By Rocky Wood

Australian of the Year Tim Flannery attempted to scare the horses recently by baldly claiming greenhouse gases are now at levels far higher than has ever been publicly admitted before. Is this a cry of warning from an eco-warrior or yet another blast of climate-porn from one of the world’s leading climate pornographers?

Traditionally pornographers produce material their audience may regard as obscene, or at least titillating. Climate pornographers produce material that is obscene, regardless of your viewpoint – extremist, alarmist and designed to frighten regardless of the facts, or the reasonable conclusions to be drawn from the information to hand.

And, no, pornographer is not too harsh a word to use in regard to the climate change debate. Polemics such as Flannery and Al Gore have taken to using very harsh rhetoric in an attempt to silence their critics and anyone who dares question climate change dogma. If you want to live by words you risk death by words.

According to one website the earliest use of the term ‘climate porn’ to describe the excesses perpetrated by the mass media, environmental groups, politicians and celebrity eco-warriors to attract attention was this, in the Financial Post, as long ago as 2004:

Parental warning: Better lock down the Discovery channel along with the Playboy channel next Thursday unless you want to subject your kids to hours of climate porn and scenes of polar bears being killed off by the evil legacy of the industrial revolution and human addiction to speed, technology, power, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

The same site, wordspy.com, defines climate porn as ‘extremist or alarmist language or images used to describe the current or future effects of man-made climate change.’

Flannery’s latest claims are the very definition of climate porn. He revealed to Australia’s ABC the contents of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) update report not due to be released until next month.

Why? Could it not wait a few weeks? Perhaps to alarm? Perhaps to get his name in the news again? According to the ABC news website Flannery was able to reveal, no doubt in tones of impending doom, that greenhouse gases are at ‘dangerous’ levels ‘far higher than has ever been publicly admitted before.’ One presumes the reference to public admission was intended to imply that governments, presumably those headed by Bush and Howard, have somehow conspired to hide data from an unsuspecting public. The problem of course is that governments do not control this data. In fact, the IPCC consists of thousands of scientists and reports to the UN, which is not exactly a hotbed of right-wing pro-business, oil-company loving conspirators.

Flannery was quoted as saying the new figures (the ones he had rushed to reveal ahead of proper scrutiny and release by the scientific community) show greenhouse gases had reached levels already deemed dangerous by mid-2005. Of course he neglected to reveal that there is no consensus about what these dangerous levels should pegged at. Nor did he rush to explain why, if the levels are ‘already’ so dangerous, the dire predictions he constantly peddles had not already come to pass.

Worse, he claimed these new figures, which only he is currently privy to, were ‘beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001’; and that the levels of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere were far beyond those previously modelled by climate scientists. Which all begs another question – if these climate models, which vary from one researcher to another by orders of magnitude are so accurate, why should we put any faith in them now they are apparently all proven to be wrong? Even the ‘worst-case scenarios’.

Then, the climate pornographic climax from Prof. Flannery: ‘We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change – that’s what the new figures say. It’s not next year, nor next decade; it’s now’. Now – no ifs, buts or maybes, dangerous climate change is upon us.

Flannery is intent on making constant outrageous predictions. He has claimed ‘there is a fair chance that Perth will be the 21^st century’s ghost metropolis’ and that ‘we face … rapidly rising sea levels, maybe up to 6 metres and hundreds of millions of refugees, because there are whole cities going under.’

Flannery is a man who likes to mix possibilities and imagination to come up with apocalyptic headline-grabbing scenarios. Try this one: ‘Let’s project ourselves 50 years out and imagine that the rate of melt has continued so that the sea level has come up three or four metres. What that means is there’s barely a functioning port facility on the planet. So how do we go about international trade which is actually the centre of our global civilisation?’ Discounting the likely response of engineers and government completely this whole nightmare is constructed on the term ‘imagine’, not on science. On fear, not fact.

These types of gloom and doom catastrophe claims are starting to have an impact quite the reverse of that expected by the claimants. Just last week a leftist Think-Tank in the UK released a report arguing the overwhelmingly alarmist claims about climate change and global warming peddled in the mass media is ‘confusing, contradictory and chaotic, and with the likely result that the public feels disempowered and uncompelled to act.’

Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better? was published by the Institute for Public Policy Research. It declares that the use of the sort of alarmism in which Flannery and Gore specialise is counterproductive. They say eco-celebrities and the mass media largely portray climate change as ‘awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control.’ As one might expect from a leftist think-tank they then go on to recommend ‘communications from government and green groups should treat climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold, making it feel natural to the large numbers of people who are currently unengaged with the problem.’ Marketing tactics are better than fear tactics, they seem to argue.

But the point they are making appeals to common sense – if extremist fear tactics are in constant use the masses will soon feel disempowered. Not long after that they will give up all hope of participating in the debate and whatever reasonable changes might actually be required.

In other words climate porn is likely to be counterproductive. That which outraged our grandparents is now standard fare on Channel 10 – to them it was pornography, to today’s teenagers it is but entertainment.

Much of the alarmism and the fear tactics may very well be misplaced. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth implies, wrongly, that Hurricane Katrina’s devastation can be put down to global warming. Links between Australia’s recent drought and global warming are also unproven. Use of terms such as fear, inevitable, catastrophe, freak weather, chaos, the collapse of civilisation, submerged, global threat and disaster in every headline, article and press release is unreasonable and the common man senses it.

Not every bad weather event is related to global warming. Not every catastrophe predicted by Flannery will come to pass. In fact most of his claims are so extreme, so pornographic, that perhaps none ever will?

Who knows – it might even turn out to be the best thing for the environment if Prof. Flannery and his fellow travellers stuck to science and swore off climate porn.

© Rocky Wood, 2007
Rocky Wood has been a freelance journalist for 30 years, and is based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of four books and has published hundreds of articles in the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.