Scientists warn of floods, fire, cyclones, and disease, grim predictions about greenhouse gas effect.

No, this headline did not come from the National Climate Risk Assessment that was just published by the government earlier this week. It comes from a newspaper report about a thing called Greenhouse 87, as in 1987. Yeah, 38 years ago. Greenhouse 87 was a 5-day symposium led by the CSRO, the government’s own science authority hosted at MES University and attended by some 260 scientists. This was cutting-edge world leading science at the time and it led to the publication of a 750 page book which you can still find on the CSRO website titled greenhouse planning for climate change. The book was simply the outcomes of the proceedings of that 5-day confab and made a series of predictions based around different scenarios as to what Australia would look like in 40 to 50 years time.

The trouble for them is that 38 out of those 40 to 50 years have now passed. And we can see that for practical purposes, pretty much none of their predictions have come true. And this is important to keep in mind as we hear and read the breathless reports about this new first ever national climate risk assessment that was just released. Because actually, if you look at the first ever climate symposium from the 1980s and this first ever risk assessment from 2025, it turns out they’re eerily similar, just with different dates on largely the same predictions. And the headlines coming out this week are predictably apocalyptic. And whilst they look very different from the headlines from that Greenhouse 87 conference, somehow they are also still exactly the same. If you’re starting to feel like you’re living inside of the fairy tale about the boy who cried wolf, then you’d be right.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is the boy crying wolf, and he has predictably seized upon this new report,

calling it a wake-up call for Australia and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has vowed to pursue ambitious emissions cuts that will make Australia proud. Despite the fact that Australia will be going it pretty much alone globally speaking, given that most of the developing world and an increasing number of the developed countries, including the USA, are no longer bothering to care about their CO2 emissions pretty much at all. meaning that whatever Australia does with our emissions will in scientific terms achieve precisely four-fifths of [….] all. But that’s not going to stop them from destroying the country in the in the pursuit of their net zero fantasy.

And as much as they would like to pretend otherwise, the simple fact is that the tides of history have changed. The reality is that their net zero gravy train is fast approaching the end of the tracks where it is going to go off a cliff called reality. More on that in a minute. But first, my name is Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense, to cut through the crap, and to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please, if you appreciate this sort of content being made by an Australian for Australians, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you’re going to love my books, which you can buy on Amazon if you search for Topher Field. Or if you’d like to buy my books as well as my DVDs and t-shirts and hoodies, the best place to do that is at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything that you buy will help me to keep doing what I do.

Now, the parallels between this new assessment and the original Greenhouse 87 report are so obvious that even a politician should be able to see them, but apparently they can’t. The big scary prediction today is that due to sea level rise there will be 1.5 million Australians at risk in just 25 years time. Thing is that the report from Greenhouse 1987 published 38 years ago. Well, in that report, they dedicated 120 pages to the issue of sea level rise and predicted that due to sea level rise, between 10,000 km up to 20,000 km of Australia’s coastline will have become inundated by the year 2030 to 2040. Uh news flash, that prediction was made 38 years ago and there are now only 5 to 15 years left in that time period and it’s not happening.

It just isn’t happening. Yeah, there’s erosion happening in places. Yes, sea level rise is continuing pretty much as it has for the last couple of hundred years. But this apocalyptic accelerated sea level rise causing tens of thousands of square kilometers of Australian coastline to go underwater, that’s not happening at all anywhere. Likewise, they predicted back in 1987 that Australia’s skiing season would soon be nonviable except with extensive snow making and that would happen within 40 years. That’s in the chapter titled the potential impact of climate changes on Australian ski fields starting on page 428 for those of you who are interested. Fast forward 38 out of those 40 years into that prediction and we just had a great ski season. Thank you very much.

