Climate Skeptic Aussie Senator Matt Canavan. By Pellowe Talk - link, CC BY 3.0, link

Aussie Climate Activists in Damage Control Mode as Winter Weather Strikes the East Coast

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

In the wake of Deputy Leader of the Nationals Senator Matt Canavan’s two word tweet poking fun at climate tropes, academics and other climate activists have scrambled to reassure people global warming is still on track to wreck the world – just as soon as the current cold wave dissipates.

Matt Canavan suggested the cold snap means global warming isn’t real. We bust this and 2 other climate myths

June 11, 2021 2.22pm AEST

Nerilie Abram Professor; ARC Future Fellow; Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes; Deputy Director for the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Australian National University
Martin De Kauwe Senior lecturer, UNSW
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick ARC Future Fellow, UNSW

Senator Matt Canavan sent many eyeballs rolling yesterday when he tweeted photos of snowy scenes in regional New South Wales with a sardonic two-word caption: “climate change”. 

Canavan, a renowned opponent of climate action and proponent of the coal industry, appeared to be suggesting that the existence of an isolated cold snap means global warming isn’t real.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has previously insisted there is “no dispute in this country about the issue of climate change, globally, and its effect on global weather patterns”. But Canavan’s tweet would suggest otherwise.

The reality is, as the climate warms, record-breaking cold weather is becoming less common. And one winter storm does not negate more than a century of human-caused global warming. Here, we take a closer look at the cold weather misconception and two other common climate change myths.

Myth #1: A cold snap means global warming isn’t happening

Canavan’s tweet is an example of a common tactic used by climate change deniers that deliberately conflates weather and climate

Parts of Australia are currently in the grip of a cold snap as icy air from Antarctica is funnelled up over the eastern states. This is part of a normal weather system, and is temporary.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/matt-canavan-suggested-the-cold-snap-means-global-warming-isnt-real-we-bust-this-and-2-other-climate-myths-130878

The tweet which triggered this unseemly scramble to reassure the faithful;

Even up in the tropical North we’ve been forced to blow the dust off our winter woolies.

The “cold snap” is mostly temperatures in the 20s and 30s, pretty mild compared to what a lot of people in the USA experience every year. But it is cold enough that many people in Australia right now likely wish we had a little more of that global warming climate scientists keep promising.

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Tony Taylor
June 11, 2021 5:35 pm

Serious question: do any leftists not believe in climate change?

Earl Rodd
June 11, 2021 6:49 pm

It would be funny if it were not so sad: when a climate realist makes a joke intentionally conflating weather and climate change, the climate zealots are quick to “educate” us all on the difference in climate and weather. But they let news report after news report attributing every wild fire, hurricane, or hot spell to “climate change” go unchallenged.

observa
June 11, 2021 6:52 pm

11am in Adelaide South Australia and it’s 13C outside with an overcast grey blanket of cloud everywhere. My 2200W solar roof panels are pumping out a glorious 200W. It’s the original FIT scheme as a first adopter and my neighbours are paying me 59c/kWhr until 2028 while it averages 8kWhrs a day annually but you can see the marginal problem writ large.

With FIT rates for slowpokes and new installs dropping as low as 7c and even that being throttled with smart meters for the duck curve I’d need over 8 times the solar collection size for equivalent return. Naturally with such largesse at present I’m not permitted to add to the system without losing the 59c. So I wait for 2028 to junk them and go BIG with a solar diverter for electric storage HWS- Solar Energy | Catch Power | Glen Innes

The chances of Elon’s Powerwalls etc being an economic proposition by then are zilch with all the mandated EVs by whenever the next lot of pollies can manage it but we’ll see. In the meantime I have a modest RV generator (and its LPG) on standby for fridge lighting and electronics but that can be upped if necessary. It’s comforting to reside in a leafy seaside burb in a Mediterranean climate with all this madness going on.

Skeptic
June 11, 2021 7:30 pm

weather isn’t climate unless it suits the narrative

Maree Eggleston
June 11, 2021 7:52 pm

Still very cold here in Newcastle today, 12c on the coast here at midday, 5c overnight minimum. This is early June winter, July is always coldest in Australia.

Peter K
June 11, 2021 10:03 pm

Orange NSW had the best snow cover in about 40 years. In fact we never had a summer this year and every month this year has, so far, finished with a negative anomaly.

