Given the rarity of cyclones these days, a Category 4 system was all it took for Climate Church Junior Wizard, Adam Bandt, to come rushing out with this hyperbolic untruth:

“Building a new coal fired power station now is like knowing cigarettes cause cancer but starting your kids on a pack a day, or knowing asbestos kills but building your family home with it anyway,” Mr. Bandt said.

“If Malcolm Turnbull uses scarce public money to build a new coal-fired power station he’ll have blood on his hands. The more coal we burn, the more intense extreme weather events like Cyclone Debbie will be. People will suffer.”

(PS: here’s The Sydney Morning Herald refusing to include the ‘blood on his hands bit’. And they wonder why we don’t trust them anymore?!).

(PPS: Dear SMH, I’ve taken a screen shot of your article with a word search showing zero hits for the word ‘blood’ – so please resist any urge you may have to engage in some funny stuff and say that it was all my imagination).

The theory that burning coal leads to more cyclones was quickly dubunked when the cyclones declined their invitation to the Earth Hour party. The theory was then altered to state that there would be more ‘extreme’ cyclones.

Of course, facts have a funny habit of playing their own game and the Climate Church’s unified theory of extreme carbon cyclontivity was also debunked some time ago:

• For Australia:

(NB: notice how BOM is too ashamed to provide an updated graph beyond 2011?).

• For the Northern Territory:

• For the South Pacific:

• The North-Atlantic Basin:

• The East-Pacific:

• Or the whole world for that matter:

How about landfall cyclones? After all, it’s us wicked human beings that are supposed to to pay for all this sinful carbon dioxidism:

Hmmm.

Again, notice how all these graphs aren’t current to 2016 – and how it’s nigh on impossible to find one? Now why would that be?

Extreme cyclone carbon theory became a complete farce when Cyclone Winston hit Fiji last year – with the Climate Vatican attempting to decree that it was the worst cyclone ever!  …to hit the Southern Hemisphere.

Thankfully, that serving of dog’s droppings was sensibly disposed of by TMR: 

Why would large chunks of the media want to recklessly mislead us about Cyclone Winston’s ranking in the pantheon of cyclones?

It all started when I read the headline ‘worst storm on record’ on news.com.au (at 15:08 on Saturday, 20 February 2016 – before Cyclone Winston had even hit Fiji)…

‘Wow’, I exclaimed to myself, it’s not every day that you come across the WORST STORM ON RECORD.

Within seconds of my socks having been knocked off, they quickly found themselves back on my feet as I clicked on the story and saw that Cyclone Winston had immediately become downgraded to a cyclone ‘being described as the strongest on record in the southern hemisphere’…

When it comes to air pressure (the lower the air pressure, the more ‘intense’ the cyclone), Cyclone Winston doesn’t even make the top 10 in the south pacific region, let alone the southern hemisphere…

If ranking by peak 10-minute sustained wind speed (the measure used by most international weather agencies), Cyclone Winston comes screaming all the way up to joint 4th in the south pacific region – but still well short of strongest ever in the southern hemisphere.

Despite having made complete and utter fools of themselves, climate catastrophists like Adam Bandt continue to double down.

Guys. Please. The tide went out a long, long time ago. It’s high time you put your pants back on and found something more productive to do.

 

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(NB: the cyclone statistics in this article first appeared on TMR on 12 February 2017 – in response to a Sky News article reporting on the release of The Climate Council’s report titled ‘Cranking up the horseshit intensity: Climate change and extreme weather events’.