In setting the stage for ambitious targets in cutting national emissions announced in mid-September, the federal government talked up the problems resulting from significant temperature changes, all while carefully omitting to mention the gigantic woolly mammoth in the room.

That enormous pachyderm is the obvious failure of the international system for limiting emissions supposedly put in place by the Paris Agreement of 2015. Without such international co-operation, the immense costs the federal government intends to impose on the economy to reduce emissions by 62 to 70 per cent on 2005 levels by 2035 will have no corresponding benefit. Like the costs involved in the overall goal of net zero, they will simply be an additional handicap Australia does not need.

But despite Australia’s contribution to global emissions being a paltry 1.3 per cent, the much-hyped National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), the government’s emission reduction announcement, and even the media coverage barely mentions other countries.

Instead, in an effort to silence the many sceptics about the business case for cutting emissions, the climate report and Treasury modelling produced by the government concentrates on identifying every possible cost to Australia that might result from four different scenarios for increases in temperatures by 2050, ranging from 1.1 degrees to 3 degrees Celsius.

For those used to looking at climate reports all the way back to the IPCC’s first report in 1990, it is difficult to take the NCRA or the Treasury modelling seriously. Leaving aside the issue of where the temperature increases nominated for each scenario have come from, and whether even the lowest would be achieved given the trends from the satellite data compiled by the University of Alabama in Huntsville, climate remains one factor among many when trying to work out what damage might occur two decades in the future.

When wildfires broke out around Los Angeles in January, for example, commentators pointed to climate change. But there were also problems due to major budget cuts in the city’s fire department, fire hydrants that ran dry and laws that prevented the clearance of dense vegetation before the fire season. Questions were also raised about whether the state and city’s DEI policies had prevented the best people from being in key positions at that time of crisis.

Although DEI policies have not had the same effects in Australia, climate remains just one factor in various natural disasters. The Brisbane River, for example, has broken its banks to flood the city’s CBD and adjacent suburbs in 1974, 2011 and 2022, to name the last three occurrences. The 1974 flood was arguably the most severe of the three, but as a result of that event the state built the Wivenhoe Dam upstream. The 2022 event prompted additional flood mitigation works.

As a result, it is entirely possible for climate effects to boost flooding (if it does do that), but the extent of floods and the damage caused to be drastically reduced through other factors. A dollar spent on flood mitigation is a vastly better investment than a dollar spent on reducing emissions.

What about agriculture, which is on the front line in the battle against climate change? Figures produced by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry show that agricultural production has increased by 34 per cent, in real terms, over the past 20 years. Part of this is due to factors such as higher prices for meat, reflecting growing demand for protein in emerging countries. But the department also notes that farmers have lifted productivity through practices such as cropping farms retaining stubble, minimising tillage, and improving practices to reduce reliance on pesticides and fertiliser. Livestock farms use a variety of grazing management systems, such as cell, strip or rotational grazing, and set long-term ground cover requirements. In other words, climate may have an effect on production, but farmers have a considerably more significant effect.

The report points hopefully to a likely increase in the number of deaths due to heat. Deaths are rarely attributed specifically to heat. Instead, statisticians look at the number of deaths before, during and after a heatwave to calculate a death toll. Rather than get into an argument over this number-crunching, it should be noted that an obvious counter to heat stress is air-conditioning. But efforts to decarbonise the electricity industry by using renewables will greatly increase the cost of power – this has been the result almost everywhere renewables have been used extensively. Air-conditioning may then become too expensive for pensioners, one group most at risk of heat stress. Decarbonisation may then cause more deaths from heat than any supposed effect from higher temperatures.

In any case, as noted, the Paris Agreement has proved little more than a talking point. The three largest emitters, China, the USA and India, which collectively account for more than half the world’s emissions, are not paying much attention to the agreement. China has been known to binge-build wind turbines and solar farms, but it has also binge-built coal-fired power plants and steel smelters. None of this has anything to do with projected demand for power, the Western obsession with emissions or market demand for steel. Instead, it’s about keeping workers employed and a national preference for building capacity, among other things.

The US never signed the Paris Agreement as a treaty; instead, President Obama signed it as a presidential agreement, meaning that the US government itself agreed to it, while the individual states were free to do what they wanted. The US Senate would have never ratified the treaty. In his first term, President Donald Trump took America out of the treaty, only for President Biden to put it back in and force through the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act with massive subsidies for renewable projects. In his second term, President Trump seems to have ignored the treaty, rather than repudiate it. This is simple to do, as the treaty’s only binding requirement is to produce promises that various actions would be taken to reduce emissions. Nothing is said about the effectiveness of those promises, and there are no enforcement procedures for countries that fail to fulfil their promises.

India has at least agreed not to build any new fossil-fuel plants once the ones in construction are completed, but with the country’s national grid so prone to failure that all major users have their own generators, Western obsessions over emissions are a secondary concern.

Australia is an inconsequential player in a game where all the major players are doing little more than pretending to play. Our tax dollars would be far better spent on precautions against floods, fires, and storms, with the grandstanding on climate being left to others.