This ridiculous video story below from ABC news cites über alarmist Richard Somerville of Scripps in San Diego, and is backed up with this print story.
Here’s what the print story headline said:
Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming
Quoting Somerville:
“Because the whole water cycle speeds up in a warming world, there’s more water in the atmosphere today than there was a few years ago on average, and you’re seeing a lot of that in the heavy rains and floods for example in Australia,” Sommervile [sic] said.
he adds:
“This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models,” Sommerville [sic] said. “We’re observing the climate changing — it’s happening, it’s real, it’s a fact.”
Well perfessor, while a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor content, I call BS on your statement. The climate has always changed. The same argument is being used to hype increased hurricane threats, and as we’ve seen from Dr. Ryan Maue, the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) says the linkage just isn’t there.
The headline of course is sensational, they really didn’t put any thought or research into the Brisbane, QLD flooding, they simply drew a conclusion and found somebody to support it with a soundbite. I’ve seen plenty of examples of this style of crappy TV news journalism in my career. Professor Somerville apparently couldn’t be bothered to do a little historical research before claiming the floods in Queensland were connected to “global warming”, neither could ABC News.
What did ABC news and professor miss? This graph from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on Brisbane flooding history. When you add the 2010 flood levels to the graph (as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. bothered to do, shown in red below) all of the sudden, the historical context for the flood being driven by global warming disappears:
And this is backed up from the BoM web page narrative.
Explain then perfesser, how the 1974 flood, which was worse, links to “global warming”. Or how about the biggest flood, in 1893? How does that figure with “global warming”, especially when it was cooler in 1974 and in 1893 there was no appreciable rise in CO2 globally?
Some people will say, “well that’s just Queensland”, so here is the Australian continent. The same questions apply:
The historical narrative for 1893 from BoM:
| 3/2/1893 | Lower part of Brisbane submerged, and water still on the rise; the “Elamang” and the gunboat “Paluma’ were carried by the flood into the Botanical Gardens, and the “Natone” on to the Eagle Farm flats. |
| 4/2/1893 | Disastrous floods in the Brisbane River; 8 feet of water in Edward Street at the Courier building. Numbers of houses at Ipswich and Brisbane washed down the rivers. Seven men drowned through the flooding of the Eclipse Colliery at North Ipswich. Telegraphic and railway communication in the north and west interrupted. |
| 5/2/1893 | The lndooroopilly railway bridge washed away by the flood. Heaviest floods known in Brisbane and suburbs. |
| 6/2/1893 | The lower part of South Brisbane completely submerged. The flood rose 23’9″ above the mean spring tides and 10 feet above flood mark of 1890; north end of the Victoria Bridge destroyed. |
| 7/2/1893 | Flood waters subsiding. Sydney mail train flood bound at Goodna, unable to either proceed or return. |
| 13/2/1893 | Second flood for the year in the Brisbane River. |
| 16/2/1893 | More rain in the south east districts; another rise in the Brisbane; further floods predicted. |
| 17/2/1893 | A third flood occurred in the Brisbane River for the year. |
| 18/2/1893 | The ‘Elamang” floated off from the Botanical Gardens. Business at a standstill in Brisbane. Ipswich and other towns. Several deaths by drowning reported. |
| 19/2/1893 | The gunboat “Paluma” safely floated off the Gardens, and the “Natone” off Eagle Farm flats. Another span of the lndooroopilly railway bridge carried away. The third flood reached its maximum height at 12 noon, viz. 10 inches below the first flood. |
In my opinion, professor Somerville is spouting nonsense about Australia.
As for Brazil, they don’t have as easily accessible climatology, but I did find this newspaper front page from the 1967 Brazil flood, on the website of my friend and fellow skeptic, Alexandre Aguilar in Brazil who works for the weather forecasting firm METSUL. This event which mainly hit Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, with floods and landslides/mudslides, was the worst ever then. The headline cites 400 dead.
The final death toll was 437 people.
