve seen in Queensland”, and “you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

Wrong, Ross. We have actually seen all this before, and worse. Nothing new here at all, expect this shameless scare-mongering.

But the trouble is that we no longer remember our past, and that’s what the warmists are exploiting: our deep forgetting.

Read it all.