Targets, Lies and Alibis

This climate blockbuster is a cinema cliché, as policy it’s fantasy, and as a story it’s a dud.

The Albanese government premiered the latest instalments in its climate multiverse recently, shows so formulaic you could predict the finale from the trailer.

Act I screened with a “He’s behind you” pantomime plotline, as the National Climate Risk Assessment delivered a gothic narrative of collapsing coastlines, relentless floods and firestorms sweeping the land. To be terrified by this tale, you have to ignore the fact no one can model the future, and the report’s own multiple storylines, deliberate distortions, inconsistencies and caveats.

But, to borrow a hackneyed phrase to underscore the cliched scripting of this franchise, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Most of the media played its part, suspending disbelief to deliver screaming end times headlines.

Act II followed two days later when the Prime Minister assumed the role of leading man and pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 62 and 70 per cent of 2005 levels by 2035 and torched another $8bn to deliver on the receding horizon of cheap green power. The target range is large because the government fears it will miss its 2030 mark by a wide margin.

The aim is to set the lower bound at what might be vaguely plausible under the laws of physics and pencil in an absurd number to please the large audience whose tastes run to fantasy.

But even if the highest bar were cleared it would do nothing to rescue us from the Act I apocalyse because these two films are set in different worlds.

Act I is an international blockbuster, its salvation story resting on unprecedented global solidarity with every nation committing to making sacrifices and acting in unison for decades. Without cheating.

Act II is a modest local production that does nothing to alter the plot. Australia could shut down its entire economy tomorrow and it would scarcely register a line in the script of future weather. And even if the whole world closed up shop, sea level rise is already locked in, as it has been for a century.

So let’s review the horror story, the tale of the targets, and what’s happening in the real world.

Convenient omissions

There were three plotlines in the risk assessment: the PG-rated version (+1.5C of warming), MA (+2C) and the X-rated horror show (+3C). These temperature increases were measured against a pre-industrial nirvana, the era before electricity, modern medicine, hot running water and cars. Each warming level was modelled across two timelines, 2050 and 2090. It won’t surprise to learn that every headline and ministerial statement was drawn from the end-of-century X-rated climate snuff movie.

In its table of risks ranked by deaths, heatwaves are named as the biggest killer with 1202 fatalities recorded between 1967 and 2022. Any death is a tragedy for someone but that is 21 deaths a year of people mostly over the age of 80. Yet almost all the news stories faithfully reproduced this arresting sentence:

“At +3.0C of global warming, heat-related mortality is projected to increase by 444 per cent in Sydney.”

That raises two obvious questions: where are the baseline numbers for Sydney or any other city? And what are the assumptions?

The answers aren’t in the glossy review but included in a technical annex. Here a different timeframe is used, 2007 to 2017, and it records 1418 excess deaths, or about 141 a year. Sydney’s share was 341 across the decade, or 34 a year. By comparison, Australian road deaths averaged about 1421 a year across the same period.

Why did the authors of the main report deliberately choose to focus on percentages and obscure the raw numbers? Was it because they feared there would be few headlines in the prediction that in 65 years Sydney might record an extra 185 heat-related excess deaths a year of mostly quite old people? A “444 per cent increase” is an editorial choice designed to buy a headline.

The deception goes far deeper. The risk assessment omits the fact far more people die from cold than from heat. This is only hinted at in the technical report but is explicit in the peer-reviewed 2014 paper it cites from Environmental Health Perspectives (Vardoulakis et al).

Page 50 of the annex notes there will be a “large decrease in cold-related deaths” in Townsville. The next page says:

“Brisbane, Cairns, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast all currently experience a higher mortality burden during cold days.”

This is true in every Australian city.

The Vardoulakis paper is clear:

“In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively.” That is more than 16 times as many cold deaths as those from heat. The study projects that by 2080 cold-related deaths will drop to 19 in every 100,000 people each year and heat-related mortality will rise to around eight deaths.

“All results provide strong evidence that the burdens of heat and cold are much higher in age groups 75-84 years and in particular ≥ 85 years,” the Vardoulakis study says.

So, the government’s risk assessment could have said this: “A peer-reviewed study projects that by the 2080s Australia could see roughly 3000 fewer temperature-related deaths each year overall because the fall in cold-related deaths will more than offset the rise in heat deaths.”

This astonishing omission should be corrected by the Australian Climate Service if it is to retain a shred of credibility. Its wilful decision to omit awkward facts reveals this document as a polemic, not a serious piece of research.

