The Spectator Australia.
Floods, hurricanes, disaster, disease, drought, rising sea levels: you name it, it’s all there in the latest doom-laden tome from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comes brightly packaged in a Mandy Rice-Davies-style warning of a ‘code red for humanity’. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Devoid of much in the way of what might be labelled ‘evidence’, the report relies instead on ‘high probabilities’ and ‘likelihoods’, all of which form the somewhat shaky foundations for the hyperbole that follows. Yet again, it is our old friend ‘the modelling’ which provides the material for most of the apocalyptic scenarios, bolstered by cherry-picked natural disasters from around the world, of which, as has always been the case, there is no shortage to choose from. The recent floods in Germany and Europe provide riveting pictures, but what is not mentioned is that Europe’s rivers have flooded in the past and will no doubt flood again in the future with or without the input of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, it is the desperate attempt to link natural disasters to increased CO2 emissions that is at the heart of this report. Lacking any genuinely compelling evidence the authors must rely instead on probabilities, the scariest of which frequently and unsurprisingly fall into the ‘low likelihood’ bracket. As the Australian’s apolitical environmental journalist Graham Lloyd points out, ‘It is the high-emissions scenarios that have the greatest potential for bigger storms and tipping point extremes. Analysis shows the high-emissions scenarios that the IPCC says have a low probability dominate the report, with 41.5 per cent of all scenario mentions. The scenarios judged most likely under current trends get less than half of this amount.’

But climate change alarmists have long since dropped any pretence of applying the rigours of scientific scepticism to what is now, in all but name, an infallible religion. Put simply, if you believe in the doctrine of man-made climate change you will find plenty to support your beliefs in the report and if you don’t believe then your questions will be left unanswered.

Laughably, Australian media reports have had to highlight ‘coastal erosion at Collaroy’, ‘beach erosion at Byron Bay’ and ‘smoke casting an orange pall across Sydney’ (all regular events documented for over a hundred years) as proof of climate change in Australia.

Which is why it is so disheartening that with the notable exception of former US President Donald Trump, the political leaders of the developed West have simply ‘taken the knee’ to the climate cult. Rather than arguing from first principles, politicians play along with the notion that ‘the science is settled’ and offer up policy responses designed to satisfy the focus groups and save face at international gabfests.

Nonetheless, full marks to Prime Minister Scott Morrison for pointing out that when it comes to causing increases in CO2, the real villain by a country mile is China. But unless Mr Morrison is prepared to link any future Australian reduction in emissions directly to a similar proportion of immediate reductions by China and India, then the finger-pointing is futile. The bottom line remains that every Australian is being asked to reduce our economic prosperity by transferring wealth to China and elsewhere.

China has in recent days reiterated that it will in no way amend its current settings under the Paris Agreement targets, which leave China free to carry on increasing its carbon emissions for the rest of the decade, at which point it pledges not to reduce them but to maintain them at that heightened 2030 level. Paying lip-service to the IPCC report and by turning up in Glasgow for COP26 in November, as the Prime Minister intends to do, is to acquiesce to this insanity.