I am indebted to blogger
Tim Blair for pointing out one of the most deranged pieces of
science-fiction masquerading as journalism about Australia I have
yet read, “Climate
Change and the End of Australia,” by someone called Jeff
Goodell in Rolling Stone magazine.
The article runs to nearly 7,000 ill-informed,
panic-mongering words, but I will spare you all but the gist of it.
It may stand as a neat, clinical example of
eco-apocalypse-mongering, eco-nutty hysteria, bad research, and the
eco-left’s divorce from cognitive reality.
Under the shrieking headline “Climate Change and the End
of Australia” the article demands: “Want to know what global
warming has in store for us? Just go to Australia, where rivers are
drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the
continent …”
It goes on: “I have come to Australia to see what a
global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations …
“
Of all the world’s nations, Australia is the
“most vulnerable”? More vulnerable than, say, Egypt, completely
dependent on the Nile? Or Holland, much of which is below sea level
and is vulnerable to floods? Or that darling of the ecological doom
brigade, the allegedly sinking Maldives? The article goes on to
invoke: “The sense that Australia — which maintains one of the
highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet — has summoned
up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere.”
Climate gods? In my years as science and environment
roundsman for a metropolitan Australian paper, I thought I’d heard
every conceivable specimen of ecological idiocy, hysteria, and
junk-science, but climate gods are a new one. Somebody better get
Richard Dawkins onto them. The talk of “per capita carbon
footprints” is meaningless, since Australia has a very small
population for its size.
“Australia is the canary in the coal mine,” says David
Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne.
“What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can
expect to see in other places in the future.”
Borrowing from Tim Blair, you mean, like the record wheat
crops we are having at present?
Goodell also claims to be able to read Australians’ minds,
claiming Yasi (a storm) “seems to embody the not-quite-conscious
fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global
warming.”
Further, he claims “The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves
as the country’s breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought,
and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable,
raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food
exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming
decades.”
This is total nonsense. The rainfall patterns of Australia
have been studied continually since the country was first settled,
and farmers, as elsewhere, know to farm within certain rainfall
lines. A few months ago I went up the Murray River on a
paddle-steamer. From the beginning, the great problem for
Australian farmers has not been to grow enough food but to find
markets for their surplus production.
“The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to
the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40
years.”
The imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef has been
predicted with tedious regularity for more than a century. I’ve
been there, too, and it looks quite healthy. It the oceans were
getting warmer, this would actually promote coral
growth.
“Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala
bears [sic — they are not bears] face extinction in
the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are
shooting themselves in despair.”
Actually, farming conditions are the best they have been
in 20 years.
Then we are warned: “What is likely to vanish — or be
transformed beyond recognition — are many of the things we think
of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas …
“
It would certainly be interesting to see koalas
“transformed beyond recognition.”
I have mentioned twice before in these pages in the last
few weeks that the Murdoch press is being targeted by the left and
by the Australian Labor Government. By some strange coincidence the
pattern is repeated here: “Murdoch’s papers also failed to point
out that the more coal the country burns and exports, the fiercer
its hurricanes are likely to become.”
The established connection between coal-burning and
hurricanes is non-existent. Most of Australia’s exported coal goes
to China, anyway. The Murdoch press’s coverage of environmental
issues has been thorough and professional.
It has been calculated that Australia is responsible for
just over 1 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, quite
apart from the fact that carbon-dioxide is both harmless and vital
to plant growth. We could probably do with a lot more of
it.
Elsewhere I have quoted Oswald Spengler, writing in 1932.
Yes, 1932, about 80 years ago: “In a few decades most of the great
forests will have gone, to be turned into newsprint, and climatic
changes have been … thereby set afoot which imperil the
land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have
been extinguished …”
The article concludes with the self-indulgent
pretentiousness apparently inescapable in this type of writing: “We
walk for a while, watching all the happy people strolling along the
boardwalk and drinking wine in cafes and surfing the waves. The sun
is shining, and everything is lovely. Too bad that it all has to
go.”
And in his report of the matter Tim Blair concludes: “Too
bad he had to show up. Bye, Jeff.”
