GC - SP - Climate Change Conference Slides

Climate change: Where the Horror and Comedy Genres Collide
1

TITLE SLIDE
Thank you and acknowledgements.
BIO SLIDE
I am not a scientist.
So I wont attempt to prove nor disprove the impact man
is having on the temperature of the planet.
I am not a climatologist.
I am an elected representative in the Australian
Parliament so I would prefer to talk about my
constituents what they think, how they live, and how
policy around climate change has an impact on their
daily lives.
I am also a fan of the television series Star Trek.
TREK SLIDE
Now I am talking about original Trek - where Captain
Kirk knew how to deal with destructive green beasts
long before the show went all liberal and the enterprise
started saving whales.
So I know good science fiction when I see it.
And that is what I have seen in the climate change
debate a lot of fiction dressed up as science.

2

Most great works of fiction end up on the silver screen
so it was inevitable that climate change would become a
major motion picture.
DIRECTOR CUT SLIDE
But a screenwriter has several angles to work with and
which one they choose depends on whereabouts on the
climate change timeline they pick up the story.
Early on in the piece, it is a disaster-cum-thriller plot as
prophets warn of the impending doom of mankind and
the planet.
The story then lurches towards a slasher-style horror
flick as ever more graphic descriptions are used to scare
people into submission.
Finally, the plot descends into a farcical comedy as
government and environmental terrorists make
ridiculous suggestions about how mankind will control
the planet.
In Australia, we have crossed that point where the horror
genre is descending into a comedy.
The Australian political scene has been dominated for
the past seven years by the global warming debate
and the political response to hysteria.

3

Global Warming and its new incarnation, Climate
Change, claimed one Opposition Leader and then two
consecutive Prime Ministers in the Australian
Parliament.
Australia is the obvious location for filming when the
next blockbuster goes into production - Climate Change:
The Movie.
But it wouldnt be the first time a movie has been made
about climate change.
In 1995, Universal Pictures launched the most
expensive movie ever made (at the time).
WATERWORLD SLIDE
Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner, cost $235 million to
bring to the silver screen but it grossed just $88 million
at the North American box office.
In you werent in one of those empty theatres,
Waterworld is a science fiction movie with a plot so far-
fetched even escapist movie-goers couldnt buy it.
In this post-apocalyptic world, the polar ice caps have
melted and the Earth is flooded seriously flooded
leaving just the peak of Mount Everest sticking out of the
water.
In Waterworld, the protagonist was Kevin Costner.

4

FLANNERY SLIDE
In Australia, we had a snake oil salesman by the name
of Tim Flannery.
Flannery is a palaeontologist, environmental activist and
global warming alarmist.
He was also appointed the head of Australias Climate
Change Commission in 2011 on the basis of providing
an independent and reliable source of information for
all Australians.
He failed.
The Commission was also supposed to build a
consensus to support a carbon tax.
He failed.
And this is the reason why he failed.
None of his hysterical claims and forecasts have come
true. Most have been spectacularly wrong.
As the Chief Snake Oil Salesman, Flannery was
supposed to build a consensus.
But the more he pushed the scaremongering envelope,
the more people turned off.

5

Flannery didnt predict seawater level rising to a
Waterworld extent.
But he did say this:
Picture an eight-storey building by a beach. Then
imagine waves lapping its roof.
If youve ever seen a tourism commercial for Australia,
you would know every Aussie home has a sandy beach
at the front doorstep and a kangaroo in the backyard.
WHITSUNDAY SLIDE
Every State capital in Australia is on the coast and more
than 80% of the population lives within 50km of the
coast.
So Flannery casts a pretty big net when he tries to scare
the wits out of coastal communities and capital cities.
And if they werent frightened enough to buy his snake
oil, he also believed Perth, the capital city of the largest
Australian State, would run out of water:
FLANNERY CARTOON SLIDE
Perth will be the 21
st
Centurys first ghost metropolis.
This is a familiar theme in Flannerys prophecies.

