Rarely do they change tack unanimously. History is an important subject, and as new evidence becomes available which appears to be in conflict with previously accepted understanding or interpretations of an issue, we should always modify our understanding, or at least question it.
If one looks at the history of droughts and floods in Australia, there is strong evidence that the current drought and heat waves are not unprecedented. Studies of ice cores from the Antarctic have provided a 1,000 year record of droughts in South West Australia. 8 mega droughts have been identified, 6 of which occurred before before the industrial revolution, and the worst one occurred in the 12th century A.D. and lasted 39 years.
Newspaper records from the 19th century describe terrible heat waves that killed many people in Australia. It's reasonable to question the accuracy of the reported temperatures which were as high as 129 Degrees F (or 54 degrees C). They might be off by a couple of degrees compared with modern methods of taking temperature readings, but I doubt that local newspapers would get away with reporting fake news about people dying during heat waves that didn't occur.
A major problem for us all, is that so many citizens don't seem to understand that although the damage caused by extreme weather events, whether droughts, floods, or cyclones, might be unprecedented, because of the huge increase in population, the actual severity of the extreme weather event, in terms of flood height, drought length, maximum temperatures, and so on, is very unlikely to be unprecedented.
As a result of these current bush fires in Australia, there's going to be a major push to persuade the government to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, because of a deluded belief that CO2 is the culprit.
If the Media would spend more time reporting on the history of climate change and extreme weather events, we'd stand a better chance of protecting ourselves from the very likely repetition of such events.
Anyone in the future wondering what happened to Australia, here's how it worked.
The leaders of both major parties were not going to do anything that would risk their wallets or the income of their mates in the mining industry. So step one was climate change denial. Step two was yes it's happening but we're not the cause. The current prime minister Scott Morrison is now at step two. Step three was yes, we caused it but now it's too late to do anything.
That's the plan. The Australian public went along with it.
The opinions of Ray and other supporters are a great evil in the world.
The other side of the same coin are the mega wealthy suppporters of people like Greta Thunberg. Their plan is to panic the world into accepting a much lower standard of living while the wealthy get to keep their extravagant lifestyle. Watch to see which country is the first to spend billions of taxpayers' money on solar arrays. Billions that go straight into the pockets of the government's wealthy mates.
On the whole the green energy movement is a con. I certainly don't begrudge people their electric cars, but globally it's little more than virtue signalling. There are not enough resources in the Earth to allow even one medium sized European country to convert their fleet to electric given the current technology. The industry is based on the exploitation of poor countires and the workers in the mines are fundamentally slave labour.
For what it's worth, I was brought up in Melbourne and remember watching the Dandenong Ranges go up in smoke in the late sixties. I was in the middle of the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983. My parents, grandparents and great grandparents all were country people and knew about bushfires. The current fires are not getting gradually worse.
They are orders of magnitude worse.
Unmatched in the historical record. Where I now live here in New Zealand we are over 2,000 km from Australia. Last week there was so much smoke in the upper atmosphere that the street lights went on and it was too dark to see indoors without lights. The forests that have burned will not regenerate, The creatures that lived there will go extinct.
In New South Wales there are towns slowly shutting up shop because the farms that supprted them no longer have stock. The sustained heat has made the animals sterile.
I haven't got the figures in front of me, but I suspect the fires in the Amazon, Indonesia, the Congo and the Siberian wilderness are worse.
Cheery thought for the day.