A Green religious diatribe

With his call for Queensland coal miners to be held responsible for the state’s floods, Greens leader Bob Brown has completed his transition from political leader to religious demagogue.

In the wake of the New Orleans floods, fundamentalist preachers claimed that the catastrophe was visited on the city of sin by a vengeful God, angered by tolerance of homosexuality. Now Bob Brown has followed their lead, identifying the Queensland floods as the work of Gaia, punishing Queenslanders for their tolerance of coal-mining.

Brown’s call for coal miners to pay for the devastation fails the basic legal test for tort liability: causation. Indeed, the chain of causation is broken at a number of points.

First is the assertion that the Queensland floods are the result of modern greenhouse emissions. If Brown is genuinely fond of the Australian wilderness, he might be familiar with these famous lines of verse: “I love a sunburnt country/ A land of sweeping plains/ Of rugged mountain ranges/ Of droughts and flooding rains.”

They were written by Dorothea MacKellar in 1904, 11 years after the 1893 floods took the Brisbane River to a peak of over eight metres and decades before Brown’s climate dogma began to pollute our public discourse.

Indeed, Mackellar’s understanding of the Australian climate was superior to that of the climate dogmatists. Less than four years ago, Bob Brown was warning of “permanent drought”, declaring that “drought is the new norm across Australia’s greatest food bowl [the Murray Darling basin]”. Tim Flannery exhorted Australians to forget about new dams, because “dams no longer fill even when it does rain”.

Science is based on testable hypotheses. The floods do not disprove the broader hypothesis of climate change. They do, however, vindicate my own hypothesis that the likes of Brown and Flannery have no idea what they are talking about, and that their response to contrary evidence consists of obfuscation and historical revisionism. Their version of science is about as scientific as Scientology.

Even if you accept the floods were caused by human greenhouse emissions, the second break in Brown’s chain of causation is the suggestion that Australian coal miners tipped the balance. We could close our coal mines tomorrow, and after a brief scramble to substitute supply by expanding other mines abroad, emissions would increase as before. Australia’s domestic contribution is negligible: the growth in Chinese emissions each year is greater than Australia’s total emissions!

In reality, coal miners and others who contribute to the Australian economy can claim credit for our resilience to floods. When natural disasters strike developing countries, the casualties are measured in thousands – witness the recent floods in Pakistan or the earthquake in Haiti. Australia’s advanced state of economic development, driven in significant part by the mining industry, enables us to mitigate the human impact of such events by orders of magnitude.

Read the full article in Online Opinion HERE

First published in the Australian Finanical Review on January 18, 2011.
Alan Anderson was a senior adviser to Treasurer Peter Costello and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. He has previously worked as a lawyer with Allens Arthur Robinson and a computer systems engineer with CSC Australia. He currently works as a management consultant in Sydney.