Story submitted by Eric Worrall
Tim Flannery, one time head of the government Climate Commission in Australia, until it was disbanded by the current government, has released a video begging for donations to “keep science in the news”. A year after raising a million dollars, he now needs more money.
Flannery has an impressive track record of being wrong. He repeatedly predicted Australia was now in permanent drought, shortly before Australia experienced so much rain, alarmists blamed the Aussie downpour for a drop in sea level.
Flannery’s predictions of permanent drought probably helped cause the squandering of billions of dollars on desalination plants.
The following is a list of some of Flannery’s more entertaining mistakes.
https://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/tag/tim-flannery-failed-predictions/
If Flannery is short of cash, perhaps he should try getting a job, rather than holding his hat out for other people’s cash, while taking a walk along a photogenic beach. He should certainly stop pretending he has any skill at predicting the future.
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pat, why is it that everyone else has to use Tips and Notes, but your thought bubble reproductions of random articles (which can be longer than the head post) are worthy of insertion anywhere and everywhere? Are you somehow special?
Please stop disrupting threads with your “insights”, of the kind that would make you the dinner party guest from hell.
Khwarizmi says:
July 19, 2014 at 12:46 am
“Hi SM,
thanks for conceding that your deranged climate priest got his prophesy wrong; that it did in fact rain, and it did so in buckets.”
And so it did K but as you seemed to have missed, 75% capacity is not full. In fact our storages have been nowhere near full for 15 years, despite per capita consumption being halved.
======================================================================
In your earlier post you quoted Flannery:
“I think all evidence says that this is our new climate and we have to get by with less water than we’ve ever had before,”
You must have missed the part where I stated water consumption has dropped from 460lt pppd to 240lt pppd. You supplied the quote, I supplied the facts.
=======================================================================
“Glad you didn’t try to set some weird new goalposts based on the very comfortable water levels in a system that includes 1 dam–the Thompson–designed by foresighted people (with no interest in atmospheric voodoo) to protect Melbourne in the very likely event of a drought lasting up to TEN YEARS. And it worked.”
Yes I know: I spent 10 years working with those foresighted people in the MMBW. And yes, it did work: just – the Thompson bottomed out at 16% of capacity but the halving of per capita consumption saved it from completely emptying. Even now with all those bucket loads of rain as you say, it’s still only at 78% of capacity.
=============================================================================
“As you point out, after only 3 years, the system is already at 75% capacity”
Given your statement “that it did in fact rain, and it did so in buckets” one would have thought we would be at 100% capacity by now.
=========================================================================
The rest of your post, like much the first part is basically incoherent.
I used to think that Wan King was the capital of China until I heard Tim Flannery speak!
SM thank you for your reply. I live in WA and am aware of the desal plants. I am also aware that the catchment areas are also being overgrown, so that runoff doesn’t flow as well into the dams. That would seem to be too much like common sense. Reduced runoff to dams, a climbing population as well as less rain all conspire to make the desal plants necessary.
WRT Queensland I must admit I was relying on SMH and wiki, which said flooding the size of France and Germany – 904681 sq km. Not the 80% in the article from ABC. Queensland area 1.731 million sq km – would mean 52% of Queensland was flooded.
SM
Hi Eric,
It may come as a bit of a shock, but most of Queensland, the State where you live, is drought declared.
Gee, a drought in Australia, must be due to our unnatural fiddling with nature.
johanna
pat, why is it that everyone else has to use Tips and Notes, but your thought bubble reproductions of random articles (which can be longer than the head post) are worthy of insertion anywhere and everywhere? Are you somehow special?
Please stop disrupting threads with your “insights”, of the kind that would make you the dinner party guest from hell.
One of Pat’s thought bubbles is now a WUWT story, so Anthony found at least one of Pat’s thoughts as interesting as I did.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/18/another-carbon-tax-domino-falls-south-korea-goes-cold-on-ets/
Pat I hope you have a go at writing a submit story. Its a great feeling seeing your name on the author line, of a blog like WUWT.
SM says:
July 18, 2014 at 7:03 pm
ROM says:
July 18, 2014 at 4:30 pm
Once again the leech like Flim Flam Flannery proves that he is utterly incapable of earning his own living and like a leech, is totally dependent on the continuing flow of OPM. [ Other People’s Money ]
=========================================================================
Hi ROM,
can you recall what you posted on Nova’s Site?