METSUL writes on their blog: (more photos there)
The disaster in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is the largest since the disaster Caraguatatuba in 1967 (photos). On March 18 of that year, a flood came down the hills like a tsunami of water, mud and rocks, causing a landslide. Hundreds of homes were submerged and rivers have won strong currents, trailing not only houses, but trees, bridges and other structures. The exact number of dead is unknown until today, having been speculation over 500, but officially are considered 300 fatalities. The rain gauge installed at São Sebastão in March 1967 indicated a [monthly?] precipitation of 851.0 mm, with 115.0 mm and on day 17 and 420 mm the next day. The accumulated [rainfall total] may have been higher due to saturation of the rain gauge.
Again, how did this massive flood happen without the help of CO2 back then?
The Australian rains are being driven by La Nina says NASA in this press release
“Although exacerbated by precipitation from a tropical cyclone, rainfalls of historic proportion in eastern Queensland, Australia have led to levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century,” said David Adamec, Oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The copious rainfall is a direct result of La Niña’s effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year.”
UPDATE: Here’s yet another expert with a similar opinion, from CNN, where they quote a Columbia (where NASA GISS is located) lead forecaster:
The catastrophic weather events taking place across the globe – from Brazil’s and Australia’s flooding to the Eastern United States’ heavy snowfall – have two likely explanations.
Tony Barnston, lead forecaster at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, said two phenomena – La Niña and the North Atlantic Oscillation – are likely responsible for the patterns we’re seeing.
UPDATE2: T Gough in comments points out this discussion on the Met Office website:
For the Australian state of Queensland, there is strong evidence to suggest that La Niña is the main reason for the ongoing widespread flooding. The current floods are also the worst since 1974 – which coincided with the strongest La Niña on record.
They offer this chart:
And this Q&A discussion which is a transcript of a video interview (PDF)
La Nina and severe weather around the world
Adam Scaife – Senior Climate Scientist
What is La Nina?
La Nina is part of a natural climate oscillation in the tropical Pacific. It oscillates between the warm El Nino phase, El Nino is Spanish for ‘the boy’, and the cold La Nina phase. So La Nina is like the cold little sister phase of this oscillation and it’s a purely natural event, occurs every few years as part of this natural oscillation.
Is the flooding in Australia linked to La Nina?
So during La Nina the rainfall that normally falls out over the Pacific shifts west over Indonesia and indeed northern and eastern parts of Australia. So the fact that there’s been lots of flooding in Queensland recently is very consistent with the occurrence of near record La Nina this year.
Is the flooding in Sri Lanka and Brazil linked to La Nina?
So La Nina affects weather patterns throughout the globe but of course the further away you are from the La Nina the more difficult it is to pinpoint the affects, it’s a bit like waving a long stick, the uncertainty grows the further away you are from the source. And so when we look at remoter regions, like Brazil or Sri Lanka, it’s more difficult to attribute the recent flooding events to La Nina. If we take the Brazil case, then when we look in historical records and in our climate models, then southern parts of Brazil are actually dry during La Nina so it would be difficult to attribute the recent flooding near Rio to the La Nina that is going on at the moment. If you go to Sri Lanka that is a little bit more complicated, a little bit less clear because it’s right on the edge of the wet influence from La Nina, but again historically it looks like La Nina tends to drive drier conditions in Sri Lanka so the previous biggest event, or the biggest on record in fact in 1974, Sri Lanka was actually dry.
Is La Nina linked to climate change?
La Nina, El Nino cycles have been going on for a very long time, they’re natural cycles, they’re part of a natural oscillation in the Pacific and indeed when we run our climate models into the future with increasing levels of greenhouse gases then there are no consistent changes in the El Nino, La Nina cycle.
Here’s the video:
While the Met Office may have trouble forecasting winter, they are right about this basic understandign of La Nina. It seem’s there’s a consensus forming that contradicts Somerville’s view of the world.
