Climate alarmists ‘crying wolf’ are finally losing credibility

The “Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a famous Aesop fable about a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock.  The phrase "to cry wolf", meaning "to give false alarm" refers to providing dishonest warnings, which result in subsequent alarms (even if true) being disbelieved.

The wolf-crying label now well-and-truly applies to the claims of climate alarmists.

The big electoral swing in Australia to One Nation and away from the Coalition and Labor in my opinion is reflective (inter alia) of growing skepticism about claims of impending climate catastrophe.  It also reflects increasing fear that alleged “solutions” are sending the nation broke.  The Liberals (in particular) are caught up in all this because so many of their federal parliamentarians and State members are “moderates”, who oppose any step back from current climate policies.  This had presented a dilemma for conservative voters, who want a party that represents their values.

The most recent element of the “wolf-crying” alarm in this country is the (now-disbelieved) El Niño-related scare about devastating drought predicted for 2026.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) last Autumn officially declared El Niño to be active.  The ABC further trumpeted :

El Niño declared by BoM and it could become the strongest on record”.  The BoM long-term outlook from 10 September 2026 confirmed “a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific, with peak warming expected around November–December 2026, before persisting into Autumn 2027.  Below-average rainfall was projected for parts of south-eastern Australia, including southern New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania.  

The BoM and the woke media were most strident in promoting the prospect of drought every time a dry spell ran for a few weeks.  They were noticeably most vocal in late-May/early-June, and again in September 2026.

Guess what?  November 2026 has now arrived, no widespread drought, and the BoM and the rest of the woke brigade have gone quiet again!

The actual weather turned out to be the exact opposite to that being promoted by the climate alarmists, though the BoM had expressed some caveats to cover itself.  In much of the South-East there was a big seasonal break last June and again recently in October.  The result has been one of the best seasons in living memory (despite dry pockets in a few places like the Monaro and the NSW Far South Coast).  In the past week or two there have additionally been very good rains in much of Queensland and Northern NSW.

In short, any farmer, who took the forecasts of drought seriously, lost a lot of money.  Most areas predicted for drought are currently looking forward to bumper crops, near record stock prices, and lots of feed.  A pregnant cow in store condition, that sold last May for little over $1000, could now easily be worth over $3000 with a calf at foot.  Those, who sold their cattle too early, literally lost a fortune. 

Long-term weather forecasts now have near-zero credibility in the farming community.  Farmers still remember the severe drought from 2017 to early 2020, whose onset and later breaking was never forecast.  They also remember the false prophesy of Professor Tim Flannery that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems.”

A further prominent Australian example of “wolf-crying” relates to the Great Barrier Reef. 

From at least the 1970s there have been near-continuous claims of the impending devastation of the Reef.  This has included alleged causes as varied as starfish damage, coral bleaching, more numerous and severe cyclones, nutrient runoff, and warming ocean temperatures.  Malcolm Turnbull's government even pledged over $1 billion to protect the Reef.  In 2016 other “experts” put an $8.2 billion price tag on “saving” the Great Barrier Reef.  The Queensland Government more recently announced a “much-needed” $330 million funding to address the Reef’s water pollution problem over five years.  

For the record, the Great Barrier Reef has just recorded six years of exceptionally high coral cover .  The latest data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science reveals that hard coral cover across the vast marine park has remained stable or increased, with the northern and central regions recording their highest levels in decades.  Natural phenomena are often ignored by alarmists, who seek to attribute all reef changes solely to climate change.  The reality is that most of the resources devoted to “saving” the Reef have been a waste of public money, merely pork-barrelling vested interests.

Rising sea levels (stemming from global warming) have been another unfounded climate scare, that is readily debunked.  The mean sea level trend at Sydney, Fort Denison 1 & 2, is +0.84 mm/year with a 95per cent confidence interval of ±0.10 mm/year, based on monthly mean sea level data from 1886 to 2025.  That is equivalent to a barely significant rise of only 3.24 inches in 140 years.

According to the UN and a plethora of climate alarmists, the (widely cited) Pacific island nation of Tuvalu (as well as other low-lying islands) “battles rising sea levels that threaten to put large parts of the island entirely underwater by the end of this century”.  Tuvalu's foreign minister even gave a speech to the Glasgow climate conference standing knee-deep in seawater to show how Tuvalu is on the front line of climate change.

The problem is that academic studies do not support this thesis. 

One study found that:

...the significant increase in sea level observed at Tuvalu’s current tide gauge is attributed more to multidecadal oscillations, significantly affecting short-term records, and the subsidence of the tide gauge, rather than the global thermosteric contribution. The residual rate of sea level rise is likely influenced by other factors, such as changes in circulation within the lagoon or other local anthropogenic biases. The suggested analysis aligns with prior research, reinforcing the perspective that the sea levels are gently rising and the surfaced area of Pacific islands and atolls is not diminishing.

