The Doomsday Handbook

Why the government’s latest climate report reads more like prophecy than policy.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble but what you know for sure that just ain’t so!” – Mark Twain

Before we dive into the freshly released Australian National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) document, we might ask ourselves why much of the rest of the world is not seeing the same picture we are. After all, they have access to much of the same global data and climate scientists, yet many of the major world powers are pursuing different pathways to us. Perhaps we might ask why coal consumption continues to hit new records? Why fossil fuel investment is up 23 per cent year-to-date on top of record numbers in 2024, and perhaps the experts could explain why there have been so many defections of large financial institutions from the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), which is now struggling to survive as memberships that fund it dwindle.

Make no mistake. The risk assessment is a doomsayer’s handbook designed to help push our economy-crushing renewables roll-out to supposedly save us from ourselves. Instead of preaching to Australia, which is a little over one per cent of the reported problem, perhaps Minister Chris Bowen should be promoting it in Beijing, New Delhi or Washington DC to chastise Xi, Modi and Trump for their wicked ways. While Mr Bowen is at it, he can lecture 90 per cent of the world that missed their self-imposed Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs), which were due in February this year as mandated by the Paris Accord.

It is worth remembering that the US Department of Energy (DoE) released a report earlier this year which effectively framed an entirely different narrative to the hysteria portrayed in the risk assessment. It debunked the ideological catastrophic positions of the past and conceded that the world is not going to boil nor Pacific nations sink beneath the waves. The climate alarmists will argue the DoE’s document was written by environmental vandals. So who is right?

It makes sense to start with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), which has generally been regarded as the gold standard on anthropogenic warming. While governments like ours continue to offer sacrifices at the altar of these IPCC climate bibles, we cannot escape the countless allegations of data manipulation, conflicts of interest – including its then Chair Rajendra Pachauri – coercing dissenting scientists to conform to consensus language, favouring gender and minority diversity over scientific qualifications, not to mention numerous climbdowns on hysteric predictions such as the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035.

In Donna LaFramboise’s investigation of the UNIPCC in her book The Delinquent Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, she wrote:

“…who is writing IPCC reports?… One group consists of graduate students… Richard Klein, now a Dutch geography professor, is a classic example. In 1992 Klein turned 23, completed a Master’s degree, and worked as a Greenpeace campaigner. Two years later, at the tender age of 25, he found himself serving as an IPCC lead author… Klein’s online biography tells us that, since 1994, he has been a lead author for six IPCC reports. On three of those occasions, beginning in 1997, he served as a coordinating lead author. This means that Klein was promoted to the IPCC’s most senior author role at age 28 – six years prior to the 2003 completion of his PhD. Neither his youth nor his thin academic credentials prevented the IPCC from regarding him as one of the world’s top experts.”

So is it fair to reference the IPCC’s climate research in such glowing terms, much less use it as reliable source material?

Which brings us to examining the risk assessment report. Naturally, it is the battle cry to push even more renewable energy into the grid. UNIPCC reports are leant on extensively. As are reports dating back two decades. What is intriguing is that the frequency of a variety of extreme weather events that carried low confidence a decade ago now carry high confidence. Looking back on actual data, there are no material statistical differences in intensity, much less occurrence.

As a former financial analyst, a trusted mentor at the beginning of a quarter-century career taught me the danger of looking at numbers that only suited personal biases. Instead, his advice was to focus on the numbers that could debunk one’s preferred narrative because – as sure as night follows day – there would eventually be a time when those chickens would come home to roost.

Having worked inside government and seen how such publications – especially climate-related strategies – get put together, politically expedient buzzwords and platitudes are used to shape a narrative. Glossy reports are effectively reverse engineered with the help of compliant consultancies to suit the government’s policy positions of the day in order to keep them in the running for future projects. Have you ever noticed how many bureaucrats end up in the Big Four accounting firms, often to return to the public service to keep the mutually beneficial partnership sustained? Independence be damned.

Perhaps the risk assessment’s own numbers expose the inherent flaws in the report production process. Out of 2,013 workshop participants and 254 “climate risk experts and authors”, only seven are listed as independent. This seems an awfully small number to validate such a key document that will direct more taxpayer billions into the hands of rent-seekers. Within that, a wide spectrum of stakeholders – including from federal, state, territory and local governments, industry, community leaders, academics and other potential users of the risk assessment – have contributed.

Seriously, what is the point of letting local councils pontificate on the climate when they rarely get the basics right and have the temerity to jack up your rates to pay for their ineptitude in managing budgets. North Sydney residents will know what I mean with the 87 per cent rate hike proposed to cover the four-fold explosion in forecasts to redevelop the iconic Olympic pool.

Thankfully, our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been afforded a “parallel process to understand the risks in a culturally appropriate way”. This topic was covered in Virtue without Voltage. Contained within the First Nations Clean Energy Strategy 2025–2030, the authors never identified how much energy, in what form, in what location, at what cost, or by when it was required. Instead of financiers, grid specialists and engineers, our government experts consulted fellow state and territory bureaucrats, not-for-profits, and the Climate Change Advisory Committee. Same same.

The ultimate irony is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been more in touch with their habitat, including controlled burning, than many government bodies could ever hope to understand. Our first settlers marvelled and even diarised such coordinated activities.