UPDATE3: My Oz friend Dr. Jennifer Marohasy has this discussion of Eastern Australian rainfall from 2008 and offers this graph, not the 1974 peak. When this graph is updated with the latest rainfall data, it may show a spike similar to 1974.
What the graph demonstrates is that heavy rainfall spikes have occurred in the past, and they are not exclusive to our present with m ore CO2. h/t to reader Crosspatch for this link.
UPDATE4: Crosspatch also points out that BoM now has the most recent rainfall totals online, here is the rainfall for QLD:
Weather history apparently can repeat itself, and the precedent was set before CO2 became a worry.
UPDATE5: See this report about Brazil –
Is the Brazilian flooding catastrophe evidence of another global warming era extreme ?
I think Dr. Richard Somerville needs a swift kick in the butt style reality-check, or perhaps he needs a course in weather history, or both.
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This ridiculous video story below from ABC news cites über alarmist Richard Sommerville
Global warming is going off the rails.
Lets restart with the second premise, “the TV people lie to you a lot”.
This makes one wonder if Dr. Somerville is an advisor to Rep. Hank “Tip-Over” Johnson of Georgia. If a climate scientist can twist his own mind into a tangle, for whatever reason, how easy should it be to confound the non-scientist with expert opinion.
You need a laugh; here’s Hank:
Last year we were inundated with how AGW was causing the then Australian drought. Now the story is AGW is causing it to rain too much. Yeah and that bridge, can i buy it?
The average person in Oz must be shaking their head and MUST be wondering why they believed the AGW hype.
It’s particularly absurd to point to flood damage in the “mountainous surroundings of Rio de Janiero” in terms of “houses being swept away” and “loss of life”.
Rio’s hillsides are slums (favelas) consisting of ramshackle ad-hoc constructions of corrugated metal, cardboard, plywood, tarp, etc., all crowded into narrow gullies that regularly run with offal, bilge, and waste — oh! and flood water.
Yes, the rain discharge “swept away homes” much like a good thunderstorm sweeps the crud from the gutter – in the civilized world – but in Rio’s hillside “communities”, far too many people happen to live in those gutters. This ain’t exactly on par with Laguna Beach mansions sliding into the local gully (which also happens).
Just because people (worldwide) happen to live in areas subject to natural extremes doesn’t mean we have to reorganize our entire economies to chase after a microscopic margin of “safety”.
People die every day under perfectly mundane circumstances. That’s life. Not global warming.
Then it follows that, with more water in the atmosphere and on land, sea level must be falling. No? But that’s not what these snake-oil salesmen are pitching – along with the above tripe.
Sou says:
January 14, 2011 at 9:00 pm
You forgot the sarcasms tags.
The extra GHG heating, excluding water vapor, is 2.63W/m**2 according to NOAA.
Evaporation/Convection, which causes weather, removes about 100 W/m**2 from the earths surface.
If this GHG heating causes an increase in surface temperature, both radiation and evaporation/convection will increase. Surely the maximum increase in evaporation/convection is 2.63/100.
So how can the GHG heating increase convection by more than a couple of percent? This effect would always be too small to be statistically detectable, surely.
“This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models,” Sommerville said. “We’re observing the climate changing — it’s happening, it’s real, it’s a fact.”
Sommerville then turned his head toward the vast sky and proclaimed, “Yea, my brethren, but behold, there shall also come a time when Anthropogenic Climate Disruption doth maketh even a passing cloudless shadow of the Sun itself!”
Sommerville is just one of those elite scientists – um – I mean elitist scientist, that’s what I mean.
For the benefit of readers who mistakenly think that Brisbane (as shown above) represents the entirety of Queensland (or Australia), the records show that the number of major floods in Queensland has been increasing since the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly since 2000. Records also show that rainfall in many parts of Australia is breaking records in regard to precipitation intensity much more often than before. And that droughts are longer and more pervasive.
In other words, many parts of Australia are getting hotter and drier and when it does rain, it buckets down more intensely. All this is in line with what is expected with human-induced global warming as far as Australia is concerned.
