Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
21 False prophets unveiled
Andrew Bolt
Not once when boarding a ship have I thought of ducking into the bridge to give the captain
pre-voyage tips on navigation. He's the expert.
Still, if I'd booked for Noumea only to dock in Karachi I would know this: whatever
the captain's credentials, he'd goofed. We weren't where he'd promised to take us, and him
screaming that he understands the sailing business better than do I, while true, won't cut it.
Next time I'm flying.
I thought such a principle was so obvious that all laymen would consult it in every
contact with any professional. Your new implant falls out? Sack the dentist. Your extension
falls down? Sue the builder. Clowns, both of them.
But in one tiny yet catastrophically expensive field of human endeavour this law seems
to have been suspended for a decade or two. Yes: climate science. This is the science where
one plus one can equal three one day and six the next—yet never may the layman question
the expert at the blackboard, or the shill demanding a few billion to make the sum equal no
more than two.
This must change, and I believe finally is. The tyranny of the experts is now crumbling.
The common sense of the layman is at last being restored.
Hey, didn't you guys say it would never flood? Then what's this stuff that's washed my
car down my Queensland street? Hmm, didn't you also predict runaway warming? So why
these sixteen years of non-warming? Think I'll get me some new experts.
See, after more than a decade of scares we are now getting the years of the busted
predictions—that'Er,thisisn'tNoumea'momentatthetopofthegangplank.Wearewaking
up to nearly two decades of wild predictions by experts who now look like geese to the
sane, despite still being hailed as gurus by the last holdouts of the global warming faith—in
Parliament, in universities and in the great fortress of our State broadcaster.
But how hard the politicians have worked to make us trust the very people we should
have questioned before we handed over $8 billion a year in carbon taxes to splurge on
making no difference at all to the weather.
Think back to 2007—the year Professor Tim Flannery, the professional alarmist, had
warned Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide could run out of water.
In Sydney, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, with a huge dam nearly two thirds full on
the other side of the city, instructed Australians to ignore the few of us now pointing
out emperor Flannery had no dry clothes. Trust the experts, he demanded, and not those
amateurs pointing out they'd docked in Karachi.