Not to be outdone, those with mental health issues are also in luck because the risk assessment will do its best to avoid Australians grappling “with the loss of familiar ecosystems and species… to come to terms with dead and dying trees, animals… as ecosystems transition.” Sort of ironic when battalions of Caterpillar D-9 earthmovers are felling over 100,000 hectares of trees and destroying koala habitats as we speak to make way for more wind towers in our expanded renewable energy zones. Don’t even mention the plight of Victorian farmers who have recently lost private property rights. Clearly, some ecosystems are more equal than others.

According to the risk assessment, the “increasing frequency, severity and complexity of extreme weather events are putting pressure” on the fire-fighting “system’s capacity to respond effectively.” Or in other words, the role of our Australian Defence Force (ADF) is at risk of being over-extended. As volunteer firefighter rates decline, the argument is that the ADF will need to fill the void when bushfires rage, taking them away from their function to protect our sovereign borders.

The report noted, “…additionally, the physical and mental health of emergency management personnel and volunteers is being compromised.” Never mind that internal government statistics point to toxic work culture and bureaucrats out of touch with the needs of those on the frontline as the reason behind these problems. In the 2024 People Matters Employment Survey for the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS), only 15 per cent thought senior management effectively managed change, while one-third admitted witnessing workplace bullying. For more data on the shocking state of the management of our first responders, please refer to Burning Questions and Who Guards the Guardians. If we want to reduce the burden on the ADF, perhaps changing the yes-men that run our fire departments is the most effective option.

On page 35, it is curious that the report notes “low confidence” in being able to predict riverine flood run-offs, category 4 or 5 cyclones, the collapse of polar ice sheets, convective weather hailstorms or the time spent in drought. The problem is that if polar ice sheets are unlikely to recede, how accurate is it to hold a position of “very high confidence” with respect to rising sea levels? Someone has clearly not told residents who own waterfront properties on Sydney Harbour, where prices have in some cases surged two thousand per cent over the last thirty years. We should look forward to buying properties when adverts for panic selling are listed in Domain!

The risk assessment was written under the banner of the Australian Climate Service (ACS), which is a combination of the CSIRO, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Geoscience Australia and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Three of the four seem to be captured institutions.

It is important to consider that government climate bodies have made obfuscation an art form. The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been accused numerous times of homogenising the data to suit a warming narrative. For example, when FOI requests were made to verify the data between traditional mercury thermometers and the new resistance probes, the data revealed the latter boosted temperatures by up to 0.7 degrees – relevant if 1.5 degrees is supposed to be the level that triggers climate armageddon.

When one FOI request was made to provide 15 years of both sets of data for Brisbane Airport, BOM said it was too onerous as it was handwritten. When the FOI rejection was taken to the Office of the Information Commissioner, the response changed to no such data existing before switching back to the original story and requesting large sums to collate it for only three years. There are 38 stations out of 700 with 20 years of parallel data which have not been released.

We are constantly reminded by our ministers that organisations like BOM are beyond reproach. If so, why the consistent pattern of deflection? Surely transparency would add to the veracity of their argument, enhancing reputation.

Are you listening, CSIRO? Energy Minister Chris Bowen swears that the CSIRO is fiercely independent and the integrity of its research cannot be questioned. Unfortunately, to independent eyes, the GenCost reports have copped widespread censure for their narratives. The costings around nuclear generation document this well. Why didn’t CSIRO, a government agency, call up the Australian Embassy in Seoul to arrange a direct meeting with Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), the quasi-government owned operator of all nuclear power in Korea, instead of using out-of-date third-party reports with respect to Korea’s nuclear capabilities? Was it because they feared the answers would not please their overlords?

When asked to supply the energy generation modelling under FOI, the CSIRO refused on the grounds that such proprietary information could undermine the organisation’s intellectual property rights, putting it at a commercial disadvantage. While it is true CSIRO gets some funding outside of government grants, it is still owned by the taxpayers. The more likely answer is that the modelling is so underwhelming that exposure to energy experts would be highly damaging to their reputation. No wonder the model is being revamped.

Why did the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) recently seek to get journalists and economists to cease and desist from publishing our immigration statistics on the basis they could mislead the debate? Despite the six to nine month delay in reporting, Leith van Onselen accused the ABS of running cover for our government by politicising its reporting and undermining transparency. The ABS has a responsibility to report statistics, not cast its political positions on how data is interpreted.

For what it is worth, Geoscience Australia seems to be devoid of questionable activity with respect to its work. Still, if three out of the four main drivers of the intellectual muscle behind the ACS come from organisations that have had chequered histories around limited disclosure and questionable actions, how much faith can we put into the overall predictions within the risk assessment?

Yet it still boils down to one inescapable truth. Even if all the most extreme scenarios highlighted in the risk assessment ended up as highly probable outcomes, if the biggest emitters continue to pay lip service to bolder action, nothing we do as a nation at home can prevent impending armageddon. The major downside will be the heavy economic toll that will be ours in the quest to solve a problem we simply cannot fix.

Rue the day that energy poverty and a hollowed-out commercial sector are the main reasons for sharper falls in our emissions at the same time we murder our two most efficient export markets – coal and gas. The quest for net zero will be exactly that – net zero positive outcomes for the climate but impoverishment on a grand scale.

Michael Newman has four decades of business experience in North Asia and served as NSW’s Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner to the region.