It was only a matter of time. NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth plays the never ending blame game.
Scientists see climate change link to Australian floods
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Climate change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.
But while scientists say a warmer world is predicted to lead to more intense droughts and floods, it wasn’t yet possible to say if climate change would trigger stronger La Nina and El Nino weather patterns that can cause weather chaos across the globe.
“I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change,” said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon,” he told Reuters.
…
The rains have been blamed on one of the strongest La Nina patterns ever recorded. La Nina is a cooling of ocean temperatures in the east and central Pacific, which usually leads to more rain over much of Australia, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
This is because the phenomena leads to stronger easterly winds in the tropics that pile up warm water in the western Pacific and around Australia. Indonesia said on Wednesday it expected prolonged rains until June.
…
Prominent U.S. climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.
He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.
“The rapid onset of La Nina meant the Asian monsoon was enhanced and the over 1 degree Celsius anomalies in sea surface temperatures led to the flooding in India and China in July and Pakistan in August,” he told Reuters in an email.
He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.
===========================================================
Read the entire news article here
Below is the Nino3.4 index from the WUWT Enso/Sea level page here
Note that in late 2007 and early 2008, a La Niña even deeper than the one we are in now occurred. Now we are quickly coming off a strong El Niño, so no doubt there would be some heat left in SST’s and some additional water vapor in the region. The current SST image shows it rather warm around Australia. Of course, it is summer there. You can also see the current strong La Niña in blue
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
How does the moron explain the 5 worse floods in the 19th century?
The last few weeks have been a constant refrain of “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”, haven’t they.
Oh.. Thanks the article Mr…
It’s like watching dogs pissing against a lamp post. They just can’t go by without stopping to mark it!
But I thought the Aussie drought that never was …was. from. warming.
For three years, the warmists blamed the drought in Australia on Global warming, and warned that the dams would never be re-filled. Now it is the flood? I would mock Trenberth and his ilk, but I could never do as good a job as they do to themselves.
They actually have reporters assigned as full-time Climate Change Correspondents now?
Get yer degree today from the Internat’l Climate Change Correspondence School!
Western culture is doomed.
Has it ever flooded in the Brisbane area before? How long ago? Before Hansen and Mann and Gore started their campaign?
A quick Google and surprise surprise!
1841
17th January: Highest flood on record, occurred at Brisbane and Ipswich.
1844
10th January: Heavy floods at Ipswich.
1845
17th December: Flood at Ipswich.
1852
11th April: Heavy floods at Brisbane and Ipswich.
1857
19th and 20th May: Great floods at Ipswich and Brisbane; river at Ipswich rose 45 feet, and at Brisbane 12 feet.
1857 seems particularly bad. Must have been all those hay eating SUV’s?
Or could it just be part of another climate cycle of almost infinite variation?
Someone had to be first !!!!
How unusual for Trenberth
/sarcoff
So trenberth finally found his missing heat then? It`s a travesty that he can get away with such crap.
They partly blame global warming.
They partly blame it on………………………….. chirp, chirp.
This flood thing in Australia is just the weather and not the climate. George Monbiot has told us this time and again. It is important to note that the Warmists had told Australia’s state governments to prepare for droughts as the norm which led states to begin investing billions in desalination plants. Now some are being mothballed as many dams and rivers are full to overflowing.
References
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/another-green-catastrophe.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jan/06/cold-snap-climate-sceptics
[RyanMaue: A reasonable hypothesis would be the “lack of TCs” around Oz this season may be responsible for the flooding. Tropical Cyclones organize convection and then efficiently move it along with the moisture to another location. Since the monsoon trough so far has been unable to produce a TC, it should be looked into as a contributing mechanism. Indeed, the flood is “not inconsistent” with my hypothesis, so QED.]
‘Goodness Gracious Me’ as the late Premier of Queensland used to say.
From Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales.
“I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change,” (He’s not too sure about it is he !)
“The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon,”
What about the times when the “waters off Australia” were not measured Matthew ?– like during the 1890’s ??
No human induced global warming during this time yet it produced a rainfall and massive flood (Brisbane River at 8.35m) in 1893 far greater than the recent flood levels during the 20th Century including 2011, even allowing for dam mitigation.
I don’t think people will end up concluding that’s its due to “climate change” at all if you were to disclose the full facts about the historical water level record.
Heck, I live here in Brisbane, Australia and lived through the 1974 floods as well while the peak here was only 4.2 metres, not the 4.6 metres on 1974. However this is not the only instance of earlier floods being worse. The floods in the 1840s and 1890s peaked at over 8 metres how does Trenberth explain this, especially since the levels of CO2 were much lower then. Fools like this burn me up especially when I don’t see people like this here rescuing people or helping to clean up the flood mess.
So AGW is warming the oceans now? What utter BS. The contortions the alarmist warmists go through is unbelievable.
I find it amusing to replace “Climate Change” with “God’s anger” as you read articles such as this. It makes as much sense.
If global warming causes more rain, why did the Australian/state governments ignore this advice and build $13b in desalination plants and NOT flood mitigating dams, & pipeline infrastructure to move it around during the ‘global warming/CO2’ events?
What was Brisbane’s Wyvenhoe dam doing at full capacity with an annual wet season approaching & full knowledge that the global warming causes increases in precipitation? When did local weather become an example of a warming global climate?
Within the same month, a single event like flooding is labeled “Scientists see climate change link to Australian floods” but massive snow throughout the northern hemisphere is only weather. Wow, these guys really are something else, aren’t they?
And it’s as if there’s never been a flood. Has he heard of Noah and his ark?
But I thought we were now in permanent drought? And permanent drought was a sign of global warming!
Here is a history of floods in Brisbane and at Ipswich from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. History of floods in Brisbane and Ipswich
The real reason global warming is behind the floods is that global warming and enviro extremists prevented adequate dams and levees to be built to protect the area from these events which happen every so often in Australia.
The dead are on the hands of AGW believers, activists and promoters.
David Karoly was saying it as well on the ABC, Australian state broadcaster.
A small point of order is required here. The flood peak in Brisbane today (Queensland, Australia for the geographically challenged) did not exceed the 1974 flood peak. It is generally accepted that carbon dioxode (the elixir of life) was lower back in 1974.
In fairness we now have the Wivenhoe Dam which has the second half of its capacity devoted to flood mitigation.
Also where did the monsoon come from? We have never had them here before in Southern Queensland. Perhaps Anthony can explain.
The University of New South Wales used to be a reputable unversity.
Bhopal
As Brian Johnson showed above, we are now, in a sense, moving backwards in time to cooler match cooler periods and climate is reverting to prior states. History of the far past will show us better what is coming down the pike. The glorious modern warm period seems to be ending, and it should, all cycles have a top.
Antony,
“The current SST image shows it rather warm around Australia. Of course, it is summer there.”
It’s an anomoly that means the seasonal signal has been removed, I suspect you know that though.
The Aussies have always called that area of Queensland: “The Wet”.
I wonder why.