The boffins at the service might argue that cold deaths were not in their brief or an oversight. Such profound intellectual dishonesty would be laid bare by the main report, because while the risk review didn’t adjust deaths for people, it did for sheep.

“... an increase in minimum temperatures will marginally decrease cold exposure at lambing”, it says on Page 217.

So, the science was good enough for sheep. For people, the truth was inconvenient.

More evidence of this is littered through the rest of the report.

Tropical cyclones

On tropical cyclones the review admits what is already documented: Australia has recorded a decline in tropical cyclones since the 1980s. This is not a projection, it is an observation that is explicit in chapter 11 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Physical Science Basis report.

“(Tropical cyclone) landfall frequency over Australia shows a decreasing trend in eastern Australia since the 1800s, as well as in other parts of Australia since 1982. A paleoclimate proxy reconstruction shows that recent levels of (tropical cyclone) interactions along parts of the Australian coastline are the lowest in the past 550-1500 years.”

True to form, the risk assessment tries to scrub this unalloyed good news away with the immediate claim that, based on modelling, cyclones will become more intense. Here the document is internally inconsistent. On page 35 it says “the proportion of category 4 and 5 events may increase (low/medium confidence)”. Low confidence means there is no evidence, medium confidence is a best guess. By page 82 all hedging has gone as the report declares northern Australia will see “significant increases” in tropical cyclones.

Professor Roger Pielke published an article last year on global tropical cyclones that drew on a dataset maintained by Colorado State University. Its records date from 1980 and it uses a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines cyclone frequency and intensity. Pielke notes:

“Over this time period and according to these metrics, hurricanes have not become more intense.”

Bushfires

On bushfires, the assessment leans heavily into the Black Summer imagery but the technical detail is more guarded. It says that with further warming, fire weather is projected to worsen across most of southern and eastern Australia, with longer seasons and more frequent extreme fire danger days. But confidence varies.

There is high confidence that hotter, drier summers increase fire risk, yet low to medium confidence in the precise regional projections, because local fire behaviour depends on vegetation, ignition sources and land management.

Despite routine headlines about a planet on fire, satellite records and reconstructions show that the total land area burned globally is declining. The Global Fire Emissions Database (Chen et al, Earth System Science Data, 2023) finds a drop of about 1.2 per cent a year from 2001-2020, Fernandez-Garcia and Alonso-Gonzalez (Remote Sensing, 2023) likewise report a significant decline in burned area even as severity increased in some regions, and Guo and Li et al (Earth System Science Data, 2025), reconstructing data back to 1901, show a fall through most of the 20th century, a mid-century rise and then a sharper decline since 2008.

Together these studies make clear that the global burned area has not surged with climate change; it has contracted over the past two decades, especially in savannas and grasslands.

Sea levels

The review also can’t get its story straight on rising sea levels. In one of its headline diagrams it stamps every sea-level rise scenario, from 14cm to more than half a metre, with “high confidence”, as if they are all equally certain.

Yet in the fine print it admits only the near-term rise of 14cm by 2050 is “virtually certain” and that confidence rests on the observed century-long trend of steady rise, not on speculative modelling of end-century extremes.

A recent peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (August 2025) examined more than 1500 long-record tide gauges. It reported that:

“…approximately 95 per cent of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea-level rise”.

The argument that there has been a surge in extreme weather events since the 1970s is sourced to the Brussels-based Emergency Events Database. The pioneer of that database, Debarati Guha-Sapir, told Swedish Public Radio this year that the rise was primarily because of a massive increase in reports on disasters because of better communications. She said it would be “dangerous and misleading” to claim there was a fivefold increase in weather-related disasters in the past 50 years.

“You can actually argue that climate disasters, or natural disasters, have not substantially increased, but the reporting has been much easier, much better, much quicker,” Guha-Sapir said.

Lower death toll

One thing is certain, far fewer people die in climate-related disasters today than in the past. UN disaster data shows the global death rate has halved just in the past decade, and longer-term records reveal that while nearly five million people were killed in the 1920s, the toll in the 2010s was closer to 170,000, despite a much larger world population. Disaster deaths have plunged because modern societies have better warning systems, stronger infrastructure, faster emergency response and greater wealth to protect people than a century ago.

