Professor John McAneney, the director of Risk Frontiers: "This whole thing about climate change being responsible for an increase in extreme weather, or natural disasters, is just a fiction really."

Climate change signals raining down but proof will take centuries | The Grenfell Record

Professor John McAneney, the director of Risk Frontiers, an independent research group funded mostly by the insurance industry, says that based on a database of natural hazard events in Australia, including some dating back to 1803, "there has been no increase in the frequency of natural hazard events since 1950".

But what of the spiralling insurance claims in the wake of hailstorms, floods, cyclones (think Yasi at $1.4 billion) and bushfires ($4 billion for Victoria's Black Saturday firestorms)?

"What we can see very clearly is that when this dataset … is corrected for the increases in numbers of buildings at risk and their value, no long term trend remains," Professor McAneney said.

''It is indisputable that the rising toll of natural disasters is due to more people and assets at risk."

He said US hurricane modelling to identify a signal climate change is contributing to storm strength suggests it could be a while before the data is definitive. Averaging 18 different climate models, "it's going to take 260 years", he said.

"This whole thing about climate change being responsible for an increase in extreme weather, or natural disasters, is just a fiction really."