Reader Grant left this in the comments to the previous post:
I live in Brisbane on high ground. Brisbane is flooding and up to 20,000 properties will be under water by tomorrow. Our major dam is at 190% capacity and they had to release 600,000 megalitres yesterday to just keep it at that. 75% of Queensland has been declared a flood disaster area and that is roughly half a million square kilometres. This is not a disaster anywhere near the order of magnitude of the Boxing Day tsunami or the Haiti earthquake. However people have died and more bodies will be found when search and rescue can find them. They have been swept away.
Delingpole’s article (not written by him) was incorrect in many aspects. Certainly more dams should have been built even if they might have put pressure on the rare lesser spotted tadpole in the catchment area. The Greens of course and local landowners put an end to that and will continue to do so as long as the Greens exist. However more dams wouldn’t have stopped the current severe floods unless an unrealistic number had been built. They may have saved some properties but the rivers do need to flow.
Eventually the waters will recede, bodies will be buried, clean-ups will commence, money will be paid out or borrowed and people will start again. Strangely however, Australian climate scientists have been noticeably absent in the media during these floods. Not on television, newspaper or radio. Not a peep. They were queuing up to get their earnest dials on TV after the hot summer and tragic deaths of the Victorian bushfires. Solemn looks, hand clasping, oh dear, if you’d only listened to us. Of course, they’d predicted this warming and were more than happy to tell us about it.
So have their precipitation predictions had anything to do with their recent camera shyness? Possibly. Here’s Prof Tim Flannery in New Scientist in 2007 –
Over the past 50 years southern Australia has lost about 20 per cent of its rainfall, and one cause is almost certainly global warming. Similar losses have been experienced in eastern Australia, and although the science is less certain it is probable that global warming is behind these losses too........Desalination plants can provide insurance against drought. In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months. Of course, these plants should be supplied by zero-carbon power sources
Here’s Dr David Jones from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 2008 –
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent… “Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones. January 4, 2008
The only uncertainty now was whether the changing pattern was “85 per cent, 95 per cent or 100 per cent the result of the enhanced greenhouse effect”
Note the precision in the probabilities. Very impressive. However, Dr Jones unfortunately appears to suffer from xenophobia. Here’s a communication from Prof Phil Jones (for it is he) gleefully relating in a Climategate email about our Dr David Jones –
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. He said
they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are
threads on it about Australian sites
So Global Warming causes droughts up until a week ago. No doubt they are working on a paper that proves that Global Warming can cause a flood now and then. A peer reviewed article in Nature will appear soon. Data freely available on request except of course to “anyone who has dealings with CA”. That’s the way science is done after all.
Seriously, these two have failed. Failed completely, utterly and abysmally with their climate predictions. After these terrible events abate, these people should be put in front of some sort of panel and held to account for their predictions and asked why they were so wrong. It won’t happen of course but why should anyone give two squirts of guinea pigs piss about their predictions for the future?
Am I pissed off about this? Yes, I am.
But at least a Nobel laureate is on top of it all –
Speaking to an audience of government officials, business leaders and NGOs in Jakarta, the Nobel laureate cited devastating floods in Australia and Pakistan and last year’s drought in Russia as evidence that unchecked global warming threatened famine, poverty and wide-scale destruction