Tim Flannery was chosen for his $3,000 a week job as Australia's Climate Change Commissioner for his expertise, his communication skills, and his track record in the competitive business of sounding alarms about the dire consequences of our “carbon polluting” ways. But how can his teachings and preaching ever be tested? Most of his apocalyptic prophesies are projected far enough into the future for him to be well and truly beyond accountability when they are proved right or wrong. When it came to Australia’s rainfall, however, Flannery threw caution to the wind and declared that the apocalypse is now. Read some of his predictions here
If governments hadn’t been swayed by fanatical counselors like Flannery and intimidated by Green politicians, they wouldn’t have wasted billions of our dollars on white elephant desalination plants; but they would have allowed more dams to be built which would have reduced the need for water restrictions when it didn’t rain enough, and reduced the damage from floods when it rained too much.
When it started to rain the Greens quickly recalibrated their spin, claiming that floods as well as droughts are evidence of anthropomorphic climate change – which makes their hypothesis un-falsifiable. If both more rain and less rain verifies it, the only way it would not be verified is if rainfall remained consistent year after year - which really would be an unprecedented climate change in this land “of drought and flooding rains” as the poet Dorothea Mackellar described it a hundred years ago.
Damp Profit of Doom, by John Dawson
.