6

He said Sydneys water supply would be dry in as little
as two years.
He said even the rain that falls isnt actually going to fill
our dams and our river systems.
He said that Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane need
desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18
months.
Flannerys disaster/thriller plot was turning into a horror
movie.
But Brisbane didnt need desalinated water because the
rains Flannery said would never come DID come.
FLOOD 1 SLIDE
Floods in 2010 and 2011 forced the evacuation of
thousands of people from Brisbane and more than 70
other towns. The floods we were told would never come
killed 38 people and caused more than $2 billion in
damages.
We were told our dams would never be filled again but
Wivenhoe Dam reached 190 per cent of capacity.
FLOOD 2 SLIDE
Three-quarters of Queensland was declared a disaster
zone and the Queensland floods were followed later that

7

year by more disastrous floods in the southern state of
Victoria.
But former global warmists who prophesied about
drought have now switched to become climate changers
to account for floods being a sign of mans carbon sins
as well.
The truth is Australia is no stranger to either.
DOROTHEA SLIDE
The poet, Dorothea Mackellar, penned her most famous
verse about Australia:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
Mackellar penned that verse more than a century ago.
More than a century ago in 1896 a heatwave
stretched across Australia for weeks. The death toll
reached 437 people in the eastern states.
And yet, a heatwave in 2009 has been sold as the worst
in 150 years. This claim is assisted by a convenient

8

deleting of history, which has been justified with
claims of poor thermometer placements.
Alarmists claim thermometers were placed in the sun.
In 1896, the temperature in Bourke was at or above 102
degrees F for 24 days straight. In Brewarrina, the
thermometer read 109 degrees F at midnight.
I dont know how you put a thermometer in the sun at
midnight in Australia.
The weather and climate in Australia has not changed in
the last century.
But a new religious interpretation has arisen since then.
Now, when we are in a drought, they tell us lack of rain
is a sign.
When we are in a flood, they tell us too much rain is a
sign.
More hurricanes is a sign.
Fewer hurricanes is a sign.
The sky is blue its a sign.
Gravity! Its a sign.

9

A new religion is born and those who refuse to kneel
down before the Inconvenient Altar shall be cast out.
AL GORE SLIDE
We had a visitor in Australia two weeks ago.
Al Gore popped in with his constant companion an
entourage of blizzard-like conditions freezing
temperatures that are such a constant companion of Al
Gores jet-setting that they have inspired a new
meteorological term the Al Gore effect.
Canberra, the Australian capital, was forecasting a warm
start to winter. But a Polar Goretex descended to the
southern hemisphere just in time to give Al another cold
reception.
Since the globe has failed to warm, alarmists have
adopted the more non-committal terminology of climate
change, which helps explain any inconvenient truths
like lack of warming or record freezes.
But where the alarmists like our Tim Flannery come
unstuck is when they make specific predictions that
prove specifically wrong.
DESAL SLIDE

10

In response to the disaster/thriller scaremongering
claims about cities running out of water, Australia built
five desalination plants at a cost of more than $9 billion.
Only one is operating.
Four have been mothballed.
The water from these plants was going to be up to ten
times more expensive for householders than dam water.
But that turned out to be wishful thinking, especially for
plants that didnt produce a drop of water.
The worst offender is the desalination plant that sits idle
in Melbourne.
The cost of having that desalination plant there
producing no water at all is $384 for every single
household in Melbourne.
Every year.
For 30 years.
If it were to produce any water, the cost would increase.
Australian policy-makers were threatened and cajoled
into undertaking farcical desalination projects on the
back of menacing doomsday climate prophecies.

11

You would think, after those desalination disasters, that
any sensible government would be too scared to go
back in the water again certainly not without a bigger
boat.
But they did.
WAVE GENERATOR SLIDE
In 2004, Energetech developed a taxpayer-funded
prototype wave generator off Port Kembla, which broke
free of its pylons and sank.
In 2012, a second prototype, having been
decommissioned, was rusting away.
But if its worth doing something dumb once or twice, its
worth doing three times.
This year, Oceanlinx (formerly Energetech) reported the
airbags supporting a new 3,000 tonne prototype had
burst and the unit had sunk.
It now looks like a salvage operation will take a year to
remove the wreckage of that alternative energy folly.
Having the carcass of stupidity polluting the marine
environment for the next year is bad enough.

