Right-wing media, groups and MPs deny climate change link to Australia’s floods

As parts of NSW and Queensland are still under floodwater, prominent voices in Australia’s right-wing media and right-wing groups have begun to downplay any link to climate change — if they mention it at all. 

Less than a week after the latest damning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report sounded the alarm yet again, climate change denialists in positions of influence have used the same playbook from the Australian bushfires to push back against the scientific consensus showing that freak weather is becoming more frequent and more extreme.

News Corp’s climate change denialist-in-chief Andrew Bolt’s response to the Lismore floods was to list a series of recent climate emergencies — something that seemingly proves the case for an increasingly volatile climate — to argue that they are exploited to promote the idea of climate change: “Here come the vultures again.”

While people are looking at lost homes, livelihoods and lives, Bolt argues that a bumper season for farmers this winter shows that global warming has been brilliant for our farmers. (Australian farmers have been among the best in the world at adjusting to the climate crisis, but this doesn’t mean it’s helping them. Quite the opposite.) 

Bolt’s Sky News stablemate Chris Smith also criticised scientists and the media for linking the floods to climate change.

“Well, now we’ve got the climate change warriors using these disasters to blame a warming planet and CO2 emissions. Horrible timing. Yet the greenest of scientists maintain that you simply cannot link climate change to single disasters,” he said.

Smith instead blames the influence of La Niña, the climate pattern that has been made more extreme, according to research by the US’s scientific body, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sky News host Paul Murray riffed on the same accusation of politicising the climate, going as far to say that Scott Morrison is being “dehumanised” by the criticism. 

Another strategy has been to cite historical records of previous floods to argue that they are regular and therefore not a consequence of a changing climate.

Advance Australia, a right-wing advocacy group that pulled $1.3 million in donations in the 2021-21 financial year, delved into Bureau of Meteorology records to claim these floods were actually very normal: “Since the 1890s there have been nine weather stations that have recorded more than a metre of rain over a four-day period (see below).”

According to Facebook, this was shared hundreds of times and had thousands of engagements, making it one of most viral pieces of content about Australia’s floods last week. 

Unfortunately their evidence doesn’t quite stack up. Records before the 1900s tend to be less accurate. Of those nine records, four were from the same two-day period in February 1893, five were from before the 20th century, and none were from the past three decades. While there are many factors influencing floods, climate change affects the weather on top of existing variability.

One Nation MPs Malcolm Roberts and Mark Latham both played on this same misinterpretation, citing old records or sharing old photos of floods. Rather than addressing climate change — something that both men deny — Roberts argues instead for dams.

And the response from others on climate change? Silence. News Corp’s Facebook pages for The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun haven’t mentioned climate change in the past week. Sky News Australia’s page mentioned it three times — all to say it wasn’t relevant or isn’t happening. 

On Monday the Climate Council noted that Morrison had not mentioned climate change in relation to the weather emergencies.

“And yet there has been no official statement or acknowledgment of the role of worsening climate change in these mega floods by our prime minister, our deputy prime minister or even our minister for emissions reduction. Not a word,” CEO Amanda McKenzie said.