Dennis
June 11, 2021 11:03 pm

My truck load of firewood I expected to last through winter is now depleted by over half at 22 June, 2021.

Dennis
June 11, 2021 11:06 pm

Friends in Gippsland, Victoria, suffered electricity supply off from 8.00 pm a couple of days ago to midday the following day. They told me that this is happening too often now.

Hazlewood brown coal fired Power Station is not a long drive away from their property, now shut down at a loss of 25 per cent of the State’s electricity generating capacity.

Patrick MJD
Reply to  Dennis
June 12, 2021 12:02 am

There were some big storms and flooding recently in Victoria, so may have been a contributor. But yes, politicians are shutting down reliable energy production here in Australia. It will only get worse.

Reply to  Patrick MJD
June 13, 2021 2:07 am

Don’t you folk have elections anymore? Or have you gone over to the lefty sure-fire voter machines used in the US and developed in Venezuela?

Patrick MJD
Reply to  Gary Pearse
June 13, 2021 8:33 pm

We do, unfortunately all parties are punch drunk on the climate alarmist koolaid. I can’t vote due to my residency status here in Australia and if I could there are no parties that warrant my vote.

June 12, 2021 12:33 am

These people would call an ice age a “cold snap”.

To bed B
June 12, 2021 2:43 am

Interesting chat with my Dad. His country of birth, Croatia, has trees to yet shoot in June.

How does that happen if the world is warmer? Remember that the imperceptible change can cause heatwaves.

June 12, 2021 11:37 am

Whilst the alarmists are quick to claim that these are exceptions, the point they are missing is it has been them that over recent decades has taken every opportunity to use every exceptional high, often recorded in some previously unknown hamlet, to push their preaching down our throats, and as such, comments such as these about exceptional colder temperatures are driven more as an opportunity to counter their constant bleating.

Oddgeir
June 12, 2021 1:29 pm

As we are in for a solar minimum, hopefully not more severe than ~1965-1975 (-ish) coldsnap, more likely as severe as the ~100 year cycle, cross all fingers not remotely as bad as the ~850 (-ish) year cycle…

It’s a coldsnap. Happens every year whereafter temperatures revert to “normalish” to continue to fall towards the yearly lowpoint (February for northern hemisphere, August for southern).

Also happens every year is the opposit. As temperatures rise, there is a warmsnap whereafter temperatures revert to “normalish” to continue to rise towards the yearly highpoint.

It’s just weather (depending on polar vortex which depends on solar activity which depends on planetary positions and orbits).

Oddgeir

Jeff Alberts
June 12, 2021 8:24 pm

Is it Winter there yet? June 21?

Michael 2
June 12, 2021 8:35 pm

“The “cold snap” is mostly temperatures in the 20s and 30s,” Presumably, this being Australia these temperatures are Celsius and would not be considered cold anywhere except maybe Saudi Arabia.

JCalvertN(UK)
June 13, 2021 6:15 am

It’s just the “La Nina” – and a rather good one.
Sure OK, it might not “disprove” global warming. But it does rather strongly suggest that the government’s predictions are excessive and exaggerated.

June 14, 2021 10:32 am

“… more than a century of human-caused global warming.”

Astounding how ignorant these alarmist foot-soldiers are. They don’t even know what the warmista “consensus” position is: that even with the outsized CO2 warming effects the IPCC consensoids assume, human increments to atmospheric CO2 have only been large enough to have any significant effect on temperature since1950, and the planet cooled from the 50s through most of the 70s.

Sorry doofuses but of the 300 years of post-Little-Ice-Age warming the only part that is even conceivably due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases is the little uptick between 1980 and 2000, and that is most likely due to the grand maximum of solar activity that lasted from 1920 to 2000.

Ed Zuiderwijk
June 15, 2021 2:31 am

It’s cold. And this year’s springtime (in Europe) was absolutely colder than last year. And last year’s spring was (at least here in Liverpool) a bit colder than the year before that.

Now there are three hypotheses:

1) You are kidding yourself, the Earth’s climate is warming up.
2) There was cooling but it was actually caused somehow by a warming climate.
3) Actually the Earth’s climate is cooling.

Which of these is the more likely?

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