Insurance

The review’s economic doomsday story was addressed by AMP chief executive Shane Oliver in The Australian. He said the report’s overall cost of $600bn to property values was unrealistic.

“I think that’s a gross exaggeration,” Oliver said.

Amen to that, and it’s true of much else in this review.

The data on the rising cost of insurance, typically, attempts to lay all of the blame on a changing climate. But most of the surge in insured losses it highlights comes down to floods, not an across-the-board climate signal.

Catastrophe costs have jumped mainly because we keep building in harm’s way and because the houses are now worth far more than they once were. Remove rising exposure and soaring property values, and the apparent hockey stick in disaster losses flattens to a far less alarming trend.

In a 2019 Macquarie University report, researchers “normalised” disaster costs, adjusting the numbers for inflation, population growth and rising property values, so that a flood in 1970 could be compared fairly with one today. Once those factors were stripped out, they found:

“… the rising cost of natural disasters is being driven by where and how we choose to live, and with more people living in vulnerable locations, with more to lose, natural disasters remain an important problem irrespective of a warming climate”.

Insurance is where this all lands. Climate change is a problem but it is not an existential threat. The question is: How do we respond to it?

Emissions

This much is known, the world’s three-decade quest to cut carbon emissions has been a debacle. Trillions have been spent on mitigation, yet global carbon dioxide emissions keep rising and the world is consuming record levels of coal, oil and gas. It does so because fossil fuels provide the dense, reliable energy that underpins modern prosperity and ultimately no society votes to be poor.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen launched the risk review with the mantra that “the cost of inaction will always outweigh the cost of action”. This is true only if your action is rational and proportionate. The cost of stupid action will be crippling, as taxpayers’ dollars are immolated on mitigation and we still bear all the costs of adaptation.

A sensible government would read the room. China, India, Russia and the US are not cutting their emissions and even carbon-cutting crusaders are hedging their bets. Canada’s newly announced 2035 emissions target of a 45 to 50 per cent cut from 2005 levels has barely shifted from its existing 2030 pledge, effectively extending the same ambition by five more years. Canada has vast amounts of hydro power and nuclear energy, while our gamble is that we can make bigger cuts based on the part-time power of wind and solar.

Against this backdrop the Albanese government has decided it will march towards 2035 trying to deliver a 62 to 70 per cent reduction in its global rounding-error emissions. This despite all the evidence that points to it missing the 2030 mark of 43 per cent. And we haven’t even started the hard part.

Since 2005 Australia’s net emissions are down about 28 per cent, roughly 1.5 per cent a year. But almost all of this came from changes in land use, which boosted the amount of carbon absorbed by trees and soil. If these are excluded, the 28 per cent reduction collapses to a meagre 2.8 per cent.

The low-hanging fruit has been picked. To reach the 2030 target emissions would need to fall by nearly double the pace so far and it will have to come by making genuine cuts in energy, transport and agriculture.

Now survey the local landscape to see how plausible that is. In Western Australia Labor Premier Roger Cook has conceded that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions will rise, driven by expansion of gas and heavy industry projects that he argues are essential to the global energy transition. In Queensland the life of coal-fired power stations is being extended beyond 2035 to keep the lights on. NSW has already extended the life of its biggest coal generator and in Victoria offshore wind is now off the agenda, but it is still in the budget for cutting carbon emissions.

Costs

Everywhere energy transition projects are delayed, costs blow out, the green hydrogen dream evaporates and electricity prices march ever upward.

The Australian Energy Regulator’s State of the Energy Market 2025 details why electricity bills will keep rising. Even though there are more hours when wholesale prices go negative because of wind and solar flooding the grid, those lows are dwarfed by extreme price spikes that drag the annual average higher. This trend will continue.

On top of that, the cost of poles and wires keeps rising, as billions are poured into new transmission lines to link renewable zones and into upgrades to ageing local distribution networks. Add up wholesale volatility, higher transmission charges and rising distribution costs, and the report shows the trend for households and businesses is towards persistently higher bills. And the regulator warns reliability margins are tightening, too, with growing risks of blackouts in states such as NSW and Victoria as coal exits.

Now all we have to do is find yet-to-be-invented scalable technologies to make those pillars of the modern world, steel, cement, plastic and synthetic fertiliser.

No one can model the future but I fear that, in Act III, this all ends very badly.

It is hard to decide whether this movie is a tragedy or a farce. Whatever it is, the audience will pay dearly for the ticket.

This article was first published in The Australian.