There is a great deal of interest in this article, by Brendan O'Neill, which examines the possibility that the flooding in Australia was made worse by an earlier decision by the Queensland government to keep water levels behind the Wivenhoe dam high, since they were expecting global warming driven drought to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
The Queensland government’s belief that water conservation should be a key priority in this speedily warming world of ours appears to have led to the situation where local dams were allowed to get dangerously full. So in recent weeks, the Wivenhoe dam was running at 150 per cent to 180 per cent capacity, which means that the authorities had to start releasing water from the dam at the same time that the rain-caused flash floods were hitting Brisbane’s river system – effectively contributing to the deluge. It is surely worth asking, at least, whether Queensland officialdom’s embrace of the ideology of climate change, its fervent belief in future manmade drought and thus the need to store as much water as possible, made it unprepared for the current flooding of the Brisbane area.