According to a report published in February 2018 in the scientific journal Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, Tuvalu isn’t sinking or even shrinking.  It’s expanding.   Despite a cumulative sea-level rise of 15 centimetres since 1971, an analysis of all 101 islands in Tuvalu’s atoll chain has found that Tuvalu’s land area has actually increased by 2.9% (74 hectares). 

Another heavily promoted climate scare has concerned the predicted decimation of the world’s polar bear population.  A typical panic is that pushed by (for example) the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), stating that:

a recent study shows that by 2100 it is likely that there will be local extinctions of polar bears from some parts of the Arctic, even if we moderately reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.  If we fail to reduce our emissions, by 2100 we may lose all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations in and around the Last Ice Area.

The Director of Wildlife Research with the Arctic Government of Nunavut on the other hand has stated that: 

Of 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct or even appear to be affected at present. 

In the 1950’s and 1960’s there were between 5,000 and 10,000 polar bears. Today there are between 15,000 and 25,000.  Hunting, not climate change, has been the primary historical threat to the species.

Another area of false claims of doom relates to alarmist predictions of increasingly severe weather, such as tornados, cyclones and severe storms, droughts etc, leading to more natural disasters.  Scientists suggest that there is no specific consensus to this effect.  Quantifying historical trends in tropical cyclone activity is said to have proved difficult, but a recent reconstruction reveals a clear global decline over the past century, driven by an increasingly cyclone-hostile environment in the troposphere.

Al Gore, the left’s prominent climate crusader, two decades after his film An Inconvenient Truth was launched, has himself lost credibility.  Critics are highlighting conflict between Gore’s warnings and subsequent data that contradicts them.  The documentary’s most spectacular predictions about the imminent vanishing of Arctic sea ice, the disappearance of snow from Mount Kilimanjaro, and the collapse of Glacier National Park’s glaciers simply have not happened.

Calls by alarmists for urgent emissions reductions have led to costly policies, that have had almost no effect, except for lining the pockets of millionaires and sections of business.  Despite trillions being spent on climate initiatives, global emissions have set records nearly every year.  In 2025, fossil fuels supplied 86.2 per cent of the world’s total energy.  Oil provided 33.5 per cent, coal 27.7 per cent, and natural gas 25.1 per cent.

Electricity itself (Mr Bowen please note) is only about a fifth of the world’s final energy use. Most oil is burned in cars, trucks, planes and ships.  The production of hardware for wind and solar generation itself contributes significantly to increased use of fossil fuels (mostly in countries like China).

The intermittent nature of solar and wind power is a core reason why electricity grids require fossil fuel backup.  Consumers of wind and solar-generated energy end up paying twice: once for “renewables”, and once again for the baseload infrastructure to back up intermittent power.  Australia (with its abundant cheap coal) is indulging in economic madness by switching to expensive intermittent energy.  Meanwhile, developing nations like China and India won’t forgo the cheap fossil-fuel energy that drives their growth.  

The claims of impending climate catastrophe have now been with us for decades.  Essentially, they involve gross exaggeration but have gained popular support through a combination of fear, people’s desire to do good, and a small core element of truth. 

A key truth is that over the last century, the world’s average temperature has indeed risen.  The rise has been a modest 1.2 degrees Celsius or so, not the extremes predicted by alarmists.  Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is only a trace gas, has also increased over the last 100 years from about 300 ppm to maybe 420 ppm.  Moreover, the world’s geological history over millennia is replete with naturally occurring eras of far more acute warming and cooling than experienced in the past one hundred years.

With all the attention given to carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by humans, it is interesting to note that CO₂ is not the most important greenhouse gas affecting the Earth’s atmosphere.  That honour belongs to water vapour.  While concentrations of water vapour can vary from almost nothing in dry locations to as much as 4 per cent by volume in humid areas, water vapour can also dissipate by falling from the air as rain or snow.  It can also evaporate from the ground to become gas again.

Increased levels of (the vilified) CO2 have positive aspects also.  CO2 can significantly enhance plant growth by boosting photosynthesis, and increased levels in the atmosphere are associated with higher yields and faster maturation.  World food output has been increasing in recent decades, not declining.

Overall, while climate alarmism is losing credibility, there is still a long way to go, as many of the developed world’s “planet-saving” governments continue their policies.  The UK parliament, for example, declared a “climate change emergency ” in 2019, phased out coal power in 2024, and remains prominent in international cooperation on climate change.  A difference, however, is that most countries promoting net-zero policies don’t have Australia’s resources of coal and natural gas, and don’t ban nuclear power either.