The Great Barrier Reef was apparently going to be partially submerged under a half meter of sea level rise, subjected to extreme bleaching, slowed growth rates, ocean acidification eating away at the coral, as well as increased cyclone impacts. 38 years later, the reef is in near record-breaking health. And the last four years running have been the best four years for coral cover since we started measuring it. And by the way, the reef is having no trouble growing, bouncing back quickly after cyclones and after bleaching events, which most certainly do happen, but they’re not proving to be an existential threat to the health and life of the reef.

And did I just mention cyclones? It’s what’s interesting is that the trend with cyclones around Australia is actually down, not up.

And the trend globally is pretty much flat. What about rainfall? Well, despite Australia’s population growing by more than 10 million people since this report was published, the water shortages that they predicted for Melbourne, Sydney, and elsewhere uh haven’t really materialized in a long-term way, only short-term. And whilst there have been some nasty droughts in the Murray Darling Basin and elsewhere since this report was published, we are still within historical norms when we compare those droughts to other droughts. For example, the Federation drought that happened back around the year 1900, let alone other droughts that we can observe only through archaeological or geological examinations.

Now, that’s not to say that everything’s rosy. Life is not always easy, especially if you’re a farmer. But apocalyptic climate change, this is not even close. This book, Greenhouse Planning for Climate Change, has aged like fine milk because it is rotten through and through. I’d actually love to buy a hard copy of this just for my records. But at $226 for a used hard copy from Amazon, yeah, I’m going to need you guys to buy me a few extra copies if I’m going to add this piece of history to my book collection.

But understand, and I need you to hear me when I say this, it’s easy to laugh at this book. Now in hindsight but this book was cutting-edge science at the time this was 260 scientists gathering at a university under the paces of the CSRO to compile 750 pages of the most authoritative data science and predictions ever created for Australia. And yet they were wrong. grossly wrong. Now, to be clear, and for the sake of the YouTube sensors, I’m not saying that the climate hasn’t changed. The world is constantly changing, climate included. And yes, the world has continued its warming trend. We are in an interglacial period after all. But the warming that we’re observing is nowhere near as fast as what was predicted, despite the fact that there has been a massive increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

And the effects of this very modest warming that we have observed, well, those effects have not matched the predictions that were made in the 1980s at all. Sea level, well, it continues to rise about as slowly as it has for the last couple hundred years. Cyclones normal. Arctic and Antarctic ice cover, well, it’s fluctuating within pretty much normal bounds given the slow warming trend that we are experiencing. The doom and gloom from the 1980s as well as the doom and gloom from earlier this week. It’s simply unjustified.

Now, some people will try and claim that this time it’s different. This report, this new report, it’s the latest science.

And they’ll argue that we can’t use the failed predictions from nearly 40 years ago against the scientists today. After all, that was 40 years ago. To which I reply, exactly. It was 40 years ago. It was long enough ago that we can actually ask and answer the question of whether they got their science right. Whether the gathering of 260 scientists backed by the Australian government’s own CSRO were even within a country mile of being accurate. And the answer is no. So the next question is, do we really have any reason to believe them when they say that this time it’s different? And the answer again is no, because it’s very clear that they have learned nothing from last time.

May I remind you that they published a 750 page report with all the doom and gloom on full display. They got the headlines in the mass media and they got the political response as well in the decades since which has led us to where we are today. They got everything they wanted except for the apocalypse that they predicted. Okay, so that’s enough about that report from 1987. Let’s get to the one from earlier this week. They are making pretty much all the same predictions just with the details and the dates adjusted. And all I can say is, hey, let’s get back together in another 38 years and compare notes then, shall we?

The reason they want us to ignore their failed predictions from the past is so that we will be terrified of their new predictions from this week. And there’s not much I can say about that other than what I’ve already said. However, there are a few key omissions and misdirection in this new report that are worth pointing out before I finish.

Firstly, the authors claimed that this report was not intended by them to inform what Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions should be. This is an important detail because this is something known as the is–ought gap. Just because one thing is, well, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we ought to do a specific thing about it. And that’s a really important distinction. Even if you are a believer in CO2 being the gas of death instead of the gas of life, just because we can release a report predicting all kinds of doom from CO2, it doesn’t automatically follow that Australia should impoverish itself to reduce our own CO2 emissions when there is nothing we can do about the fact that global emissions are continuing to rocket upwards.

