h/t Chris Gilham; Tim Flannery has finally admitted his efforts have all been a big waste of time.
The gloves are off: ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children
September 17, 2019 6.39am AEST
Tim Flannery Professorial fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of MelbourneIn this age of rapidly melting glaciers, terrifying megafires and ever more puissant hurricanes, of acidifying and rising oceans, it is hard to believe that any further prod to climate action is needed.
But the reality is that we continue to live in a business-as-usual world. Our media is filled with enthusiastic announcements about new fossil fuel projects, or the unveiling of the latest fossil-fuelled supercar, as if there’s no relationship between such things and climate change.
…A ‘colossal failure’ of climate activism
Each year the situation becomes more critical. In 2018, global emissions of greenhouse gases rose by 1.7% while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by 3.5 parts per million – the largest ever observed increase.No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure.
…
Far fewer humans will survive on our warming planet
That future Earth may have enough resources to support far fewer people than the 7.6 billion it supports today. British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people. Mass deaths are predicted to result from, among other causes, disease outbreaks, air pollution, malnutrition and starvation, heatwaves, and suicide.
My children, and those of many prominent polluters and climate denialists, will probably live to be part of that grim winnowing – a world that the Alan Joneses and Andrew Bolts of the world have laboured so hard to create.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/the-gloves-are-off-predatory-climate-deniers-are-a-threat-to-our-children-123594
Poor Flannery, if only he had been more persuasive, we would now all be enjoying the benefits of civilisation powered by renewable energy.
Update (EW): Andrew Bolt who is named in Flannery’s article has responded with a video which calls Flannery a crank, with examples of billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money which have been wasted because of Flannery’s “advice”.
Tim Flannery has never had a heap of credibility here in Oz but buying a house near the water finished off what little he had left. Australians may be stupid in his view but we recognise hypocrisy when we see it.
Sounds like recycled Paul Ehrlich garbage from the 1970’s.
+10!
Perhaps the only old guy Mosh admires.
Or recycled Thomas Robert Malthus, 1798.
“‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children”
Surely that is hate speech
If Tim Flannery had stuck with his qualifications of Mammalogy instead of wandering about in the desert of Climate Chamge he could have improved the lives of countless kangaroos, koalas and wombats.
While roaming the deserted outback, he stumbled across ancient, fossilised, corals that are many 10’s of metres ABOVE current sea levels.
Yes, ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children.
Those who deny that climate is changing naturally, and inflict fear and guilt upon the youth (over their very humanity) by the (religious) indoctrination of unproven conjecture as fact. They count on their agenda advancing one birth at a time.
Tim states: “…No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure….”.
@Tim: Try as I might Tim, I could not find anyone on the Internet that sells a “The End is Nigh” sandwich board for you to wear as ponder your colossal failure and the planet’s doom. If I was any good a carpentry I would make you one myself and send it to you. You could wear it as you walk up and down the streets of Melbourne. All the better to get your message out to your fellow Aussies…if you still believe their is hope.
That leaves me wondering how many of them I could maybe sell to the climate strikers this coming Friday.
I guess I would have to find a supplier to make a bunch of them for me. I could set up a stand on a street somewhere while the Friday climate strikers are passing by. Oh what the heck, I would GIVE them away to the school-age climate strikers. I don’t necessarily need the extra income anyway. Bless their little underage hearts.
I can only guess how it must feel to be the colossal failure that you admit to becoming. I really feel for you. But I guess that’s the way you can end up when you’ve been flimflamming the people of Australia with your fear mongering narratives for the last twenty years (hence your nickname). BTW Tim, aren’t you the one that got stuck in the ice on a trip to Antarctica to highlight the “problem” of climate change?
Anyway Tim, if you really have your heart set on that “The End is Nigh” sandwich board, please let me know (the WUWT moderator has my email address). I’ll try and get my hands on one from somewhere. It will cost me a small fortune to ship to Melbourne from halfway around the world here in the upper Midwest USA. But what the heck, you deserve it. Bless you Tim.
The End was Nigh back in 2012……
Hey, feel sorry for his poor children. Fancy having to come home to be faced with such accusations from winnowmaster-general.
Flannery:
“British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people.”
The link is to an article by Lovelock in 2006.
Dear Tim, great news!!!
