AGAIN I must ask: if global warming is so clear a threat, why all these deceits?

You see, the Gillard Government and its paid alarmists this week stooped to even more despicable lows to panic you.

Take Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery, who used to claim we'd never again get dam-filling rains and that Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide could run out of water by ... oops, already.

Click here to have your say at Andrew's blog



This week he was at it again, insisting global warming was already drowning some of our islands.

"There are islands in the Torres Strait that are already being evacuated and are feeling the impacts," he claimed.

Oh, really, Tim? Which ones? When?

In fact, sea levels have dropped over the past few years.

Moreover, even Toshie Kris, a warming alarmist who chairs the Torres Strait Regional Authority, last month described evacuations of his islands as a thing that might happen one day, not a thing that had happened already.

"The Torres Strait may well be the first area in Australia to commence evacuations of inhabited lands, not as a precaution but as a direct result of climate change," he said.

The only evacuation I know of to which Flannery could be referring was of just six families from Yam Island in 2006 when a storm coincided with a king tide.

But such floods have happened in these low-lying islands since before memory. For instance, Bamaga, on Cape York, was settled more than 60 years ago after Saibai Island was hit by a tidal wave. So which islands, Tim?

Surely you can't be referring to the few families who have quit Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands?

After all, the real problem there is not that the seas are rising but that the land, on tectonic plates, is falling.

But Flannery's alarmism is almost forgivable compared with that of the Department of Climate Change, which yesterday leaked to the Herald Sun its latest "fact sheet" on the allegedly deadly threat of global warming.

So I read this: "Victorians ... are being warned that global warming could slash the ski season by up to 96 per cent ... The number of heat-related deaths could reach 1318 a year ... "

What shameful hucksterism from the department.

The claim that skiers will weep for warming is based on a suspect CSIRO 2003 study, which warned that ski resorts could already lose a quarter of their snow by 2018.

Yet most of the snow seasons since have been great, and this year's has opened early. One day the CSIRO will admit it was wrong. Again.

The death scare is even dodgier. That bizarrely precise prediction that 1318 older Melburnians could die of heat in 2050 plays down two critical things.

First, this prediction was first made by the CSIRO and National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in 2002, and over the past decade the world - surprise! - hasn't warmed at all.

So the prediction is outdated.

Second, why is the Department of Climate Change recycling this scare when the truth is that even if more people die of heat in a warmer world, more lives will probably be saved by the milder winter?

In fact, even the 2002 report reluctantly makes that very point: "In some countries, decreases in winter mortality due to milder winters may compensate for increases in summer mortality due to the increased frequency of heatwaves."

And even the Department of Climate Change is forced to admit, after first scaring us about heat-related deaths, that in fact, with the lives saved by a warmer winter, there would overall be a "slight decrease in the total number of temperature-related deaths".

Isn't that the real headline? Global warming actually saves lives?

Hear it again from the British Medical Journal, which in 2000 reported a study by scientists in Britain, Italy, Holland and France, who concluded: "Our data suggest that any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short-term declines in cold-related mortalities."

Same story here. An Adelaide University study, Temperature and direct effects on population health in Brisbane, 1986-1995, published in the Journal of Environmental Health, noted that even in warm Queensland, winters were deadlier than summers.

Cold kills more surely than heat. The truth is other than what this Government wants you to believe.

You are being deceived yet again.

Is it because global warming is actually a con, that it must be sold with such cheap tricks and false alarms?

Join Andrew at 8am weekdays on MTR 1377

Originally published as Alarmists recycle a flood of tactics