TIM, mate, just a quiet word in your shell-like.
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Could you turn down the wick on your predictions, especially the accuracy factor?
Bearded and behatted, most folk would know you as Professor Tim Flannery, jetting fearlessly over Godzone as the feds' Chief Climate Commissioner talking up Biblical epic droughts, earthquakes, fires, cyclones and sea rises as warnings on global warming.
Such a gabfest for the faithful was held in Launceston on Tuesday evening as part of the federal government's campaign designed to scare the pants off everyone concerning not only Australia's future but the entire goddamn planet.
And nothing at all to do with making it easier for the feds to introduce a local carbon tax and such like.
So far, Flannery, a palaeontologist before he became the nation's official weather forecaster, has been proved wrong on almost every guesstimate that he has made.
None of which does a lot for the credibility of climate change science.
Except, of course, among his disciples who don't seem to mind that he's got it wrong yet again and as he genially gets on with his officially sanctioned campaign of spreading fear and despondency among the populace.
Come on, Tim, even on $180,000 a year for three days a week commissioning, you can't possibly be privy to exactly when earth-shattering events will occur?
Albeit with all that modelling generated by computer programs.
And that must include Tuesday's commission report on Tasmania's climate change future, The Critical Decade, that included the usual ``shock horror'' hype on rainfall patterns and sea temperatures and, brace yourself, readers, ``the significant risk posed to the broad-tooth mouse''.
Hell, Tim, the locals would prefer the temperature went up a tad, especially over a long Tassie winter.
Anyway, mate, all that modelling is just that, a projection, something that you may as well do with plasticine.
Such as your 2008 forecast that Adelaide would run out of tap water within several years.
The forecast sort of worked in reverse with the South Australian capital city's reservoirs now registering almost 80 per cent full.
Matter of fact, most of Flannery's guesses have sort of worked, as Her Indoors would say, ``butt backwards''.
There was his 2007 prediction that global warming would see Australia so dry that, around about now, desalination plants would be needed to save Sydney and Brisbane from disaster.
Sydney and Brisbane? Yes, you know, those state capitals that have had record rainfalls lately, water lapping into houses and water catchments brimming over and Sydney's reservoirs full to the brim.
Flannery then reckoned, as a last-chance non-time specific resort, that the planet could be saved if the sun's rays were kept out by firing sulphur into the stratosphere.
Flannery also told Radio National's Science Show that humans were capable of communicating with our planet, as a single organism, through the Greek theory of Gaia.
Mind you, Flannery is occasionally a little more cautious in the forecasting area.
Especially with his claim that, if polluting the air ceased tomorrow, it would take around 1000 years for anthropogenic carbon dioxide to be cleared from the atmosphere.
Never fear - you may have noticed that, with the lack of supporting evidence of worldwide heating, some catastrophists now regard snowstorms as a sign of global warming.
They cite the current spate of record-busting European blizzards and temperatures as examples of ``extreme weather events''.
Most of these scientists, of course, are required to fly around the world many, many times, and attend many global warming talks before coming back to an air-conditioned office to ``model'' their findings.
Meanwhile, here at In Black And White we're waiting patiently for the ridgy-didge end of the world.
Sorry Tim, but that's December 21 as predicted by the Mayan calendar.
Factor that baby into your forecasts of global doom though, prof, now there's a dead cert.