12

But that is peanuts compared to what might just be the
dumbest, the weirdest, the most bizarre attempt to fight
carbon that we will ever witness.
The ultimate folly would have left thousands of
carcasses strewn across the continent because global
warmists pointed the finger at farting camels.
CAMEL SLIDE
The climate boffins in Australia produced a 62-page
proposal to issue carbon credits for killing camels.
Can you imagine the chaos that would be created not
just in culling the beasts but in policing the credits.
There would have been an explosion of camel-culling
police regulators, inspectors, prosecutors and
auditors.
And someone had already wrestled with the problem of
producing more carbon in the process than what might
be saved.
Hence a formula was derived to measure any possible
net gain.
FORMULA SLIDE
A complicated formula it was, too.

13

Note that GDgv,c,j,y equals the Ground distance
travelled by vehicle (gv) using fuel type (j) in undertaking
the activities (c) in year (y).
Also note that LPKgv,j equals the litres of fuel type (j)
combusted per kilometre for vehicle (gv).
Got that?
Its no longer a disaster movie or a horror movie.
At this point, we are seriously in the bowels of a
comedy.
Shooting wild camels, armed with a mathematical
formula and reporting to the camel police might be a job
creator but not a climate solution.
That might have been the thinking of former Australian
Prime Minister Julia Gillard when she floated the idea of
the green police to investigate households using too
much power.
Her plan was to require power companies to meet tough
new efficiency standards by conducting audits of their
customers and telling them to upgrade inefficient
appliances.
The green police were to go door-to-door, sticking their
noses into everybodys lives on behalf of a government
intent on perpetuating the global warming hysteria.

14

The Gillard government even provided $3 million in
grants to organisations who could sell their snake oil for
them.
GILLARD SLIDE
By this stage, the Labor Government had already
introduced a carbon tax (which they specifically
promised they would not do) but then started advertising
for help to come up with a reason why we needed a
carbon tax and to sell that idea to the people.
If you listen to the alarmists, theres no shortage of
reasons why something needs to be done even if the
reasons are paradoxical.
Even on something as simple as trees, the global
warming alarmists cant seem to get their story straight
about what the alleged impacts will be.
One day the alarmists are telling us that trees will grow
slower.
The next day they are telling us that trees will grow
faster.
One day trees will be less colourful. The next day they
will be more colourful.
Weve even heard claims about trees growing on
Antarctica.

15

These are actual reported claims made by climate
alarmists that have been made in the media I kid you
not.
There are plenty of other environmental catastrophes in
the pipeline, according to these media reports.
Global warming will:
Make poison ivy more prevalent and itchier
Change the sex of lizards and make them smarter;
and
Cause volcanic eruptions
That claim about volcanic eruptions might have been
made after an alarmist support groups hosting of an all-
night volcano movie marathon.
VOLCANO SLIDE
Perhaps they had watched Joe Versus the Volcano,
Dantes Peak, Volcano, SuperVolcano all through the
night (and finished it off with the 2009 film 2012)
before thinking: Wow. That would be a good thing to
blame on climate change.
Its hard to tell the difference between an alarmist claim
about global effects and the basic premise of a disaster
movie plot.

