FACT is, even our Climate Commission on Monday ran out of global warming scares.

Joke is, not one of the players reading its latest report noticed.

Not one slapped their head, blushed and said: "Is this what we've panicked about? What fools we've been."

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And so it was Groundhog Day when the commission, chaired by Tim Flannery, handed Prime Minister Julia Gillard its update on the global warming catastrophe it's paid to hype.

There was Gillard, declaring the debate was now over, and we should back her carbon dioxide tax.

There was Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, still pretending to believe we were threatened by warming, and he had the policies to stop it.

And there was the media . . .

Journalists are now so conditioned to greet every global warming report with horror that few seemed to consider what they were writing as they once more penned their "doom doom doom" stories.

And so we got headlines like this: "Sea-level fright as climate report goes public" and "Wipe-out: sea level could rise 1m by 2100".

But wait. Is that the biggest scare the journalists can pick out of this report -- seas rising just one metre? If the very worst happens?

A century from now? When we'll be long dead?

But wait another sec. This prediction is not merely an anti-climax, but a lovely surprise. After all, didn't the ABC's top science presenter, Robyn Williams, once warn that the seas could rise by not one metre, but 100?

Here he is on his own Science Show in 2007, at the height of warming hysteria:

Andrew Bolt: I ask you, Robyn, 100m in the next century . . . do you really think that?

Robyn Williams: It is possible, yes.

And didn't Climate Commissioner Flannery himself once warn of sea level rises so high that we should "picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof"?

So we're already gone down from 100m seas to just a metre, at worst, and most likely half that. I think we'll cope.

The mystery now is why no journalist noticed the hot air leaking from the alarmist balloon, given that even the report's author, Climate Commissioner Will Steffen, seemed to feel he had to apologise for not reporting worse.

"While a sea-level rise of 0.5 metres -- less than the average waist height of an adult human -- may not seem like a matter for much concern," he admitted, "such modest levels of sea-level rise can lead to unexpectedly large increases in the frequency of extreme high sea-level events."

Or maybe they won't. Who knows?

Sorry if I sound flippant, but we've been fooled so often by alarmists peddling dud scares that we'd be mugs not to doubt them now.

Just read the Climate Commission's own report for proof.

Remember how The Age editor told us in February: "There will be more cyclones, and more of them will be as big as Yasi"?

Actually, the report admits, there's no evidence we'll get more cyclones.

Indeed, "it is not yet possible to attribute any aspect of changes in cyclone behaviour (frequency, intensity, rainfall, etc.) to climate change".

Remember Climate Change Minister Penny Wong swearing in 2009 -- before the rains returned -- that "this severe, extended drought is clearly linked with global warming"? Remember Flannery claiming "even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems"?

Actually, the commission's report now admits after the floods, we can't be so sure global warming will cause more drought, or that it has already.

"Our capability to project future changes to rainfall patterns, apart from the drying trend in southwest Western Australia, remains uncertain" and "it is difficult from observations alone to unequivocally identify anything that is distinctly unusual about the post-1950 pattern".

Next, remember Greens leader Bob Brown blaming coal miners for the Queensland floods: "It's the single biggest cause, burning coal, for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now."

Actually, the commission's report admits: "The floods across eastern Australia in 2010 and early 2011 were . . . not the result of climate change."

The report isn't even sure global warming will cause all those "extreme events" we're often warned of -- heatwaves, storms and hail -- since "the connection between long-term, human-driven climate change and the nature of extreme events is both complex and controversial, leading to intense debate in the scientific community . . ."

So much for the Government's global warming guru, Professor Ross Garnaut, who crowed after Cyclone Yasi that warming was causing "an intensification of extreme weather events now" and "you ain't seen nothing yet".

Even the old bushfire scare is now just a hypothesis, with the report saying only that the "intensity of large bushfires in southeast Australia is likely changing, with climate change a possible contributing factor". Likely. Possible. Contributing.

How far this is from Brown's opportunistic claim that the deadly Black Saturday fires were a "reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change".

In fact, the report admits, while we know the planet has warmed over the past century, we're not sure what will happen to us if that warming keeps going: "Many uncertainties also surround our understanding of the risk that climate change poses for human societies."

So perhaps I should praise this report for exposing the Browns, Garnauts and Wongs. Except for this: desperate to keep their cause alive, Steffen and the commission still can't resist exaggerating what few scares remain.

For instance, this report fails to note the world has not further warmed for a decade, a fact Steffen could not deny to me on MTR this week.

The report also fails to note that the average warming of 0.17 degrees a decade over the past 30 years is almost identical to the warming from 1860 to 1880, which no one blames on humans.

Again, the report fails to note any benefits of warming that might leave us better off, such as better crop yields and a lower death rate in winter.

THE commission's agenda seems clear, which is why it still pretends Australia can slow the warming and still pretends China is already slashing emissions.

And it still exaggerates what miserable few scares it has left.

Take that sea level rise it warns of -- of up to 1cm a year for the rest of the century. In fact, the sea level rise from 1993 to 2005 was just 3.3mm a year, and since then has slowed dramatically -- "a 60 per cent reduction" since 2005, notes a paper in Ocean Science.

So what last scare have these alarmists got left?

It's that last refuge of the desperate warmists -- that if we don't do as they say, the Great Barrier Reef will get it.

Warmer seas will bleach our reef, the commission's report warns, quoting Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who claims we'll be left with "the great weedy reef" unless the world cuts its emissions.

But Hoegh-Guldberg's past predictions make me doubt his latest.

In 1998, he warned that the reef was under pressure from global warming, and much had turned white.

He later admitted the reef had made a "surprising" recovery.

In 1999 he claimed global warming would cause mass bleaching of the reef every two years from 2010.

He yesterday admitted it hadn't.

In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant "between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef could die within a month".

He later admitted this bleaching had a "minimal impact".

These, then, are the people telling you yet again to panic.

But as Gillard said so unwittingly as she held their thin report in her uncomprehending hands: "We don't have time . . . for false claims in this debate."

And we should have too much pride for yet more such scares.

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Originally published as Left, media pander to carbon scare