By Jo Nova
The Nanny State strikes again
Apparently, there just aren’t enough real emergencies anymore, so we need to fake them up.
A couple of weeks ago, our billion dollar ABC, in cohoots with the Bureau of Meteorology, decided to report in prime time news that heatwaves are now so deadly serious we need New Emergency Warnings — “like a Bushfire emergency”, even though we get heatwaves every year, they hardly kill anyone and even five year olds know how to press the air conditioner button.
Back in 1896, Australians had to catch emergency trains and head for the hills the heat was so deadly. But apparently adult mammals are now so stupid they don’t know when it’s hot, and need to sit next to ABC Emergency radio all day in case “things change quickly” and someone needs to tell them to rush to the fridge for a glass of water.
I mean, it’s almost like heatwaves sneak up on people around hills at 100 miles an hour?
Either that or two government agencies want to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers:
New heatwave warning system adopted across Australia, using bushfire-style emergency alerts
by Tyne Logan, ABC
Bushfire-style emergency warnings are set to be issued for heatwaves across Australia, as authorities warn their dangers are potentially being overlooked.
No seriously, in an “Emergency” level heatwave the advice is… drink water, stay indoors, and use air conditioning. The whole news story is a form of subliminal coaching to infantalize the nation. You are all babies and Mummy-Government is here to sing a bushfire emergency song.
Get your dose of Play School for adults on the Australian ABC News:
But the real emergency here is the ABC reporting
One day when the ABC gets the internet they’ll be able to do real research instead of being factually wrong and literally incompetent. The ABC says: “Research has shown heatwaves are the most deadly natural hazard in Australia, with the exception of disease epidemics.” But anyone who reads unfunded science bloggers instead has known for years that the worst weather hazard in Australia is called winter, and it kills around 7,000 extra people each year.
Compare that to the official heatwave tally hidden in the ABC news (20 a year), and winter is 300 times worse.
If we are going to talk about overlooked dangers, lets say the word “cold” and sing about fossil fuels. They can keep you warm or fly you to summer, whereever it is.
Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period. | Indur Goklany
Officially we’re talking about 20 deaths a year:
This doesn’t sound very scary though so the ABC bundles 18 years of deaths together:
Analysis of coronial records, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, showed there were 473 heat-related deaths reported in Australia between 2000 and 2018.
It found 354 of these occurring during heatwave conditions.
But in January 1896, when Australia had only one sixth as many people, an astonishing 437 people died of the heat in the space of a few weeks. There were no air conditioners then. So we could add all the deaths that occurred then over an 18 year period and multiply by six and the deaths from actual heatwaves would be vastly bigger than current deaths.
The ABC tosses in a wild outlier study, with bigger numbers:
…other research suggests the number of reported heat-related deaths could vastly underestimate the actual number, with up to 36,000 deaths associated with heat between 2006 and 2017.
It is written by people who believe the effects of climate change will become more common, and who fish through death and temperature data looking for “heat-related” mortality but presumably not “cold related deaths” or deaths due to unaffordable electricity.
And all of them seem to ignore that it’s well known in mortality research that often heatwave deaths are followed by a dip in deaths. It appears that heatwaves tend to kill people who are so close to dying that they probably would have died in the following weeks. This process is known as forward displacement. The same pattern is not found after cold snaps.
Our media is the problem
The real issue here is not the Heatwave Emergency Warnings, but that the ABC acts as a propaganda unit. They should be mocking the BoM instead for treating us like babies and filling our airwaves with meaningless warnings.
When we were kids we’d turn on the garden sprinklers and run through them on hot days, and we didn’t wait for the ABC to suggest it.