16

See if you can spot the Hollywood movies among these
animal disaster plots
Tigers eating people
Different shark species interbreeding to producing a
hybrid shark
JAWS SLIDE
JAWS 7 maybe?
Supersized spiders with a passion for biting
Alligators in the Thames
A herpes epidemic in oysters
Invasions of:
o Alien worms
o Antarctic aliens
o Asian carp
o Cane toads
o Caterpillars
o Cats
o Herons
o Jellyfish
o King crabs
o Lampreys
o Midges
o Pine beetles
o Rats
o Slugs
o Stingrays

17

o Walruses; OR
All of the above
I dont know how many of those have been made into
movies, but every single one of them is a global
warming claim.
PENGUIN SLIDE
And spare a thought for the penguins.
Apparently:
o Their chicks will be frozen
o Their chicks will be smaller
o Penguins will be in the dark
o Their populations will be devastated
o Their sex lives affected; and
o Penguins will be replaced by jellyfish
WOLVERINE SLIDE
We can also expect the extinction of the Wolverine (sad
news for Hugh Jackman and the X-men franchise).
The news is no better for humans.
Hollywood already has a list of disease disaster movies
to scare audiences, with the likes of Outbreak, 28 Days
Later, I Am Legend, Slither, Children of Men, 12
Monkeys, Blindness, Quarantine, and Resident Evil.

18

But screenwriters need look no further for inspiration
than alarmist claims that global warming will:
Cause stress, anxiety, and depression
Increase the incidence of Post Traumatic Stress
Cause an explosion of asthma in children
Cause bubonic plague outbreaks
Make us all fat; and
Release ancient viruses into the atmosphere
Apparently society is already crumbling in Africa with a
decline in circumcision and marriage due to global
warming.
Thats the theory of Australias own alarmist and Snake
Oil Salesman Tim Flannery.
According to the alarmists, if we dont do something to
cool the planet, we will see an escalation of intelligence
and spying wars as well as rioting and nuclear war.
Global warming already has been described as a
Weapon of Mass Destruction.
But if you really want a bizarre plot line, theres a whole
solar system and universe out there to be impacted by
camels farting.

19

According to the alarmists, global warming has already
caused the Earth to tilt, changing the sun and stars we
see in the sky.
And it gets worse.
There will be more asteroid strikes and more UFO
sightings.
But global warming will prevent contact with alien
civilisations.
And through all this, we will have to deal with:
ZOMBIES SLIDE
The dead rising from their graves not in the
zombie way but with water levels rising, dead
bodies will be pushed out of the ground
More executions of witches in Tanzania
A prostitute shortage in Bulgaria
Increased cannibalism
More amorous cats
LOCH NESS SLIDE
And the death of the Loch Ness Monster Nessie
hunter Robert Rines has ended his 37-year search
because apparently she is dead possibly the
victim of global warming.

20

And the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise will
have an unlimited supply of new plot lines.
According to Chief Climatologist for alarmist group
Climate Central, Heidi Cullen, in her book, The Weather
of the Future, she claims pirates will run rampant in a
globally warmed world.
I look forward to Johnny Depp doing Pirates of the
Antarctic.
Finally, some movie screenwriters were obviously ahead
of their time with classic flicks like:
Unfaithful; and
Indecent Proposal
Because Global Warming is already causing women to
cheat on their husbands.
CHEATING SLIDE
There have been several reports now of extra-marital
affair websites claiming that global warming is causing
their clients to stray women more often than men.
But women are getting the rough end of the deal
because theres also claims that climate change will kill
more women than men.

21

Now that we know what global warming will cause
pretty much everything lets look at what an alarmist
response looks like.
Not just a thought bubble response but an actual Act-of
Parliament response.
$23/TONNE SLIDE
Australias previous government introduced a carbon tax
two years ago, taxing companies $23 per tonne of CO2
emissions.
The fixed price increased to $24.15 after the first year
and rose again on July 1 to $25.40.
A shotgun inquiry was conducted into the tax but the
inquiry was given just three weeks and was forced to
start blindfolded.
There was no legislation drafted and the modelling that
had been done on the impact of the carbon tax was not
released until minutes before the inquiry began.
I was appointed to the carbon tax inquiry as an
Opposition MP and had the opportunity to grill Ross
Garnaut, an economist behind the originally-proposed
cap and trade legislation, who had been brought in to
sell the new carbon tax.
GARNAUT SLIDE

