Morrison is a retired geologist and farmer, and a former MP, who lives in Calgary.
The catastrophic bush fires that killed more than 200 people in the Australian state of Victoria a few weeks ago were still raging wildly when, as predictably as the rising of the sun, global warming enthusiasts blamed it on evil, carbon dioxide- emitting humanity.
A Greenpeace news release blamed global warming, not only for the bush fires, but for contemporaneous flooding in the state of Queensland. “The tragedy,” it said, “should be a clarion call to politicians for the need to begin treating climate change as an emergency…. Urgent and dramatic action is required to cut greenhouse pollution if we are to have any hope of avoiding runaway global warming.”
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Noted Australian environmental doomsayer Tim Flannery smugly declared, “There is no doubt that emissions pollution is laying the preconditions necessary for more such blazes.”
The disaster was preceded by 35 rainless days and a 12 day heat wave but were those conditions extraordinary? Hardly.
Drought and extreme heat are so normal in Australia that long dry periods are the benchmarks of history. Since 1895 there have been 57 years of severe drought, including 29 years when almost the entire country suffered. The great drought of 1958-68 was the worst ever recorded.
I worked “outback” in 1964-65, and the stench of rotting livestock, dead from starvation, is burned into my sinuses.
So were this year’s fires in Victoria an anomaly? Not at all. In the past 100 years, Victoria has suffered 18 major conflagrations that destroyed millions of acres of forest and thousands of buildings, with the loss of almost 600 lives. This years’ death toll was extraordinary but the area burned (1,300 sq. miles) didn’t come close to the Black Friday fire of 1939 that engulfed 5,400 sq. miles or the Black Thursday fire of 1851 when an area of 19,000 sq. miles – a quarter of the present state – was burned.
Given the high winds that drove them, there’s no way this year’s fires could have been controlled. However, a few foresters have bravely spoken out in support of rural people who blame the great loss of life on “green” policies that have hindered precautionary seasonal burning of forest floor litter and have prohibited the clearing of brush and trees around homesteads and villages.
For dedicated global warmists, the temptation to blame every natural disaster on global warming or, as they now prefer, the less controversial “climate change,” is irresistible. Climatologist Patrick Michaels refers to this obsession as a “culture of disaster worship.”
When New Orleans was overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina, there was a great hue and cry attributing the disaster to humanity’s greedy addiction to fossil fuels.
The human stupidity of building below sea-level, behind an inadequate levee, in a hurricane-prone region received less consideration.
The world’s leading authority on hurricane forecasting, Dr. William Gray, has said, “the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about those storms.” Ouch!
The eagerness of the warmist cabal to blame every conceivable weather event on out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions would be hilarious if the economic and political ramifications of sharply reducing those emissions weren’t so dire.
Wilting in the heat? Blame greenhouse gases. Ice storms and killer blizzards? Clearly caused by excess carbon dioxide emissions. A spouse drinking, philandering and neglecting personal hygiene? Unimpeachable evidence of global warming.
John Brignell, a statistician and humorist (is that an oxymoron?) with apparently more time and patience than the rest of us, has compiled a list of more than 300 things that the media have reported as being caused by global warming.
These include: increased salinity in the North Atlantic, decreased salinity in the North Atlantic, desert advance, desert retreat, aggressive polar bears, wolves eating more moose, returning bubonic plague, spreading dengue fever, rivers rising, rivers drying up, a maple syrup shortage – well, you get the picture.
What’s more, all of these remarkable things are happening in spite of the fact that global atmospheric temperatures, as recorded by extremely accurate, satellite-mounted microwave sounder units, have been falling for a decade. Meanwhile the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has continued to rise at a steady rate.
Within the broad scientific community, and among almost half of the shivering Canadian public, global warming is becoming a derisive punch line, but federal and provincial legislators are a mile or two behind the parade and busily concocting multibillion-dollar schemes to save us from hypothetical climatic catastrophes.
Who will save us from ignorant politicians?