You’ll be mightily relieved to know that since that time, Lovelock has since recanted on his global warming alarmism. In 2016 he said: “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.”
You’ll be even more relieved to know what he now thinks of the Green movement: “Well, it’s a religion, really, you see. It’s totally unscientific.”
Now, you may be aware of this turnaround, and resile from Lovelock 2016. But even so, why would you continue to quote Lovelock 2006, aware that it now fundamentally misrepresents his current position? How can we continue to rely on you as a trustworthy participant in this very important debate in which – as your side insists – the very future of mankind and life on earth is at stake?
Lovelock’s 100th birthday was recently celebrated. https://www.lovelockcentenary.info/live-stream/
Ahh yes. Good old Tim. The man who came up with the idea of carbon capture by growing lots of seaweed. I wonder how that’s going!?
The man is mental dwarf who unknowingly embarrasses himself each time his mouth opens.
His background is paleontology. A field which by it’s very nature is largely speculative. Not surprising that this need for speculation has followed him into his comments on climate.
Its odd that “the climate sham” — as it really is —, isn’t called out for what it is.
To whit… the Go! Climate! Go! camp has a deeply nefarious liaison with lesser nations’ central banks, the U.N., the endless panoply of makers of solar-this and windy-that, of software, hardware, grants, tax deferrals, international money funding, the Chinese, the Germans and the Koreans … to — if the orders come in — to make stuff, more stuff, and way more stuff … until the money runs out.
Politicians don their hats and lead the parade of well-wishers, miracle-promisers, sovereign fund bilkers and grand plan hucksters in the Academic and Socialized Government “leadership”. If (and as he did) General cum President Dwight D. Eisenhower urgently warned, “beware the military-industrial complex [for it has plans of its own, and they often aren’t in the public’s best interest]”, well … how exactly would one characterize the unholy alliance (dalliance?) betwixt these rah-rah interests, and the starkly banal failure of all that money to actually have turned any of the CO₂ tide from advancing? Ah… um… err… beware the …
What strains the very fetters of credulousness is reading the above, the quotes from Tim Flannery, decrying that “the problem, the abject failure” (paraphrasing) is the lack of tangible progress in stemming the CO₂ tsunami of modern civilization, regardless of how much effort has so far he and the activists have put into it.
The complaint is, “all is woe! we have plenty of advocates and grassroots organizations and international non-governmental operations openly and broadly supporting our heart-rending cause!!! But The Industry of delivering power and energy to civilizations large-and-small is inert!!! It continues in its well heeled, superficially progressive way, to ultimately do near-nil to resolve the problem!!! The fûquers cannot even invent the real technologies, or perhaps already have and are just sitting on them … that’d allow our one-view-of-the-future-that-works plan to work!!! Woe! Woe! Prostrate thyself before the golden calf! Etc.”
Which is just laughable.
Meanwhile, the profiteers have definitely profited from the sentiment. Basically modest and relatively insignificant amounts of renewable energy have been implemented and ballyhooed from on high each and every news cycle. Yet, renewable energy accounts for what … less than 1% of mankind’s power demand?
And why is anything but!!!
Because if we (or anyone, really) were to WANT to do the whole renewable-progressive-mindful energy thing, it has but one single path to implementation in a total-coverage sort of way.
TAXATION. Heavy, progressive, inexorable, implacable taxation. Taxation, taxation, taxation and taxation. More every week (I’ve always liked “1% more a week, forever”). The ramp up is planned, no entity gets a hall-pass, and noone rich or poor gets a subsidy. NO ONE. Whole planet on a stomach pump of ever increasing power.
The monies raised by taxation then would also be mandated to go into funding the entire world alt-fuel-power-energy domain. Worry not … with that kind of yearly funding (tens of trillions!), we probably could make fusion finally work, too. Aneutronic “clean” fusion as base power, and all the renewables as the almost-for-free stuff.
________________________________________
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
His “activism” hasn’t been a failure, for him. He has become very well off because of it. Beach front property so not worried about sea level rise either. Don’t cry Timmy, just retire quietly and let the big boys deal with the rain, that you said would never fall again, falling on Sydney.
Hi Patrick MJD,
You’d better pray for more rain, Sydney’s dams are still under 50% of capacity.
