Articles Tagged "Joe Fone"

When hurricane Yasi followed massive floods to devastate Brisbane and parts of Queensland earlier this year, many climate alarmists seized upon them as evidence of human-induced climate change. Professor Ross Garnaut, climate adviser to the Australian Government, warned of more climate chaos to come unless Australians drastically cut their greenhouse gas emissions. The “climate risk is set to worsen” he said. Professor Garnaut confidently claimed that “If we are seeing an intensification of extreme weather events now, you ain’t seen nothing yet”. Climate alarmists now routinely interpret every extreme weather event as unmistakeable evidence, even “proof”, of Man’s culpability. But what was so special about cyclone Yasi in February that distinguishes it from the nearly 200 other cyclones that have hit the area since records began in 1864, and the untold extreme weather events before then?

Since climate alarmism is something of a fashion these days, Garnaut is not alone with such dire forecasts. In an interview with Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun recently, Professor Tim Flannery, Australian Climate Commissioner, was so pessimistic he suggested there is no hope to save the planet even if we quit our CO2 habit now. “If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years”, he predicted.

From Garnaut’s alarming claims, and Flannery’s pessimistic outlook, one might imagine that such disasters as Yasi and the Brisbane floods were unique. However Garnaut contradicts Flannery by arguing that “With strong mitigation, we at least rule out, or reduce to low probabilities, the potential for catastrophe”, while Flannery argues that such mitigation efforts will have no effect for a thousand years because it’s already too late.