Here it is :
ROM
July 18, 2014 at 11:19 am · Reply
We are on the pension, something we never wanted to be on as it is a burden for others who have to support us through their taxes,………………………
______________________
Well SM your own true green and colours are really showing and I would suggest that you are the archetypal and devious cherry picker of quotes as are many of your ilk.
Perhaps a little honesty on your part might have gone a long way so to complete my quote from JoNova’s blog;
**********
“My wife and I are 76 years old so I assume that passes as being one of the older generation.
We are on the pension, something we never wanted to be on as it is a burden for others who have to support us through their taxes, taxes which I might add I also have paid the odd few millions [ or ] so through the income earning parts of my [ 60 years of ] farming life.”
******************
We were over 70 years old before we took up the pension and then the only reason we did so was because the very dry decade with a couple of total crop failures including a million dollar loss of a crop only three to four weeks from harvest when we had 4 consecutive days of over 40 degrees right when that Lentil crop was flowering which along with the extremely dry decade from about 1998 to about 2008 about crippled our’s and my son’s economic ability to continue farming.
Unlike Flannery we coped for ourselves through all those 70 plus years of my life without any handouts of more than a few dollars from the tax payers and governments through all that time. Had circumstance been different we still would NOT be, unlike Flannery, taking tax payers money, money that allows us to at least continue living very modestly and carefully.
I trust of course SM that you NEVER EVER revert to any vestiges of hypocrisy yourself of course
that would give anybody any reason to suggest that you are both a cherry picking and devious individual or that you are a hypocrite yourself.
Hi ROM,
Me….. a “cherry picker” …Where would I learn that from? Worrall’s whole post is based on cherry picked quotes. Read Flannery’s statements in full and you’ll see what I mean.
Life on the land can be tough, but the banks did me over for $400,000 so you’re not the only one to find it difficult.
Also, Flannery is requesting donations from the general public, not the government and those donations are not tax deductible. He is not using taxpayers money.
There is nothing hypocritical about me. That’s where we’re we differ.
Spend my taxes wisely, old son.
Eric Worrall says:
July 19, 2014 at 3:04 am
SM
Hi Eric,
It may come as a bit of a shock, but most of Queensland, the State where you live, is drought declared.
Gee, a drought in Australia, must be due to our unnatural fiddling with nature.
========================================================================
You must have forgotten your own words Eric.
“He repeatedly predicted Australia was now in permanent drought, shortly before Australia experienced so much rain,”
If there was so much rain why is much of Australia still in drought??
In my student days they took us, on a bus, for some reason or another, to see the Thompson River Dam under construction. I opined then that this dam would never fill. I may have been wrong (and then again, I may not have been). If the Thompson River Dam is 75% full Melbourne has a lot of water in store.
Poor fella Melbourne, with the desalination plant bills coming in forever, whatever happens.
lee says:
July 19, 2014 at 2:52 am
SM thank you for your reply. I live in WA and am aware of the desal plants. I am also aware that the catchment areas are also being overgrown, so that runoff doesn’t flow as well into the dams.
========================================================================
Lee,
Catchment areas need to be vegetated, large trees preferably. Runoff over bare ground will eventually cause the dams to silt up. This why all catchments are closed to public access and logging except where politicians get a nice kick in the back pocket from logging companies.
Some drought affected areas did receive rain, but 500mm in a day is useless if there is no rain for another 12 months.
No surprise that the BBC gave him a job on the recent Coast Australia series.
I have to admit, that Flannery video really made me think. I will gladly forward to the good doctor my next (err… first) check from BigOil (TM) just as soon as it arrives.
Eric Worrall says:
July 18, 2014 at 5:08 pm
That explains why there’s nobody having a barbie on the beach, I’ve always thought that Aussies had barbies all day every day.
“….one time head of…Climate ‘Communism’ in Australia..”
Flimflam Flannery flumoxed by financial frustrations? Farcinating!
Lewis P Buckingham says:
If Skeptics had a couple of Prof Flannerys on side we would not have any media problems.
True. There are plenty of qualified skeptics, and what’s more, they have the facts on their side. Flannery doesn’t.
What they don’t have is the easy media access tha Flannery has. So the public gets bombarded with alarmist propaganda.