22

I asked Garnaut: Is it a distortion of reality to state that
regional communities and industries are likely to
become more vulnerable to the impacts of this
legislation than urban centres due to their reliance on
agriculture and other natural resource-based industries
and low levels of infrastructure stock?
He replied: I do not think it is true.
That was was an interesting response because I was
quoting chapter 16 of his report, Sharing the burden in
Australia.
Garnaut knew exactly what the impact of the carbon tax
would be on industry, on businesses, and on families.
He knew that a carbon tax like the one being proposed
the biggest and widest carbon tax in the world would
place Australian industry at a competitive disadvantage.
He knew that industries would be forced to close down.
He knew that people would lose their jobs over this
carbon tax.
And he knew that Australian emissions would still go up
after the carbon tax was introduced.
But he was a salesman first and an economist second.

23

A Deloitte Report showed that my home State of
Queensland would be the worst-affected under the
carbon tax.
It also showed the region I represent would be the
worst-affected in the state.
Our main agricultural industry, growing sugarcane,
would cop an $81 million slug due to the carbon tax.
In an industry where 87 per cent of the crop is exported
overseas, a carbon tax would place local growers at a
competitive disadvantage.
WHITSUNDAY SLIDE
The same story applied to tourism where the majority of
tourists in the world-famous Whitsundays (in my
electorate) were from overseas.
A report predicted that a $26 per tonne carbon tax would
drive $266 million of domestic tourism offshore and
reduce inbound international tourism by around $457
million.
An independent report warned a number of mines would
close down and 4000 jobs would be lost under the
carbon tax.

24

So we knew, before the carbon tax was introduced, just
how much damage it would do to our three key
industries.
And still it was introduced in one of the greatest acts of
economic self-harm ever enacted by an Australian
parliament.
Of the 150 members in the House of Representatives
149 went to the election promising NOT to have a
carbon tax.
Only one member promised to advocate for it and a
hung parliament meant that one persons party the
Greens party had the power to destroy peoples lives
for no benefit to the environment.
SUBMISSIONS SLIDE
The carbon tax inquiry received more than 4,500
submissions on the carbon tax but the committee only
accepted about 350.
I attempted to table the overlooked submissions a two-
foot high stack in parliament but the Labor-Greens
alliance denied those voices.
And so, Australia went out and led the world in folly
and nothing happened to change the world nor the
planets temperature.

25

We still have droughts. We still have floods.
The tropics are still warm and Antarctica is still cold.
In fact, alarmists are now even trying to blame the next
ice age on global warming.
They have to because of an Inconvenient Truth about
the expansion of ice in the Antarctic.
At the end of last year, Chris Turney led an expedition of
tourists and climate activists to the Antarctic, retracing
the voyage of the explorer, Douglas Mawson.
SHIP OF FOOLS SLIDE
But the Expedition of Irony was trapped in ice they were
there to prove didnt exist.
Not only was this Ship of Fools stranded in sea ice
some 70km from where Mawson landed, the ship sent to
rescue them also became stranded.
Before the expedition, their claims were that loss of sea
ice is a sign of global warming.
After the expedition, their claims changed to too much
sea ice is a sign of global warming.
Its time we called Kevin Costner back into service.

26

The remake of Waterworld should be Iceworld because
even if the planet were up Mount Everests neck in ice, it
would still be the fault of global warming.
And Id like to leave you with one final prediction that we
look forward to celebrating.
Because in all of these claims, the alarmists were bound
to set a deadline that they could be held to account on.
This one came from Australias then chief scientist,
Professor Penny Sackett.
5 YEARS TO ACT SLIDE
She warned that the planet had just five years to avoid
disastrous global warming.
That claim was published in the Herald Sun on
December 4, 2009.
Less than five months out from the deadline, we are
expecting the next apocalypse movie to be enacted in
real life.
Perhaps I will see you at the premiere on December 4.
Then again, I am guessing its going to be a complete
flop, like all the other climate change disaster plots have
turned out to be or will turn out to be.

GC - SP - Climate Change Conference Slides

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

GC - SP - Climate Change Conference Slides

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Climate change: Where the Horror and Comedy Genres Collide

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi