The snow is snowing, the wind is blowing, admittedly not in Sydney, but Seoul has been blanketed by the heaviest snowfall in five decades, an arctic blast has buried parts of the Great Lakes of North America, and a ‘wall of snow’ has ‘walloped half of Britain’.

The survival of winter for yet another year despite all the catastrophic caterwauling of climate alarmists is something to celebrate. As sceptics with a reverence for the tales of yore like to remember, it is now 24 years since Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, said that within just ‘a few years’ winter snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ and ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’. As snowmen are erected and snowballs hurled, it’s like a modern day Christmas miracle.

Did Viner’s failure to predict the persistence of snow harm his career? Of course not. When it comes to making foolish forecasts Viner is not Robinson Crusoe. Au contraire. Everyone from King Charles to Greta Thunberg is in the VIP lounge of that club. Only deplorable deniers are uncouth enough to point out the errors and they are promptly cancelled to limit the spread of the scourge of scepticism that undermines faith in The Science. As for Viner, he is the Principal Advisor on climate change for a global engineering consultancy so we are not privy to his prognostications.

In Sydney, it’s starting to feel a lot like yet another La Niña. As the rain settles in for another cool, wet summer, it’s always gratifying to think about Australia’s greatest professor of dud predictions, the incomparable Tim Flannery. Flannery is the first climate alarmist to have a weather event named after him. (As well, apparently, there is a monkey-faced bat that has been named after Flannery, which sounds somehow appropriate if a little unfair to the bat.)

After the professor’s spookily psychic vision, delivered in 2009, that Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane were going to run out of water and ‘even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems’ Australian sceptics rejoice every time the rain comes ‘flannerying’ down. It’s flanneried so much recently that the Greater Sydney dams are 94 per cent full, Southeast Queensland dams are 82 per cent full, and even arid Adelaide’s dams are 51 per cent full.

In his 2005 book, The Weather Makers, Flannery elaborated on the vanishing rainfall and ever more frequent droughts and the need to secure water supplies without doing something simple like raising the height of dam walls let alone building a new dam. Why bother when the Professor knew it wasn’t going to rain again? Eventually, governments in each of those states built desalination plants whose eye-watering capital and operating costs have demonstrated the reason why desalinated water has been dubbed ‘liquid electricity’.

Flannery boasted in his 2015 book Atmosphere of Hope of the decision-makers he had influenced with The Weather Makers, who included Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gordon Campbell, then premier of British Colombia, who said he introduced a carbon tax after reading the book and Zhou Ji the president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. If they regret taking the advice of the dud Delphic Oracle Flannery hasn’t mentioned it. He’s still ‘educating’ people about climate change. But one unimpressed Australian did manage to ask on the ABC’s Q&A why the professor’s ‘alternative facts’ were never challenged resulting in the true fact that, as he said, ‘NSW spent $1.8 billion and $500,000 a day to protect us from the catastrophe by buying and building a desalination plant, that has never been used.’

One person who should be glad that Flannery turned out to be more ‘weather faker’ than ‘weather maker’ is Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. A La Niña summer on the eastern seaboard might be all that can save him and his hapless Prime Minister from the humiliation of going into a federal election with voters smarting from the triple whammy of soaring power bills, black-outs, and government-sponsored bullying to switch off the lights and the air conditioners and to sit around the in the heat in unwashed clothes.

It takes a special sort of genius to engineer shortages of this magnitude when Australia has some of the world’s largest reserves of high-quality coal, gas and uranium but Bowen is that sort of genius. Others can see that the power shortages have been created by shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with solar panels that stop working at sunset and wind turbines that stop working for weeks at the arrival of the ‘Dunkelflaute’ (the almost onomatopoeic German term for dark windless doldrums or wind droughts). Not Bowen. He said it was ‘disingenuous and dishonest to blame renewables’ for coal-fired generators being offline at the same time as he claimed that Australia had a ‘world-beating uptake’ in rooftop solar and had added more capacity to the system ‘than the entire fleet of coal-fired power stations across the country’. If it’s true that we have a fleet of solar-powered stations capable of creating as much energy as our coal-fired fleet, then Bowen has proved that even a complete duplication of power generation capacity by renewables is not enough to provide energy security. As Milton Friedman reputedly said, ‘If the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five years.’

Bowen has come back from the UN climate fest in Baku undeterred in his mission to host the 31st UN climate jamboree in Australia. It is only thanks to Turkey’s opposition that we are being spared the prospect of hosting 65,000 climate carpetbaggers at Cop 31. As Cops are usually held around this time of year there is always the possibility that Bowen will achieve his goal at the same time as the electricity grid demonstrates why sceptics call renewables unreliables. A climate jamboree without air conditioning because the power failed might help focus delegates minds on the real cost of net zero.

Meanwhile, in other climate capers, Denmark is the first country in the world to impose a tax on cow farts. No doubt it won’t be the last. At least no one is proposing such a tax on reindeer. Yet.

Closer to home, it’s starting to feel a lot like something in North Sydney but it’s not quite clear what. The council has put up banners that read ‘May Your Days Be Merry and Bright’, the penultimate line of the wonderful Irving Berlin carol.

The last line of the carol however is nowhere to be seen; a banner with those words on it would be viewed as the equivalent of inviting the Ku Klux Klan to conduct a torchlit parade along the Pacific Highway. But even if its verboten to say it in North Sydney, for all those dreaming of a white Christmas, may your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.