How do skeptics get the same kind of media access that Flannery gets?
dbstealey says: July 19, 2014 at 2:51 pm
“How do skeptics get the same kind of media access that Flannery gets?”
They don’t/can’t and therein lies the major problem with combating the CAGW meme…..media control. As long as the Environmentalists/Greens/Liberals control the media the message will remain the same.
This seems to work, on many levels ?
Flannery’s first degree level qualification was English literature. He is also has no qualifications in atmospheric physics.
“Josh Payne says
Summary: “Think of the children!”
I am thinking of the children, I; thinking of the children in Africa RIGHT NOW that are destined to a shortened life of poverty and misery because the eco-freaks and population-control ghouls will not allow them to have cheap, abundant energy.
Interesting that Flim Flam the fraud says there is a lot of misinformation out there.
I thought showing no warming through the datasets for an average of 14 years was factual.
But what would i know.
Leigh says:
July 18, 2014 at 6:33 pm
“… Make no mistake, Flannery is a fraudster right up there with Gore and co. …”
—
Dear Leigh,
If Al Gore and Clive Palmer were to hold a press conference and break into an impromptu gala performance of “Toad of Toad Hall, the Musical”, who would play Toad? I’ve been pondering this off and on for several weeks now and must admit to being quite stumped by it. Moreover, would they give Flim Flammery a bit-part or just pass him over for someone with some actual talent and rapport with the audience?
But my secret anxiety is what could occur if on opening-night the main protagonists had a wee falling-out regarding underlying resentment over who had the biggest and snazziest private jet?
I’m tipping Clive will win that at three to one, but I’m not entirely confident as Gore’s well-connected and is known to be a dedicated hyper-greenie saviour-of-dah-world and builder of zah Internetery, so he may have an ego-equivalent gas-guzzler like a secondhand Concorde or something up his sleave. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Which would lay-waste to Clive’s much more modest Bombardier BD-700 Global Express jet, Air Farce 1:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YO0OpbYtP40/UaL9C1zoRZI/AAAAAAAAVJ8/-ojThIJaG9A/s320/CHALLENGER_013.jpg
A big seat for dah big boss:
http://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2013/09/01/9-2000976-palmer31b-original_t620.jpg
But Clive also retains a gas-guzzling Cessna Citation-X which he keeps squirreled away in the corner of a cavernous hanger, for when the inner-toad must hit the road and run amok scaring the town-folk ‘n stuff:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wij2owsfwPA/T1CRhU9d-BI/AAAAAAAAFVg/TVJQWaI4G-o/s1600/2012_0225Image0525.JPG
Fastest civil jet in production, and it comes with a snooze button, for those days in Parliament Question Time that really wear on a toad:
http://indaily.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/clive-palmer1.jpg
Anyway, that’s one media conference I think it’s safe to say we’d all watch a re-run of.
I think you will find that Flim used to lecture on palaeo subjects, like fossil finds. Anyway he looks a fool, and no big business will back him. Who would, if he has already gone through one million in less than a year?
Sm, it is as you say. However we need to be careful that we don’t prevent runoff by allowing too much plant life. It needs to be kept in check and not allowed to run riot.
I can’t donate to Flannery’s appeal. I did my bit for him with my taxpayer contributions to his Hot Rocks and Desalinisation debacles.
Cheers, (another Tim.)
How the Melbourne water system was depleted slowly during a long drought, and replenished rapidly, contradicting the false picture painted by SM with his empty words:
http://www.baywx.com.au/accumall.html
===============
On 31 July 1984, the newly-built Thomson Dam was officially included in Melbourne’s total water storages, more than doubling storage capacity. Still virtually empty when factored in, Thomson’s size dragged down the city’s storage levels from 65% to 26% overnight.
With a capacity almost four times that of Melbourne’s next biggest reservoir, the Thomson was designed as a drought reserve – to be built up in wet years and used in dry years. It has been full three times: 1992, 1993 and 1996.
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/aboutus/historyandheritage/History-of-our-water-supply-system/Pages/History-of-the-Thomson-Dam.aspx
===========
It took 8 years to fill the new dam from empty to 100%. It took just 3 years, from 2010-2013, to increase the volume in the entire system from ~18% of capacity to ~75%. That’s 57% of the total volume of the system replenished in just three years, faster than the initial inflow rate.