By Jo Nova
The Northern Territory will become unlivable says the ABC, mindlessly parroting the latest activist-blob voodoo.
The ABC Blob News spent nearly $3 million dollars of our money today but didn’t spend ten minutes cross checking the latest scare.
Extreme heat will make Northern Territory unlivable within 40 years, activists warn
By Matthew Qvortrup, ABC
The Climate Justice Alliance, a coalition of health, housing, environmental and social service organisations, says rising temperatures and increasingly severe heatwaves present a direct and immediate threat to people across the Territory, particularly in the Top End.
Environmental advocate Ned Bible from Jesuit Social Services said the scale and speed of warming meant urgent, coordinated action was needed from all levels of government.
“Without urgent action, extreme heat will make the Northern Territory unlivable in less than 40 years,” Dr Bible said.
If only the ABC spent two minutes searching the historic temperature records on the BoM site they’d see that while temperatures have risen since the 1940s, Darwin has long good records and it was hotter 120 years ago. And before anyone says “non standard equipment” the answer is “No” — Stevenson screens were installed in Darwin by 1894 and they recorded many annual mean temperatures above 33 °C in the next ten years. Temperatures today have only just returned to to that with the help of hot airport tarmac, population growth, electronic sensors and radar interference. If any data needs correcting in this graphs, it’s probably the recent readings which might be in shrunken 60L screens, with electronic equipment that records one second records and gusts of hot air off the tarmac.
The temperatures in Darwin fell, and it’s taken nearly 90 years to recover:
Sources: BOM Data for Darwin post office and for the Airport.
The ABC lie by omission
They show the recent graph but not the historic one.
And that cooling trend has been known for 75 years — it also stretched across a vast area of Australia including Alice Springs, Hay and Bourke, and was written up in a peer reviewed paper by Deacon et al in 1952.
Jennifer Marohasy analyzed the data from Darwin and concluded that what the BOM had done to the original data was “indefensible”.
If they don’t rewrite history, they just ignore it…
The Climate Justice Alliance seem to think climate change will hurt the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples disproportionately more than everyone else. But haven’t they been here for 40,000 years? If so, their ancestors survived the Holocene when the world was so much warmer that the seas were 1.5 metres higher around Australia. I hear the air-conditioners were not too good either.
The cruellest thing we can do to anyone in a heatwave is make their electricity unaffordable because we’re trying to change the weather.
If we sold off the ABC we could buy a billion dollars worth of airconditioning for the poor.
REFERENCES
Deacon, E.L. (1952) Climatic Change in Australia since 1880, Australian Journal of Physics, Volume 6, Pages 209-218. [PDF]
ABC “News” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-04/climate-change-will-make-nt-unlivable/106301158