As for the rest of the world – well, everyone knows the arctic ice continues to disappear, glaciers are melting, snowfalls and rain are more intense etc etc. And that warming-related extreme events far outweigh cold extreme events.
Unfortunately, not wanting all this to happen is not sufficient to prevent it. Nor is protesting that it’s not happening. We need to do more to shift away from using the atmosphere as a rubbish dump.
REPLY:We can’t tell the difference between Brisbane and QLD? That’s just stupidly insulting. And what records of floods? Cite them. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. Are you actually capable of reading? Because it sure seems that you have not read nor understood a single thing about this article. Have a look at what the other experts says, and then comment on that, and we’ll see if you have cognizance of the facts. Or you can not read the article, and remain ignorant like you are now. – Anthony
Conservation Council of Western Australia appear to believe Somerville and Karoly’s tripe, just like any good ideologue …from their facebook page…
Neville Numbat
Floods, Climate change and what the scientist are saying. | Conservation Council of Western Australia
ccwa.org.au
In Queenland, large areas of the east coast, and of course our own Gascoyne region, are bearing the brunt of floods that are resetting the record books. There have been well informed voices been prepared to talk about the obvious link these massive and extreme floodign (sic) events have to climate change.”
Well, I looked at the Smithsonian eruptive history of volcanoes by date for the years on or just prior to 1893, 1974 and 1967. There are a number of eruptions reasonably close to the lattitudes of the flood subjects. Vesuvius was active all throughout the latter 1800’s as well. I still think Merapi in Indonesia added massive amounts of steam and aerosols to the La Niña weather pattern. Volcanoes inject a lot of steam into the atmosphere, especially near subduction zones, that will eventually come down. Sometimes a lot in one area. What say the rest of you?
100% admit to skimming the article, so apologies if it was addressed.
Couldn’t the lack of cyclone energy be a result of increased thunderstorms elsewhere, causing more precipitation? Of course, all this work changing phase of water uses the energy that is supposed to be changing the temperature, so perhaps that is Trenberth’s missing energy. It’s gone out to space in a puff of thunderstorm. Water condensing released it’s latent heat and poof.
Of course, what does this mean for their climate equation?
And I guess we’ll have to play wait and see with the flood predictions.
The heavy rains in Rio de Janeiro were caused by the Benguela current that borders the west African coast and start a journey of warm waters towards Brazil. It reaches Brazil and split in two branches, one towards the north and another to the south. This branch stops the Malvinas cold current coming from Antarctica and diverts it towards South Africa.
It is also known as the “Atlantic El Niño-Benguela” -an event less frequent and less poweful than the regular Niños, but it was the cause of these heavy rains as it did in 1967.
Although the article is in Spanish, you can see maps and graphs in my website about it:
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/calen12/catastrofe_rio.html
you’ll see there an animation of satellite pics just before the rains in Rio, then a map of the Benguela current off west of Capetown; a graph of merged sea levels indicating the warming of the current, a map of how the current flows and its path north and south, and finally a graph of sea level anomalies 1992-2007 in a square between 36ºE/15ºE and 10ºS/15ºS.
The Brazilian met service was unable to predict the storm with 24 hours in advance –but they purport to predict the weather by year 2050.
Anthony, I was in no way suggesting that most readers could not tell the difference between Brisbane and Queensland. Nor is that what I said. As the expert you posted about clearly states, the evidence is accumulating more and more that the effects of AGW are occurring already – even though the warming has only just begun.
I’m pleased that you do not disagree with the rest of my post because I know that you generally promote the notion that the world is not warming, even though a lot of articles you provide on this site demonstrate the fact of human-induced global warming.
REPLY: For the record, I disagree with everything you say, and you are cherry picking your facts because of your beliefs.
Read this below, then comment on them, no diversions about ice or other things allowed. – Anthony
The Australian rains are being driven by La Nina says NASA in this press release
“Although exacerbated by precipitation from a tropical cyclone, rainfalls of historic proportion in eastern Queensland, Australia have led to levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century,” said David Adamec, Oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The copious rainfall is a direct result of La Niña’s effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year.”
