POSSIBLY for the first time in her political career, Greens deputy leader Senator Christine Milne made an accurate prediction. Tropical Cyclone Yasi, she said on Wednesday, was "a tragedy of climate change". She was right for all the wrong reasons. For climate-changers like Milne, Cyclone Yasi was a tragedy precisely because it did not live up to its advance billing and failed to deliver the disaster she and others had predicted.
The fear-mongering Greens and the carbon tax hopefuls in the ALP have long been spruiking human responsibility for environmental disasters as the driver of their bizarre climate change policies.
According to Greens leader Bob Brown, coal mining was responsible for the flooding which occurred in North Queensland last month, ignoring the more severe flooding of 1974 and the historically greater flooding of the 1840s and 1890s. Milne said the cyclone was another example of why it is important to cut carbon pollution.
"This is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of climate change. The scientists have been saying we are going to experience more extreme weather events, their intensity is going to increase, their frequency," she said.
The scientists she cites are not dissimilar and, in some cases, the same ones who 30 years ago were promising the world would suffer from a devastating ice age by the end of the last century.
They do not include the somewhat more measured Florida State University researcher Dr Ryan Maue, a meteorologist whose work on global tropical cyclones and accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) demonstrates that there has not been any increase in cyclonic activity associated with global temperatures.
Last year was one of the lowest in terms of tropical cyclonic activity worldwide since at least 1970, and Dr Maue expects the level of activity to decrease even further.
"With the fantastic dearth of November and December global hurricane activity, it is also observed that the frequency of global hurricanes has continued an inexorable plunge into a double-dip recession status," he said. "With 2010 being a globally 'hot' year, we saw the fewest number of global tropical cyclones since at least 1970."
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, again at the forefront, was everywhere on Wednesday, warning that the cyclone could be expected to batter the state for three days.
Coastal areas were particularly under threat because a giant 9m wave had been recorded off the coast.
"Without doubt, we are set to encounter scenes of devastation and heartbreak on an unprecedented scale. This cyclone is like nothing else we've dealt with before as a nation," she said in one scene-setting interview.
It was not to be another disaster movie, however. Without detracting from the experience of those who endured Yasi, particularly those in Cardwell and Tully, it is now apparent that the category five event rapidly degraded into a category four after hitting the coast early yesterday and then weakened to a category three, then category two.
Bligh was yesterday saying that people would have been in the "path of danger" if they had not listened to the warnings as she continued in her new-found role as the national weather girl.
Engineers who warned that Yasi could even blow apart "cyclone-proof" homes when its centre moved overland, despite changes to building standards designed to protect homes from giant storms predicted by environmentalists, found that homes built within the past 25 years held up remarkably well, apart from some external damage caused by flying debris and falling power poles and trees.
Notwithstanding the lack of evidence of the predicted disaster coming from Queensland, and the fact that the latest news of counter-riots in Cairo was more compelling, the ABC morning's radio host Deborah Cameron persisted in asking global warming advocates yesterday: "Is this the pattern the scientists warned us against?"
Well, no actually, this is the pattern predicted only by those scientists responsible for Al Gore's inconvenient falsehoods, and the regulars consulted by the ABC to prop up the global warming hysteria.
Even Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a die-hard global warmist, had to dissuade Cameron from pushing her ideological barrow by telling her "you cannot say that Yasi, or the Queensland floods or the Victorian bushfires" are evidence of climate change.
Bligh had warned Queenslanders to "brace ourselves for what we might find when we wake up tomorrow morning," and what they found were fellow Queenslanders telling them that "we get one of these cyclones every 10 or 20 years -- a small price to pay for living in paradise".
Those who choose to live and work in tropical Australia, be it Queensland, WA or the Northern Territory, well know what comes with the turf.
Cyclones, floods, crocodiles, poisonous snakes, lethal jellyfish. This is the sort of wild stuff that sends shivers up tourists' spines and sells books for Bill Bryson.
It is not new however. None of the creepy-crawlies or the smashed homes can be attributed to climate change.
Further, a national carbon tax will not alter the sea temperature, curb the frequency of cyclones or stop arsonists lighting fires in national parks, no matter what the Greens and ALP may claim.
Suggesting Cyclone Yasi and similar weather events are the result of human behaviour, as Senator Milne has done, implies that adjusting human activity can prevent such activity.
This is as preposterous as the Senator herself, and the notion that a carbon tax will change the weather or do anything more than provide the Labor Party with the means to take even more money from working Australians to funds further wasteful projects.
All those who shamelessly predicted without qualification that Yasi would be the worst natural disaster to hit Australia have been proved wrong.
It is as if mother nature herself, having shown how ruthless she can be during the recent floods, has shown how capricious she also is, and how foolish are those hubristic humans who dare to predict what she will do next.
