- From:Herald Sun
- September 23, 2013
TIM Flannery has been sacked. But why haven't journalists who promoted such scaremongers been sacked, too?
When will they pay the price for the most shameful collective failure of journalism in decades?
Flannery's astonishing record of dud predictions, such as his 2007 warning that we'd never again get dam-filling rains, finally caught up with the Chief Climate Commissioner this week.
The Abbott Government sacked him on just its second day, ostensibly to cut costs, and few journalists are defending the global warming alarmist they once hailed as our 2007 Australian of the Year. Damaged goods.
But it's too easy to merely give Flannery the flick now his warming faith is finally crumbling. It's too easy to make him the sole scapegoat after 15 years of no significant rise in global temperature - a hiatus to which the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will on Friday reluctantly admit in its latest report.
More important is to demand accountability from the countless journalists who made heroes of his sort and terrified the public with preposterous scares about a warming that hasn't come.
For years, most in the mainstream media didn't just refuse to question the great global warming scare, but howled down the few who dared to.
Journalists became propagandists, even witch-hunters. And the biggest cabal of them gathered in the ABC.
Four years ago,for instance, I was a panellist on the ABC's Insiders program and mentioned the warming pause.
Fellow panellist David Marr asked me not to refer to it again and then ostentatiously buried his head in a newspaper. La la la la, not listening.
Marr, of course, was a former host of the ABC's Media Watch, which for years, under various hosts, hounded warming sceptics and gave the Flannerys a free pass.
The other panellist was Annabel Crabb, now an ABC host. She, too, demanded we talk about something else, and on another Insiders show, mocked my quoting of scores of studies which showed the warming theory wasn't working out as the likes of Flannery claimed.
"You put a million posts on your blog about some new study from the University of East Bumcrack," she scoffed.
In a debate on the ABC's The Science Show, I faced the same fierce denialism from the ABC's chief science presenter, Robyn Williams, who absurdly insisted we faced sea level rises this century of up to 100m - or about 99.5m more than even most warmist scientists say is likely.
Williams later led a staff revolt to stop the ABC from screening the Great Global Warming Swindle, the only documentary or current affairs show it has ever aired that questioned the warming scare.
Showing such stuff, was "verging on the irresponsible", protested Williams.
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, another ABC science presenter, was this year still insisting Britain's influential Met Office had detected 0.3C of warming since 1997, even after the Met Office itself announced the real figure was just 0.05C.
Former ABC chairman Maurice Newman was right: "There are signs that a small but powerful group has captured the corporation, at least on climate change."
The ABC is not alone, of course. The Age has been even more vindictive. It imposed a near total ban on articles by sceptics and has vilified the most prominent of them.
Most shamefully, it mocked well-known sceptic Christopher Monckton by publishing a close-up picture of the mathematician's protuberant eyes - a symptom of his Graves' disease - under the headline: "Moncky business".
But now the warming pause is so undeniable that even The Age, after 15 years, on Saturday was forced to acknowledge it.
True, its front-page story still had the deceptively scary headline "Warming in danger zone", and started with a warning that humans had emitted so much carbon dioxide that temperatures could rise to "dangerous levels". Panic!
But deep in the article came the critical admission. A leaked draft of the report to be released on Friday by the IPCC, the UN body given a Nobel Prize for its climate alarmism, now admits temperatures have, in fact, all but stopped rising.
Said The Age: "Warming has slowed in the past 15 years to 0.05C a decade - below the long-term average of 0.12C since 1951." (Other measurements show even less warming.) That trivial rise, less than what 114 of 117 leading climate models predicted, suggests our rising carbon dioxide emissions may not have much influence on climate, after all.
In fact, Professor Judith Curry, a former warmist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, now says the two decades of warming we saw before 1997 could just have been natural. Ergo: the theory of dangerous man-made warming could be bust.
As Dr Roy Spencer, who leads the US team that monitors global temperatures measured from NASA's Aqua satellite, says: "We are now at the point in the age of global warming hysteria where the IPCC global warming theory has crashed into the hard reality."
But this implosion of warming theory has alarmed several governments, and Hungary and Germany have even asked the IPCC to delete any reference to the warming hiatus in Friday's final summary.
"A 15-year period of observation is not sufficient" to make any such conclusions, Germany said. Besides, "hiatus" was "strongly misleading" because "there is not a pause or interruption, but a decrease in the warming trend".
Warmist scientists have scrambled to explain why the planet has not warmed as they predicted. The draft IPCC report suggests natural variability, volcanic eruptions, a transfer of heat to the deep ocean and a drop in solar energy reaching the Earth may be temporarily masking an increase in heat content.
But with the warming theory in tatters, here comes the ABC again, preaching doom.
Tonight's Q&A, hosted by global warming spruiker Tony Jones, has scrapped its usual panel format to give the floor to just one guest - Canadian eco-extremist David Suzuki, here to preach his message of frying hell.
He's already warmed up by claiming in The Age "climate change is going to devastate Australia", half the Great Barrier Reef's coral could vanish. thanks to the "increasing frequency of cyclones", and ditching our carbon tax would be "absolutely suicidal". But how credible is this insect expert who once likened humans to maggots?
Fact: we're getting fewer cyclones, not more.
Fact: Labor's carbon tax plans would have cut the global temperature by a meaningless 0.0038C at the very most, according to IPCC author Professor Roger Jones.
Why did The Age not fact-check Suzuki's lurid claims? Why does the ABC give this extremist such a platform?
These are the real questions now Flannery has been sacked. Which journalists should pay for making heroes of cranks and gurus of alarmists?
Which journalists have been enemies of reason as they've mindlessly pushed one of the greatest scares of our lives?
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