Just because it is doesn’t mean that we ought. The atmosphere is shared globally.

So even if you believe that CO2-driven climate change is real, well, it doesn’t automatically follow that we ought to cut our own CO2 emissions when globally emissions are just going to keep going up regardless. That’s what the Australian Climate Service is saying when they say that this assessment report is not intended to inform Australian CO2 emissions targets. They’re simply describing what they believe is the is incorrectly in my view for all the reasons that I’ve covered.

But even though they’re wrong about CO2 causing an apocalypse, they’re still honest enough to admit that just because this is, it doesn’t automatically follow that we should destroy our manufacturing, our national security, our energy reliability, and our quality of life going solo on net zero. However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese does not care, announcing proudly that he was going to use this report to do exactly what the authors of the report said it was not intended to be used for to inform his decision-making around CO2 emissions targets for Australia.

Here’s the worldwide CO2 emissions according to Our World in Data. And that’s Australia’s share down the very bottom. Notice that if Australia dropped to zero CO2 emissions overnight, it wouldn’t even erase a single year’s worth of increase from the rest of the world. And none of the countries whose rising emissions are visible on this graph in that top-line number have any intention of slowing down in reality, although they might pretend otherwise in what they say at climate conferences. Australia cutting our CO2 emissions to save the world is like an ant volunteering to be stepped on by an elephant to save its nest. It’s not going to make a lick of difference.

But actually, it gets worse because this new report is quite deceptive and it deliberately hides the fact that climate change will actually save lives in Australia. The report warns of soaring heat deaths, but makes no mention of the reduction in cold deaths. And Senator Matt Canavan took them to task on exactly this point during Senate estimates:

Matt Canavan: Did you estimate the uh the potential reduction in deaths from cold?
Response: Uh no, we did not.
Matt Canavan: Why not? My understanding is more people die from cold than heat in Australia.
Response: Uh we were specifically looking at climate hazards so it was out of scope for our report.
Matt Canavan: But isn’t if the climate warms won’t there be fewer cold deaths?
Response: We were looking at physical risk from climate hazards specifically and that the transition risk which has included any changes to do with mitigation were out of scope.
Matt Canavan: But this is not a mitigation risk. This is a direct result. Presumably, if the climate warms, there’ll be fewer people who die because it’s too cold. Am I missing something or
Response: It was outside of our scope.

There’s two things here that I want to draw your attention to. Notice that the defense was “it was outside of our scope.”

This is how politicians and bureaucrats can design a report or an inquiry or really anything at all in such a way that it is forced to come back and tell them whatever it was that they wanted to hear. They control the outcome by controlling the terms of reference or the scope to include only the things that they want and the angles that they want and none of the things that they don’t.

Secondly, Senator Canavan is exactly right. More people die from cold around the world than from heat. And Australia is no exception to that. You may have seen this graph doing the rounds over the years. It was originally published by The Lancet, the once reputable journal that has showered itself in shame repeatedly over the last few years, with this deceptive graph being just one example among many.

It shows a comparison between excess deaths from cold versus excess deaths from heat in a range of European countries. And it looks like in some countries heat deaths actually outnumber cold deaths, particularly in the southern parts of Europe or the lower part of the graph. But look a little closer because if you look at the scale on the bottom, you’ll quickly realize that they are lying to your face with this graph.

On the cold side, the scale goes from 0 to 250. On the heat side, the same physical-sized scale only goes from 0 to 40. Less than 1/6th. So to make this graphic visually accurate, you would have to shrink the heat deaths side down to about 1/6th of its current size or you would have to expand the cold deaths side to six times its current length. And then you would have a visually accurate graph. Why would they do that? They could very easily have made the graph scale the same on both sides. It would have been perfectly readable and much more visually accurate. Why? Well, because they didn’t want it to be visually accurate. They wanted it to tell a story. And the story they’re telling is that you should be afraid of heat.