Another Flannery apologist.
Patrick,
Why are the dams not full?????
Looks like Flannery was spot on with his prediction!!!!!
No apologies needed.
“…The gloves are off: ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children…”
Cute. An attempt to subliminally get readers to associate “climate deniers” with “child predators.”
I sent a message to the “news” organisation that released this article, complaining of the language used. I hope more folks do so. It is insulting and defamatory.
Once a fan of the ABC
Yes I sent an email to the editors email address along similar lines. They are not doing themselves any favours with the wider public.
Michael, perhaps it’s projection on the bloke’s part. A predatory climate alarmist making a Freudian slip.
It’s easy to spot predatory behavior towards youth by climate alarmists, but very hard to find that behavior in the contrarians to climate activism. Skeptics only try to negate the collateral damage by countering conjecture and predictions with fact and observation.
Does anyone know how many children he has? I found references to his waterfront home (boat-only access, and his boat used a motor, not sails), and to the jetsetting international travel he indulges in. But nothing about his kids, if any. Given his age, wouldn’t they be a little old to get hysterical over his melodramatic pronouncements?
Ole Flim Flam wasn’t that much of a failure.
He got paid $AU180,000/year ($AU was close to parity with $US at the time) to be an adviser to the former Labor federal government at the time…a part time job btw.
He also got a $90 million grant from the Labor feds for his “hot rocks” geo-thermal plant that was going to be easy to start and would combat AGW. It turned out to be not so easy and was scrapped.
He also still owns two properties on the tidal Hawksebury River, an hour or so north of Sydney.
Rising seas Timmy! Isn’t that what you keep saying?
Thank you for the reminder. That AU$18k/y was indeed for a part-time job which, IIRC, was just 3 days per week.
Finally. We have a climate activist who admits that after 20 year of climate activism he failed. He admits climate and the fight against climate change is all politics and zero science.
I recon he’s retired or about to and his pension, and lifestyle, are secure so can say what he likes.
Well done Timmy!
Like every macro-phenomenon in nature, Earth’s “climate change” is a chaotic/fractal, random-recursive, dual-dynamic process objectively unpredictable in astro-geophysical detail. Over some 1,500-million years, from the pre-Cambrian Ediacaran Period to the mid-Pliocene 3.6 million YBP, dustmote Earth experienced no global glaciations (“Ice Ages”). But from the Andes – American-Canadian orogeny in Paleogene/Oligocene times some 45 mm YBP, connecting North and South American continents have blocked global atmospheric/oceanic circulation patterns by walling off Eastern from Western hemispheres.
Though paleo-climatologists have yet to “model” this large-scale, long-term, cancellation phenomenon, which not only coalesced surface topography but elevated continents’ western coastal regions “from the Pole to the Horn”, the geologically recent result has been cyclical Pleistocene Ice Ages averaging 102 kiloyears, interspersed with interstadial remissions of median 12,250 years.
On this basis, Earth’s most recent Würmian Glaciation lasted from c. 116,400 – 14,400 YBP, followed by the Holocene Interglacial Epoch ending 12,250 + 3,500 – 14,400 = AD 1350 (Roman calendar, skewed by the 1,500-year Younger Dryas “cold shock” of 11,950 – 10,450 YBP). Meantime, Earth’s semi-millennial Medieval Warm ended coincident with Kamchatka’s strato-volcano Kambalny Eruption plus a 70-year Grand Solar Minimum to AD 1420 similar to that of 1645 – 1715, precipitating a 500-year Little Ice Age through AD 1850/1890.
Wegener’s plate-tectonic shifts aside, recent researchers not imbued with chiliastic Doomsday Cult hysteria have linked Earth’s century+ scale climatic regimes to sunspot cycles’ Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) affecting our Inner System’s solar magnetic field (SMF): Reduced irradiance at Sunspot Minima weakens field-emissions’ “plasma sheath”, seeding global cloud-cover with penetrating Cosmic Rays. As long-term overcast persists, temperatures drop; snowfalls accumulate; and –voila!– absent countervailing circumstances, miles-thick ice-sheets cover 60 – 70% of Earth’s habitable-zone landmasses.
