Let's worry about the real council emergencies

"Meanwhile, a climate emergency declaration made at the July 8 meeting was reversed at Monday night's meeting."

Our thanks are due to "Crs Funnell, Kendall, Kerry Pascoe, Yvonne Braid and Tim Koschel" who voted to save Wagga from this political embarrassment.

If you were to ask who was the politician who most refused to give up after a sound political defeat, most people would answer Hillary Clinton. Some would say Al Gore, another Democrat.

The real answer would be Gough Whitlam, who pleaded with supporters to "maintain the rage".

But to no avail, because he was soundly defeated again, three years later.

So top marks to Cr Vanessa Keenan, who was merely trying to continue the good fight on behalf of Labor.

If climate change can be kept alive until the next election, then she has done her duty for the party.

Meanwhile, Cr Keenan has sucked in the likes of Dallas Tout and Greg Conkey, both of whom received my vote at the last election.

I thought there were shades of Kevin Rudd in our mayor's column on the page opposite last Monday.

Here, Cr Conkey referred to "this era's greatest challenge - climate change."

When he said "with no credible federal approach to climate change in sight", he was singing straight from yesterday's Labor songbook.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not support connecting cyclones or extreme weather events to climate change.

So Cr Conkey's statements like "extreme weather events like drought, heatwaves and floods will also have an impact on agriculture and food production" are mere motherhood statements.

Of course droughts and the like will impact agriculture, but their connection to climate change is speculative.

The Climate Council is a very different body to the United Nation's IPCC. Tim "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More" Flannery is part of the Climate Council. Remember Tim's bleatings during Rudd's early years? We had two floods not long after.

Labor never learns. So keep the climate change exaggerations going, and Labor will be defeated again in three years.

It's worth looking at the origins of climate change. The Earth warms and cools naturally. When I was at university, cooling during the 1960s had caused enough concern in Britain to spark fears that the world was about to enter another ice age.

The upper reaches of the Thames froze over in 1963, and records showed a steady cooling process since 1940.

Global cooling was part of our climatology studies. The Whitlam Labor government commissioned a report in 1974 which when delivered in 1976 - during the Fraser years - showed no cause for alarm in Australia.

But 1976 was the year the temperatures started to warm again.

Probably no-one would have become worried had 1998 not been a very hot year. Why? Well, it coincided with the rise of Al Gore as a US presidential contender, a candidate in search of an issue.

Gore railed for ages against his narrow defeat by George W Bush and, searching for relevance to keep his political hopes alive, suddenly invented "global warming" as a rallying cry.

If he could not reform American society through the ballot box, then he would claim a higher moral order - saving the world.

As a Huffington Post analysis pointed out in 2017, the former vice-president "boasted a relatively modest net worth of $1.7 million, held mostly in family farm assets, when he ran for president in 2000", adding that he has become "a media mogul and financial titan over the past decade, with a personal fortune valued at upward of $200 million."

So climate change has been good for Gore, and good for overseas wind-farm owners and power companies, too.

This year, The Guardian invented the term "climate emergency".

As Robert T Walker suggested in a letter in the Daily Advertiser on July 8, council should address problems that exist right here, right now.

And I agree with Cr Koschel - roads and Lake Albert are our real emergencies.