But as Matt Canavan rightly queried, isn’t cold more dangerous? And if this report is going to be all apocalyptic about heat deaths, shouldn’t it be honest about the fact that for every additional heat death, there will most probably be multiple cold deaths that are avoided? Or to say it another way: according to the data, global warming will probably save lives in Australia and not take them. The official reply: that’s outside of our scope. How convenient.

So, let’s sum up, shall we?

The prime minister is going to use this assessment as an excuse to ram new emissions targets for Australia down our throats, claiming that we’ll be proud of them, despite the fact that the predictions in this report are just rehashes of predictions from that failed 1987 report. And despite the fact that the report wasn’t supposed to be used to inform emissions policy in any case. And despite the fact that even if the report is right, what Australia does will make next to no difference to the outcomes. And despite the fact that there are glaring omissions on purpose that have skewed the conclusions of this report to be knowingly apocalyptic and to predict increased deaths when in fact it should probably be predicting that lives will be saved. And this is what passes for leadership in this country.

Now it’s not all doom and gloom. As I covered in a video earlier this week, the L&P is fighting a civil war over their commitment to net zero. And I’m quietly confident that net zero is going to be abandoned by the Liberal Party very soon and that most probably Sussan Ley will be scrapped along with it.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that the National Climate Service that published this piece of nonsense was created by Scott Morrison and that it was formally announced in May 2023 by none other than the vent environment minister Sussan Ley. Mhm. So, yeah, this battle over net zero, it cuts to the very heart of the Liberal Party and the power struggle that is now going on between their power broking elites and the grassroots. And I personally cannot see how Sussan Ley is going to get herself out of the corner that she has now painted herself into.

So in the short term, Albo and his side of politics are going to use this new assessment as a cudgel, a club beating us into submission. And he’ll do that believing that it’s a winning strategy and that if the Liberal Party abandon net zero, then that will be the end of them. He will celebrate the day when the Liberal Party abandoned their net zero targets.

But I think he’s got that exactly wrong. I would go so far as to say that the Liberal Party abandoning net zero is just about the only thing left that could save them. And if I’m right and if the Liberal Party do follow through and oust Sussan Ley and her swamp mates from the leadership, reject net zero and give Australians a real choice at the next election, then I foresee that this report, this cudgel will transform itself into an anchor.

Thanks to the cost of living here in Australia and to the example being set elsewhere in the world as other countries move to prioritize cheap and reliable energy instead of prioritizing low emissions energy. Thanks to all of that, net zero targets are going to become an anchor that will sink the Albanese government, dragging them down at the next election if and only if the Liberal Party have the courage to give the people of Australia a real choice at the next election.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I love what I do. But as you can probably tell from watching this video, there is a huge amount of research that has to go into every single video that I do. And I need to build a bigger team if I’m going to keep growing the Topher Project and turn this little quest of mine into something that can really make a big difference. And that’s why I really appreciate your support.

And I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports my work by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And to everyone who buys my books and DVDs and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. I would love to expand my team even more, especially to be able to put on a full-time researcher and to be able to therefore expand the Topher Project in keyways that will dramatically increase my ability to have an impact for the better here in Australia and in time around the world.

Now, if you’d like to help me do that, then please support me in the ways that I’ve already mentioned. But if you’d like to support me in a way that’s perhaps bigger, partnering with me in a major way, becoming a regular patron so that I can expand my work with confidence knowing that the bills are paid if you’d like to do that, then please reach out to me via email Topher@topherfield.net.

Thank you so much for watching to the end. Please like, subscribe, comment, and let me know how you see all of this playing out. Do you agree that the Liberals will abandon net zero? Do you think it’s possible that the next election might give Australians a real choice?

Tell me what you think in the comments, but most importantly

And as always, think free.