As Australian Robert Holmes’ Mean Molar Mass version of the Ideal Gas Law definitively demonstrated in December 2017, any planet’s global atmospheric-surface temperature (GAST) T = PM/Rp (qv), meaning that anthropogenic warming via “greenhouse CO2” trace-gas emissions at 420 parts-per-million (.042% ppm) is a physical non-issue. Though such objective, scientific fact means nothing to Eric Hoffer’s True Believer (1951), the reality is that Earth faces a Super-Grand Solar Minimum through c. AD 2110 (Svensmark, Zharkova) concurrent with a cyclical Pleistocene Ice Age beginning 670 years back.
Dâhmn… I thought I was “on top of my game” vocabulary wise! Well written, I bow to you. GoatGuy ✓
Tim Fannery, for a moment I thought you said Flim Flannery.
Tim Flannery
Positions: Second Baseman, Pinch Hitter and Third Baseman
Bats: Left • Throws: Right
5-11, 175lb (180cm, 79kg)
Born: September 29, 1957 in Tulsa, OK
Draft: Drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 6th round in 1978
School: Chapman University (Orange, CA)
Debut: September 3, 1979
Last Game: September 29, 1989
Played 972 games all for the SD Padres
Career:
AB 2473 H 631 HR 9 BA .255 R 255 RBI 209 SB 22 OBP .335 SLG .317 WAR 9.1
You’re batting 1000, Walter. 🤣
Yeah, thought so. He is 63, retirement age in Australia is 65.
Nice to see I scored a hat tip for this post, but it pales into insignificance compared to a post today by the editor and executive director of The Conversation , which is supposedly Australia’s premiere academic website/blog.
The post is headlined “Climate change deniers are dangerous – they don’t deserve a place on our site”.
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-deniers-are-dangerous-they-dont-deserve-a-place-on-our-site-123164
In essence, the post states that The Conversation has reviewed its policy on climate change coverage and the new policy is summed up as: “That’s why the editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and skeptics. Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts.”
So Australia’s leading academia website won’t just ban any comment not supporting climate change, it’ll stop such commenters having a say on anything. Not just “deniers” but anybody even skeptical.
i.e. Australia’s academia now won’t allow dissenting views on a scientific theory which supposedly is the most grave issue facing humanity.
Maybe a commenter said they didn’t agree with everything Flannery said in his post. Last week a commenter said that it should be made illegal for any Australian anywhere to say anything anti-AGW, which presumably aligns with The Conversation’s definition of free speech.
The total ban on anything not supporting climate change, and on the commenters themselves, is a tragic reflection of the current state of Australia’s academic integrity.
At the bottom of the other link in the opening thread is this;
“Before you go…
The Conversation serves society by making knowledge accessible to everyone, not just a select few. Our only agenda is a better informed public. If you care about what we do please make a donation now and help secure our future.
Misha Ketchell
Editor”
With a big Donate Now button. Don’t think that will work somehow.
“The total ban on anything not supporting climate change, and on the commenters themselves, is a tragic reflection of the current state of Australia’s academic integrity.”
I was excommunicated from ‘The Conversation’ mths ago & ALL my previous posts removed …for showing NASA data proving climate has always changed but disproving the CACC claims in a British ‘Conversation’ article; so I must be a very dangerous person !
I note the latest pronouncement…
“This article is part of The Covering Climate Now series
This is a concerted effort among news organisations to put the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage”
(The Conversation Australia has also joined more than 170 other media outlets in an initiative called Covering Climate Now, co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation. The idea is to provide a single week of dedicated high quality coverage of climate change ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23)
And don’t you just love the –
“Academic rigour, journalistic flair”
in the title banner & the
“We believe in the free flow of information”
Flannery comes out of this looking like a complete fraud, sad to say.
Commentators have posted about the economic ill-effects of Flannery’s pronouncements.
But there has also been a human lives cost:
Wivenhoe Dam
Look it up if you are not familiar with the thinking that led to the 2011 dam burst.
“Far fewer humans will survive on our warming planet
That future Earth may have enough resources to support far fewer people than the 7.6 billion it supports today. British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people. Mass deaths are predicted to result from, among other causes, disease outbreaks, air pollution, malnutrition and starvation, heatwaves, and suicide. ”
Isn’t that AGC ?
It was certainly not a failure for his bank account, and he enjoyed some very nice trips all expenses paid .