UPDATE: Here’s yet another expert with a similar opinion, from CNN, where they quote a Columbia (where NASA GISS is located) lead forecaster:
The catastrophic weather events taking place across the globe – from Brazil’s and Australia’s flooding to the Eastern United States’ heavy snowfall – have two likely explanations.
Tony Barnston, lead forecaster at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, said two phenomena – La Niña and the North Atlantic Oscillation – are likely responsible for the patterns we’re seeing.
I think the tide gauge is not a good metric, you need to factor in the effect of the Somerset Dam (1959) and the Wivenhoe Dam (1974). I’ve lived in Brisbane but feel free to call me stupid.
Why is the media reporting on global warming so biased in favor of those supporting it? Shouldn’t there be two sides to every story? Why are all the western governments pushing for global warming taxes when the science remains unproven? Why do people still believe that hypocrite and snake-oil salesman Al Gore?
Al Gore has no friends and is just using global warming to get attention. His own wife divorced him and his children are on drugs and booze because of him. I’m super cereal.
By the way, there’s no possible way for America to pay back its debts. Even if Americans passed a carbon tax, they still couldn’t overcome their budget deficit. They can’t print money forever. I look forward to the day when China buys America and turns it into a sweatshop. Of course, America could always go rogue like North Korea and threaten everyone with nukes.
Excellent article Anthony. In skewering this particular blowhard you have also presented a great summation of this whole story.
No-one that I know of disputes the fact that this season’s La Niña, which scientists posit will turn out to be the strongest or second strongest La Niña ever recorded, is bringing record rains and repeated flooding to eastern Australia – from Queensland to Tasmania.
Nor does any knowledgeable person dispute the fact that the intensity of the rainfall across eastern Australia occurring during this La Niña would be less if not for anthropogenic global warming. AGW is exacerbating the extremes of weather. There’s no doubt about that.
[Reply: You are sure? 1/4 of 1 degree difference in global temperatures since 1980 makes that much difference that you can be that sure that this year’s storms are affected by the change in temperature going on since 1750; but not last years’, the previous years’, nor any of the the previous 29 years of weather are affected? Robt]
“Sommerville said. “We’re observing the climate changing — it’s happening, it’s real, it’s a fact.””
He’s correct. We’re also observing global rotation – it’s happening, it’s real, it’s a fact.
That Orwellian shift to ‘climate change’ sure was handy.
I really hate to be picky but I think his name is Dr. Richard Somerville.
It’s important for people using Google, which already has many negative results under the name Sommerville.
Let’s assume that we have Global Warming and more moisture in the sky due to the increased temperature. OK, come winter the cold causes more snow, more moisture = more snow; it all sounds reasonable, UNTIL you look at the science.
(1) The process of freezing water, causes the water to release heat energy.
(2) According to the laws of thermodynamics, the energy does NOT just disappear.
(3) Air circulation will mix the air from the ground level to the cloud level and back again.
The explanation given could explain more snow, BUT it should be very mild cold temperatures. Sooner or later the heat will make its way to the ground. If it doesn’t, then we would have more snow, followed by more rain. However, we are seeing a very bitter cold. The facts don’t fit the theory.
Given that 10 years ago they told us that, “However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. ”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
I’d say they are just making it all up as they go along.
The individuals who claimed that Queensland would not experience floods anymore due to AGW need to be listed in large bold print on the front page of the newspaper.
Anyone now saying that floods are due to AGW need to be likewise listed along with the notation that today’s floods are still less than the flooding that has appeared in the past.
What they attempt to do is take ANY current weather extreme and link it to AGW. If it is dry, it is AGW. If it is wet, it is AGW. If it is hot, it is AGW. If it is cold, it is AGW. What some newspaper there needs to do is contrast these conflicting claims on the front page in large, bold print.
Sommerville, Karoly et al. are simply following Rahm Emanuel’s frank advice: