Climate change induced, just about everything nasty.

After a while it becomes difficult to keep up with all of the frantic and hysterical hyperbole launched against us in relation to all of the terrible things that are going to happen to us if we fail to cut emissions by (insert whatever figure represents the current truth.) Most of us tend to tune them out like background noise after seeing so many extravagant claims come to nothing.

By about 10-20 years ago we were supposed to be inundated by hundreds of millions of climate change refugees. OK so that didn’t happen. Tim Flannery, climate guru, predicted that there would be constant drought here forever. All of our cities were going to run out of water. Greens leader Bob Brown came to his rescue over the recent floods that were never going to happen by blaming them on coal miners.

Today’s Australian exposes the increasing tendency to link all things bad, to global warming:

This script is not used simply by environmentalists insisting that we adopt a low-carbon lifestyle. Virtually any campaign on any issue can gain a hearing through adopting the tactic of linking their cause to that of raising concern about climate change. An example of joined-up scaremongering was provided by the Australian Climate Institute, which last month published a report, A Climate of Suffering.

A Climate of Suffering argues that climate change has a devastating effect on the mental health of Australians, particularly of children. The report suggests that catastrophic weather episodes are causing anxiety and insecurity for Australian children. As an illustration of this claim, it indicates that one in 10 primary school pupils exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of Cyclone Larry in 2006. The transformation of climate change into a causal agent of childhood trauma is only one example of the numerous health, social and security problems blamed on global warming.

Joining up an alleged health problem with scare-mongering about the environment sometimes takes on an extravagant form. Take a "flesh-eating virus": scary enough in its own right. Then link it up with contemporary anxieties about climate change, and we get a headline like "Global warming 'spawns flesh-eating virus' in Britain."

The issue of childhood trauma has been dealt with here before, and is largely due to the indoctrination on GW by the education system, which uses them as hostages in the debate. Fifty years ago, cyclones happened, floods happened, as did bushfires and droughts. They are part of life and you dealt with it, even if you were a kid you accepted that. Back then though, we were not nannied to today’s extent.

The histrionics adopted in the anti carbon agenda may have exacerbated the effect of the flooding. Flannery’s prediction of endless drought probably had some impact on the decision, not to release water from the major dams above Brisbane for flood mitigation purposes, resulting in emergency releases of water into the flood peak.

In the case of the Lockyer Valley flooding, warnings from residents of huge rainfall were ignored by the Weather Bureau who were relying on the most modern, up to date modeling available. The locals were after all, were depending on primitive technology like rain gauges for their readings.

Update: Angry Exile has left a comment referring to a list of things that zealots have blamed on global warming. John Brignell has done a great job in compiling it in alphabetical order with an incredible number of entries, many of these claims contradicting each other. It looked like a ‘piss take’ at first, but every item is linked to an article claiming just that.

It is part of the ‘Number Watch’ site, which if you visit it, be sure to read “March of the zealots.”