Image by Jacqueline Wales from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The modern media is like a form of hypnosis
Lord help us all. Climate change might wreck Ayers Rock, I mean Uluru. It’s been baking in the desert for 550 million years, but another half a degree C and it’s in “peril“. (You had to use the hair-dryer…)
It’s such bad luck. “Climate change” could hit anywhere but it’s going to hit airports, vineyards, national parks, and Bondi Beach? It’s ruining holidays and your favourite symbols. It’s so unfair.
I thought this was surely an AI joke, or a grade school project, but Graham Readfearn put his name on it and the Guardian editors didn’t run away. The whole story is a keyword salad of hot button words and random numbers. 620,000 tourism jobs will be at risk they say mindlessly, as if 26 million Australians will stop having holidays and 10 million international guests will stay home, scared off by a one degree Fahrenheit rise.
Almost 68% of Australia’s tourism sites at major risk if climate crisis continues, report says
Uluru, the Daintree and Bondi beach among iconic Australian locations that could be impacted if planet hits even 2C of warming by 2050
Who comes up with these headlines: “almost 68%”? What is that? They could have said, well ….”67″. They could have said 2 out of 3, but they had to drop some meaningless specificity in there to give these chicken entrails the appearance of “scienctifiiness”. As if the error bars on this analysis don’t reach plus or minus 100.
The basis is that some people who want to sell us insurance have helpfully done a report telling us which industries, towns, airports and businesses will be mercilessly crushed by the Climate Gorgon. Given the dismal state of the climate models, these are the modern equivalent of Shamanic Spells.
I’m sure the Zurich-Mandala team did good work on the economic costs and losses, but they start with IPCC climate models, so they might as well be analyzing the Land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree.
Even the media know this is a nothing-burger
For some reason even Bloomberg thought there was something newsworthy about this new “index”:
Australian Airports Face Costly Fight Against Worst Climate Risk
The index calculated for the first time the risk from climate change to Australia’s A$170 billion ($114 billion) tourism sector. It studied 178 sites, ranging from Sydney Airport and Bondi Beach to the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Uluru, using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeling and proprietary impact assessments.
Though hold off with the SWAT Team:
Assuming 2C of warming, by 2050 the proportion of Australia’s tourism sites in the three highest climate-risk categories will rise from 50% to 55%, the report said.
So the writers at Bloomberg know there’s nothing there. To put it bluntly: if half a degree more warming happens by 2050, (and if the models are right, which they rarely are) a big 5% of Australian tourist sites will shift from one arbitrary category to a slightly worse one? That’s as bad as it gets.
So much of what we call news is so absurd, yet repetitive, at best, it’s a kind of trance with a drip drip drip feed…