OPINION | We are all being duped but not doomed

The US has been on water rationing for the past 46 years and food rationing for the past forty.

Sixty-five million Americans have died due to lack of food, and the UK has been a small group of impoverished islands inhabited by some 70 million hungry people for the past 20 years.

For the past 25 years 75 to 80 per cent of all species of animals have been extinct.

The Maldives has recently disappeared and the population had no drinking water for the past 28 years.

The "tipping point" of no return courtesy of human-induced climate change has long gone - about 20-30 years ago. There is no road back.

The peddlars of doom have been with us for millennia. They're often persuasive and charismatic gathering a following (and of course money for their causes and "foundations").

Their strength is that you can't disprove their assertions until the day of doom has come and gone. In the mean-time millions of people are witlessly frightened.

The leaders of the movements become the centre of attention (feeding their ego) and the unwitting pay big money to hear them, buy their books or just donate (feeding their bank accounts).

In recent times the Western World has been particularly afflicted with a variety of such environmental doomsayers.

And yes, all the examples above are just a small selection of predictions which not only failed to eventuate, but the exact opposite occurred.

Today the USA has an obesity issue, not a food rationing issue.

The Maldives are still with us and they're busy building resorts and airports.

Because of "over population" we were breathlessly told hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s.

It didn't happen. In fact, the human population has continued to increase, yet the percentage of our world population chronically undernourished has collapsed from 33 per cent in 1968 to about 10 per cent today.

In Australia we have our own prophets of doom. Remember, because of human induced climate change the Brisbane River would never flood again? It has. Twice. With devastating consequences.

We were told the great Murray River would never flow out to sea again and if it did, a salty slurry would scorch everything in its wake. Yes, the Murray flows out to sea again and there was no salty slurry devastating all in its path.

But the false predictions sold a lot of books, grabbed the headlines and gained certain people great fame.

Even governments got sucked into the narrative building multi-billion dollar desalination plants that have, as some suspected, remained constantly idle.

We have a right to ask questions and seek explanations as to why the "expert" predictions are so fatally and demonstrably false.

Polling in the UK suggests 20 per cent of children have nightmares because of "climate change".

The scare-mongering and apocalyptic climate scenarios do have cruel consequences impacting the next generation beside jobs and economic well being.

In studying these false predictions and noting the damage they do to people's mental state and to jobs it was refreshing to recently read a climate activist's confession.

Michael Shellenberger has been an environmentalist for 30 years and an activist for 20 years. He has served as a reviewer of the next assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change.

He's been in the thick of it. In his own words, "On behalf of environmentalist everywhere I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years."

In his book "Apocalypse Never" Michael Shellenberger systematically, convincingly (with sources to verify) and comprehensively debunks the popular myths which are fed out daily about the state of our environment.

Try these for a few facts. And facts they are.

and so the list goes on.

One of his stated reasons for not speaking out earlier was his fear of losing funding. (Ever noticed it's mainly retired scientists speaking out against the apocalypse orthodoxy?)

All this and more from a left-wing environmentalist who rightly concludes:

"Once you realise just how badly mis-informed we have been, often by people with unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped".

Good environmental stewardship? Sure. Apocalyptic scare-mongering? No.

Hopefully we have a few years left before the "tipping point" of our society being completely duped by a false apocalyptic environmental narrative which is as real as was Dad's Army. We're not doomed. Let's hope we're not duped.