ABC's preaching not based on fact
ANDREW BOLT
HERALD SUN
OCTOBER 23, 2013 11:30PM
5 COMMENTS
The ABC has claimed the NSW bushfires are linked to global warming and Prime Minister Tony Abbott's plan to scrap the carbon tax. Source: News Limited
THE Gillard Government died broke yet could still toss one last biscuit to its pet media outlet.
On its deathbed it gave the ABC an extra $10 million, mainly to create a - ho, ho - Fact Checking Unit.
Could the ABC damn well use it? Now, when almost every ABC current affairs program is exploiting the NSW fires in a fact-free jihad for the global warming faith?
Some of this preaching is simply clownish.
ABC's 7.30 starred an academic from the Monash Sustainability Institute who blamed global warming for confusing the kind of child arsonists accused of starting some of these fires: "You light it and in the circumstances that we've got at the moment with climate change it gets away when it probably wasn't meant to get away."
But mostly it's disgraceful. Wall to wall - on Lateline, AM, 7.30, The Drum, Q&A, Radio National Breakfast, The World Today - we get the ABC promoting two deceitful notions.
First, we're asked to believe these fires are linked to global warming and, second, that Prime Minister Tony Abbott's plan to scrap the carbon tax means we'll get more.
Yes, I can understand the ABC's desperation. As former ABC chairman Maurice Newman has said, "a small but powerful group has captured the corporation" on global warming and these poor zealots have seen nothing work out as their gurus prophesised.
The planet's atmosphere hasn't actually warmed by a statistically significant amount for 15 years. The great Australian drought that Greens leader Bob Brown warned could be "permanent" ended years ago.
The rains that professional alarmist Tim Flannery claimed weren't "actually going to fill our dams and our river systems" returned and did.
Result: the public's faith in the warming catastrophe melted so fast that Abbott won an election promising to scrap the carbon tax.
So when these NSW fires came, you could almost hear the cheers from the ABC canteens.
At last! A chance to flog the global warming scare. A chance to promote alarmists who presented these fires as not just serious, which they are, but so "unprecedented" that only man-made warming could explain them.
So let's do some of the fact-checking the ABC didn't.
Claim: NSW faced an "unprecedented fire disaster", reported Radio National Breakfast.
Fact: NSW suffered serious fires in 1951-52, 1968-69, 1984-85 and 1993-94. These latest fires have burned perhaps 100,000 hectares and killed one person, but the 1984-85 fires burned 3.5 million hectares and killed four.
Australia's biggest known bushfire, Victoria's "Black Thursday" disaster in 1851, burned five million hectares. Our deadliest, Black Saturday, killed 173 people.
Claim: "It's certainly the first time bushfires of this magnitude have happened in October," reported Lateline. Added Radio National's Fran Kelly: "We've always dealt with fire, but not necessarily in October."
Fact: In October 1928 the Sydney Morning Herald reported Sydney was "encircled by bushfires".
In October 1948, the Herald reported "the village of Termeil, 12 miles from Ulladulla, was practically destroyed" ...
In October 1951, 100 bushfires raged around Sydney in what the Herald described as "the worst in history". NSW has in fact had more than a dozen big fires in October or earlier in the past 90 years.
Claim: On AM, Christiana Figueres, a UN climate change bureaucrat, said - unchallenged - these fires were "introductions to the doom and gloom that we could be facing", adding: "We are really already paying the price of carbon ... with wildfires, we are paying the price with drought ..."
Fact: Global temperatures have been flat for 15 years and even the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conceded last month it had only "medium confidence that globally the length and frequency of warm spells, including heatwaves, has increased".
As for the "doom and gloom", the IPCC admitted it had "low confidence" that droughts, floods, winds or thunderstorms had actually got worse and there had even been "slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones".
But behind all this hype is the biggest deceit of all - a delusion that the carbon tax could make a difference to future fires and Abbott will make fires worse by scrapping it.
In fact, Abbott still promises to cut our emissions.
But so what? Both Abbott's "direct action" scheme and Labor's carbon tax would at best cut the world's temperature this century by 0.0038 degrees, according to IPCC author Professor Roger Jones.
Does anyone believe this infinitesimally small change would spare us one fire?
Of course, the ABC did occasionally interview people with surer ways to save us.
Bushfire expert David Packham tried to tell 7.30 we had to burn our bush every 10 years to cut the leaf litter that turns our fires into infernos, a level of burning NSW doesn't come close to reaching.
But after just 69 words, 7.30 handed back his microphone to chatterers whose living depends on the warming scare - two green activists and a scientist from Climate System Science.
The ABC is not reporting but preaching.
So it has a Fact Checking Unit? Money back please.
http://m.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/abcs-preaching-not-based-on-fact/story-fnj45fvd-1226745593355