Dead Wrong

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS, being the settled bunch they are, have decreed with a degree of certainty lesser soothsayers would not dare match that sweaty and premature death awaits a good many more of us than would be the case if only temperatures could be kept at current levels. 

Without international action on climate change to limit temperature rises to 2C, the number of predicted temperature-related deaths in Australia is predicted to rise from just over 6000 in 2020 to about 10,000 in 2070.

Such wisdom is very hard to doubt, as it is more of Tim Flannery’s handiwork and he is widely recognised as being incapable of error, even when he is wrong. Still, those numbers do give you pause to wonder if, before Flannery & Co. go back to tweaking their computer models, they might be well advised to purchase a simple a pocket calculator and a copy of some recent Bureau of Statics projections.

In 2020, according to the ABS, Australia will be home to some 30 million people, of which Flannery insists roughly 6000 will be carried off by dengue fever and other curses that thrive in the heat. By 2070, the same ABS projection posits a likely population of between 46 million and 54 million, depending on which curve you choose to track.

So let’s see how that works out: 6000 deaths per 30 million means a 1-in-5000 chance of being done in by nasty weather as of 2020.

And 10,000 deaths in a 2070 population of 54 million? Well that comes in at 1-in-5400 climate casualties.

So the warmer it is, at least by Flannery’s reckoning, the safer and healthier we will be.

Even if you take the middle curve (forget the lowest one, which is nonsense) and go with a projected population of just 47 million, the mortality rate is only slightly worse – a 1-in-4700 chance of falling victim to climate carnage. Unless they are members of the St Kilda Football Club, those 300 additional lives would be a dreadful pity to see lost. But in the grand scheme of things it is not much of a change. Not much at all.

So we can conclude that climate change is at best a trivial threat to health – and may even be good for us. That’s both official and incontrovertible, vouched for by no less an authority than Tim “my wife is taking notes” Flannery.

Who can doubt a word the great man says?

UPDATE: A very informative comment by an anonymous reader in the comment thread. Very interesting stuff on where they find these people who look at thermometers (and grants) and see only death (and talk of death).

AGGRIEVED UPDATE: Generally speaking, the more grandiose the title of a blog the smaller the mind behind it. Applied Hermeneutics makes the point rather nicely, while its proprietor demonstrates, apart from two-fisted wanking, that other hallmark of the left: an eagerness to lay false charges.

Die Grüne Bierhalle

THERE are many amusing things about the climate change movement, from adherents’ inclination to fret about hermaphrodism in water fleas to the increasingly desperate efforts of its Australian operatives to persuade fellow citizens that higher taxes are a source of much pride, great joy and no pain. Advanced by advocates who earn too little to be of interest to the ATO or, more often, by those who can afford the services of sharp accountants, that proposition has proven so difficult to sell that any distraction from the ruptured narrative is these days welcomed by warmists with open arms. A week or two back, the sideshow du jour were those death threats that weren’t. Now, the dogs having barked, the catastrophist caravan has moved on to the next illusory oasis, which this week happens to be the visiting Viscount Monckton’s observation that many alarmists would have felt very much at home in a Munich beer hall, circa 1922 or so.

The Silly, as you would expect of an organisation staffed by quality journalists, has been particularly active over the past few days in dismissing Monckton as a nutter. Indeed, Jacqueline Maley – whose thin-lipped mugshot suggests either bad teeth or a gridlocked bowel --  was at it again on Saturday morning.

During a speech in the US, he exhibited projector slides of the Nazi flag, possibly even using one of those laser pointery things to emphasise his case — which was that Professor Ross Garnaut, the government's key climate change adviser, is akin to a Nazi.

He even chucked in a German accent and an hilarious "Heil Hitler" to bring the point home.

It's all stuff that never fails to win over a crowd.

This is Fairfax, of course, which has adopted the novel policy of selling newspapers by all but giving them away, so Maley’s summation of Monckton’s address is an extraordinary curiosity. While just about any coffee drinker, ferry rider, hotel guest, university student or gym patron can count on a free copy of her newspaper, Maley demonstrates a miserly attitude toward the distribution of what, from any company not staffed by quality journalists, might be considered relevant information -- Monckton’s address.

Making her omission doubly curious is the snatch of audio preceding the web version of Maley’s little article – an unfiltered, unquestioned PM asserting that, when she said there would be no carbon tax, that pledge was not at odds with her post-election drive to introduce one.

Of Monckton’s speech, however, not a direct quotation nor link. Doubling the mystery is the fact that the speech, all 60 minutes-or-so of it, is readily available, as a curious taxpayer or even a non-quality journalist might have discovered with minimal effort. Click here to view the presentation and, if you are late for a dental appointment or an assignation with a high colonic irrigator, skip to the 50-minute mark for the comments and slide show at the centre of all the fuss.

Just to set things up, Monckton begins the sequence with a quote from the Austrian Corporal’s Mein Kampf: “There will be no body of representatives which makes its decisions through majority vote.” After that comes a selection of authoritarian reveries from various greenshirts, Garnaut amongst them, starting with a statement from something called the Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change. Perhaps appropriately, it is a German panel and it has been blitzing Chancellor Angela Merkel with some unsettling suggestions, amongst them:

The people must accept the absolute pre-eminence of sustainability and must surrender their own wishes. The guarantor of this virtual contract is the directing State.*

The next Monckton quote is sourced to the University of Adelaide’s  Professor David Shearman, who has also advised the IPCC:

Specially trained philosopher-ecologists will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities.

Those interested in Shearman’s deeper thoughts about what is good for the shallow rest of us can find more on page 134 of his book,  The Climate Change Challenge And The Failure Of Democracy. If that whets your appetite, also see this post at Haunting The Library, where there is a further exploration of Shearman’s hope that a cadre of “eco-warriors” will be raised and indoctrinated from childhood to lead the crusade against the carbon curse. This will be needed, apparently, because humanity is an “eco-tumour” best excised by some ebola-type virus capable of carrying off 90% of us. Almost as distressing, as Haunting The Library reports, is the fact that Shearman’s co-authored book was underwritten in part by “the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.”

As his penultimate quote, Monckton finally gets to the Garnaut utterance, the one that set Maley to such a fit of chortling:

  

The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change.

Monckton then notes how Garnaut’s view is an affirmation of the view that little people must “accept authority without question, which is a fascist point of view.”

Doesn’t seem too much of a stretch – unless you happen to be churning out quality journalism for a paper, like the Silly, opposed to too much information.

*NOTE: Linguists might quibble about Monckton’s translation, but it seems a fair rendering of the relevant passage, found at the foot of the right column on page eight of the Council’s report, released in March, 2011.

“Die Weltbürgerschaft stimmt Innovationserwartungen zu, die normativ an das Nachhaltigkeitspostulat gebunden sind, und gibt dafür spontane Beharrungswünsche auf. Garant dieses virtuellen Vertrages ist ein gestaltender Staat, der für die Zustimmung zu Nachhaltigkeitszielen die Bürgerschaft an den zu treffenden Entscheidungen beteiligt.”

Readers who feel they can do a better job are invited to post their favoured translations as comments.