Stridently dark green

GLOBAL warming preachers have been crowing over the bushfires in ways not just despicable but dangerous.

Just hours after the first bodies were being recovered, Greens leader Bob Brown was already on television, lecturing us on our sins against the planet.

Rather than confess that green activists had been desperately wrong to oppose fuel reduction burns, Brown was eager to boast that this catastrophe had instead proved them right. About global warming, you know.

"(The fires are) a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority the need to tackle climate change."

Well, actually, Bob, the fires were a sobering reminder of the need to help the victims first, and to fireproof our houses and towns after that.

Freya Matthews, a La Trobe University "ecological philosopher", wrote in The Age that there was no doubt these fires were caused by our gases: "This is climate change."

ABC presenters religiously took up this lesson of the day on radio and television and declared -- falsely -- that never had it been this hot. Never had fires burned so fiercely. Global warming was here.

And -- sure enough -- former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, another preacher with no formal training in climate science, outdid all his previous exaggerations by directly blaming our gases for these 200 deaths.

"Let's hope that Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible tragedy, and change our polluting ways before it's too late," he thundered.

Or as historian Jonathan King put it hysterically, again in The Age: "We humans started this war and now the environment is fighting back."

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.
As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.
AND despite claims that global warming is now heating this land like never before, Victoria's highest recorded temperature is still the 50.7C measured in Mildura 103 years ago. South Australia's is also 50.7C, recorded 49 years ago. NSW's is the 50C of 70 years ago. Queensland's is the 49.5C of 37 years ago. Not much recent warming obvious there.

It is important that the public be reminded of these heat waves in the past - they are a normal part of life in Australia.

A greenie in the comments section said that there was a report of 52C in Mildura this week - so the previous record is broken. He also maintained that none of those early figures are usable, because they were not taken with modern instruments.

But that is a general problem in Australia - we have no records at all from any proper length of historical time. The 1850s is nothing - it is yesterday in terms of mapping climate trends.

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