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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ABC’s story is a peice of warmist clap trap. You expect this from ABC that has bought the AGW con hook,line and sinker.
But please don’t compare 1893 with what has just happened. There are 2 significant dams in place today that weren’t present in 1893. If these dams were not present it is quite possible the 1893 flood level would have been exceeded for the current event although its hard to be certain.
Some areas in SE QLD saw flood levels 1-2m above the 1893 event bear this in mind when making comparisons. Several recording stations in the Lockyer Valley had their gauges destroyed so we will never know what the true river levels were at these places. Both events were very different in nature. The current event saw wide spread rainfalls up to 600mm whilst 1893 saw more concentrated rainfalls in the northern part of the catchment with one measuring station recording 2000mm+ in a 4 day period.
I’m a big fan of this blog but we need to get our responses correct when people like Dr Richard Sommerville start trying to falsely link AGW to severe weather events.
Re comment to my previous post: Yes, I’m sure that this season’s rainfall has been exacerbated by the warming world. And AGW has not only clearly exacerbated the weather of this year and this summer as a whole, but also that going back at least the last 20 years or more.
Certainly in my part of the world the weather of the last decade or more has included events unprecedented in recorded history. Record drought in extent and duration, record heat in duration and temperature, record rainfall in intensity and extent, record floods in extent.
Many other parts of the world are recording similar patterns of increasing extreme events.
BTW – not sure what units Robt is using, but the global temperature has increased by 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1970s, which is considerably higher than 1/4 of a degree in total using any known temperature scale. And as the charts in the original article above show, the land temperatures in Queensland and the sea surface temperatures around Australia are trending up at an alarming rate (the scales in Celsius as is used around the world except the USA). (If not for humans using the air as a waste dump, global temperatures would probably be falling.)
REPLY: You really need to look at the history of rainfall in your area, reader crosspatch provides this link to Jennifer Marohasy, in Australia. When this graph is updated, it may be close to the 1974 rainfall peak from that La Nina – Anthony
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/Eastern%20Oz%20No%20Trend%20Line.jpg
Met Office has a report (14/1/11) on its website ‘Global flooding and La Nina’
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/La-Nina-impacts
They say “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”.
I have put some other examples of Biased and Unbiased Climate News together. This particular topic is part of the coverage as well.
There is good news coverage out there, there is also an equal amount of crap.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2011/01/examples-of-biased-and-unbiased-climate-news/
I guess Australia had access to the real story as early as 2008:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/08/interpreting-eastern-australian-rainfall-data/
I do not think anyone in Oz has woken up to this post yet, so may I add a couple of comments.
Brisbane is not the only part of eastern Australia affected by floods. The problem started as a cyclone developed in the Coral Sea, moved south and then inland. This left a trail of townships flooded down the Queensland coast.
Oz is the flattest continent, averaging only 300 m asl. The continental divide runs close to the eastern coastline and is generally less than 1000 m asl. As a result, major waterways starting in the ranges, run inland until they reach the Southern Ocean or Lake Eyre. The gradients on these rivers is thus very low, except near the headwaters and so there are no effective deep channels to guide rainwater in the manner of many northern hemisphere rivers. Instead large downpours in the headwaters of the major rivers readily spread across broad, ill-defined flood plains and readily cause chaos.
A similar pattern has developed in the Gascoyne region of WA and flash flooding is seriously affecting northern Victoria. Much of the Queensland water is about to flood western NSW.
It is like pouring water on a table. Too readily the flow takes ill-defined courses to the sea or lowest point.
Unfortunately many settlements are on or close to the “normal” water courses, and hence they are too readily prone to flooding, because there is little to contain extra waters in existing channels. Brisbane is one such settlement. Water from the eastern side of the Darling Downs escarpment was channeled onto the flood plains of the Brisbane River. Old hands learnt by experience and designed the “Queenslander” style of house on stilts, that generally survives flooding. Unfortunately engineers warnings, particularly after the 1974 floods, were ignored by governments and planners and much of the damage witnessed in the past few days could be blamed on lax planning laws about rapid development and poor house design on flood-prone plains, ie. in much of western Brisbane.
And don’t forget northern Australia is in the tropics, subject to monsoonal conditions. Heavy rains are “normal” in that part of the world. The cyclone was an unwelcome extra.
And after all that, I agree Somerville is an ignorant idiot.
Hi Anthony, thanks for responding to my posts and for posting the articles illustrating what is happening. I realise how difficult that must be given your position on the matter of global warming.
Jennifer Maharosey is not a climate scientist and she is well-known down here in Autralia for frequently writing articles that range from misleading to false. I am not saying this particular article you to which you refer is wrong or right (I don’t bother reading her articles any more). I rely on information from the Bureau of Meteorology and the findings of other experts in the field. I would expect that (except perhaps in matters relating to climate), most people on this site would also look to experts for information about important matters.
REPLY: James Hansen is an astronomer by training, so what? It doesn’t matter if Dr. Marohasy trains goldfish for a living, LOOK AT THE DAMN DATA.
Otherwise you are just wasting our time. And so far it looks like you are incapable of ingesting new information, but travel the safe path of the faithful. Rommulan perhaps, a svarmisk resident maybe?
On second thought I realize now your purpose here is to waste our time, so we won’t be having any more of that until you can comment intelligently on the data and sources presented instead of tossing out diversions. Frankly, I don’t think you are capable. – Anthony
“….I’m sure that this season’s rainfall has been exacerbated by the warming world. And AGW has not only clearly exacerbated the weather of this year and this summer…”
I know this is a stupid question Sou, but I’ll ask it anyway:
How do you know that a “warming world” = AGW*?
*AGW being shorthand for ‘IPCC science’ viz. most of the warming since c. 1950 is most likely due to human CO2 emissions.
Is it because 98% of scientists say so?
Sou,
You have said that the rising sea temperatres around Australia this past 30 years exacerbated the La Nina. Using the same logic warming oceans should moderate the cooling around Australia during an El Nino event and hence reduce drought severity. Yet we have been told AGW will increase drought frequency and severity?
Sou
for you
http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/flood7.htm
The year 1973 was one of the wettest known over much of Australia, and in keeping with the strong La Niña event that prevailed, the 1973/74 northern wet season started early. By the end of 1973 large areas of the country were saturated. Then came January 1974, which featured probably the biggest continent-wide drenching since European settlement, inundating vast areas of the country.
New Year celebrations had barely finished when torrential rains on 4 January soaked northeast Victoria and parts of the Riverina, and flooded Albury. Meanwhile, far away in north Queensland, big floods on the 5th marooned cars and coaches across a broad area. The deluge then extended to northwest New South Wales on the 7th and 8th, causing flooding along the Namoi and Castlereagh rivers: railways and roads were cut, necessitating evacuations by helicopter.
Further heavy rain fell in NSW during the second week of January , and many rivers in the north of that State were flooded. On 11 January, creeks in Brisbane burst their banks, flooding roads and streets. Northern Victoria experienced a second burst of heavy rain on the 13th; this time, floodwaters swirled through the streets of Nhill and Dimboola. Rains also extended to the normally arid north of South Australia on the 17th, flooding opal mines at Coober Pedy.
As monsoonal rains poured down, the Gulf Country of Queensland, and extensive areas of the dry centre, were turned into vast inland seas, isolating pastoral stations and causing heavy cattle losses. About 500 people were evacuated from Normanton and Karumba, while 250 stranded passengers on the Townsville-Mt Isa railway were air-lifted to Mt Isa. Some 400-600mm of rain inundated the southern Northern Territory and southwest Queensland in January, more than twice the average ANNUAL total at some locations.
On top of all this came tropical cyclone “Wanda”, which moved ashore north of Brisbane on Thursday 24 January, producing relatively little wind damage, but sending down enormous quantities of rain over the Australia Day weekend. In Brisbane, intensifying rain throughout Friday dumped over 300mm within 24 hours. In three days (ended 9am 27th) the Queensland capital received 580mm, with even heavier falls over river catchments near the city (1,300mm in five days at Mt Glorious). Wanda floodThe first houses were washed away along Enoggera Creek early on the 26th. As rivers continued to rise, many more were lost. The Bremer river peaked at Ipswich on the Sunday, and the Brisbane River peaked early on Tuesday; both at their highest levels since the disastrous floods of 1893. Fourteen people were drowned, some trapped in offices by the rising waters.
By the end of January much of Australia – normally the “dry” continent – was experiencing the problems of too much water. Vast areas of the inland remained submerged for weeks – in some cases, for months. Crops were destroyed, and outbreaks of disease, such as Murray Valley encephalitis, took their toll.
Hi Dave, good question.
El Nino tends to cause hot and dry conditions across much of Australia with more evaporation from the land surface, rather than having a cooling effect. It is during La Nina that the cooling occurs, all the extra water in the atmosphere condenses, rain falls and droughts come to an end. Despite the cooler weather with this La Nina, the temperatures in many places, for example Melbourne, are still above the 30 year averages.
You can explore the BOM site to see what is happening: http://www.bom.gov.au
Anthony:
I think we are seeing a new meme being presented by catastrophists. It is based on this argument:
Weather events are driven by energy flows,
and AGW increases energy in the climate system,
so the severity of each weather event is increased by AGW.
The new meme is
‘AGW increases the severity of weather events and those who dispute it are evil deniers in the pay of Big Oil, or Big Coal, or Big Industry.’
The argument is wrong for several reasons, but the catastrophists need it.
Following the failures of the conferences at Copenhagen and Cancun, it is clear that political support for AGW is fading away. But that political support fuels the AGW ‘gravy train’, so those riding the ‘gravy train’ need a way to maintain the political support. And politicians respond to public concern. Everybody is concerned at weather disasters, and weather disasters happen somewhere around the world most of the time.
Hence, we can expect much more propoganda like
“The severity of these heat waves is AGW”,
“The severity of these cold spells is AGW”,
“The severity of these droughts is AGW”,
“The severity of these floods is AGW”,
“The severity of these snow storms is AGW”,
“The severity of these tropical storms is AGW”,
etc.
Richard
Anthony;
Took you long enough to twig to Sou; classic thread-highjack-with-loud-blather troll. Scroll-by stuff.
As for “warm air holds more moisture”, the converse is also true: cool air holds less moisture. So it falls out and lands on the ground as rain, causing floods. I think you’d find much more statistical support for that observation than the Hot Rain one.
REPLY: I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and offer data for discussion, but it’s clear now he’s just a tweaker. – Anthony
“Again, how did this massive flood happen without the help of CO2 back then?”
That’s easy!
In the past such disasters were due to the weather … these days they are due to the climate!
Whenever, or wherever, engineers construct a major new processing plant or bridge, they are asked to ensure it will continue standing in a 50, 100, 200, or in some extreme cases a 500 year weather ‘event’.
Only the most stupid AGW fanatic would refuse to accept we have occasional extreme weather events in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
A classic case of: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
this goose should be told that he speaks a load of crap, in brisbane it has been flooded countless times 1886 was a bigger flood than 2011 I wounder what they where blaming back then I bet it was not global warming.
Noelene says:
January 15, 2011 at 12:04 am
Good Post Noelene, don’t forget that the ’74 flood in Brisbane was made worse because of the total stuff up of the management of the Somerset dam out flows, as the release of water concided with the extra high king tide at the mouth of the Brisbane river.
See Jo Nova at Brisbane’s Man Made Flood,,, http://joannenova.com.au/2011/01/brisbane%e2%80%99s-man-made-flood-peak/
It’s been suggested that I haven’t referred sufficiently to the data. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that many posters here would have been familiar with the masses of climate data widely available. I also referred to the information shown in the charts in the original post above. For some more data, here is the latest annual climate statement from our Bureau of Meteorology, which includes some explanation of data on 2010 weather in Australia:
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20110105.shtml
The statement concludes with the following: “Increasing global mean temperatures derived from instrumental measurements are consistent with other independent indicators of climate change, such as reductions in ice and snow cover, and rises in global sea levels.”
The BOM site is rather good to delve into for anyone wanting to learn more about weather in Australia and the changing climates in the different parts of this large island continent.
Global warming was supposed to cause drought in Oz, according to CSIRO and WWF:
http://www.wwf.org.au/news/n36/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200610/s1765929.htm
Just a relative surface dig of Richard Somerville (couldn’t stomach more than that at the moment) yielded some interesting facts about him. He was a coordinating lead author of IPCC AR4 and helped throw together “The Copenhagen Diagnosis” released a few weeks after Climategate broke (Mann, Schneider, Steig, Weaver and others listed as co-authors). A gem among many from the executive summary:
“[T]he average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-90% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.”
I wonder if the Luddite brigade will still be flying around the world spreading the good word. I glanced through the report itself, twitched a bit at the Nature cover illustration of Steig’s fiery Antarctica, and then forced myself to stop at the Mann 08 spaghetti schtick. Gotta love this passage:
“The first of these reconstructions has come to be known as the ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction (Mann et al. 1998, 1999). Some aspects of the hockey stick reconstruction were subsequently questioned, e.g. whether the 20th century was the warmest at a hemispheric average scale (Soon and Baliunas 2003), and whether the reconstruction is reproducible, or verifiable (McIntyre and McKitrick 2003), or might be sensitive to the method used to extract information from tree ring records (McIntyre and McKitrick 2005a,b). Whilst these criticisms have been rejected in subsequent work (e.g. Rutherford et al. 2005; Wahl and Ammann 2006, 2007; Jansen et al. 2007) the US National Research Council convened a committee to examine the state of the science of reconstructing the climate of the past millennium. The NRC report published in 2006 largely supported the original findings of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) and recommended a path toward continued progress in this area (NRC, 2006). Mann et al. (2008) addressed the recommendations of the NRC report by reconstructing surface temperature at a hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded data set for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, along with recently updated instrumental data and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with climate model simulations.”
Now I have to go and try to fall asleep with that ripe tripe revisionism fresh on my mind. Why do I do this to myself? If you’re a glutton for punishment, the links are below. And maybe somebody can do the calculations on just how far (in today’s terms) one metric ton of CO2 will get us, perhaps even some top ten lists of ways we can use our alloted energy of “well under 1 metric ton CO2.” For perspective, according to the last link I provide below from Science Daily 2008, the average American’s carbon emissions is 20 metric tons. Better still, that article says that even a homeless American tallies 8.5 metric tons:
“But the ‘floor’ below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person’s energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.”
So perhaps our new goal (based let’s say on 0.85 metric ton CO2 to qualify as “well under” one) should be as follows:
“”[T]he average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink by 2050 to 90% below the per-capita emissions of a homeless person in America in 2008.”
Pleasant dreams.
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/executive_summary.html
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm
Since you brought up Tony Barnston, you should know he’s deep into AGW belief – as evidenced here:
http://www.bic.org/statements-and-reports/featured/the-ethical-dimensions-of-climate-change
Taking part in talks about the ETHICAL side of climate change.
“Tony Barnston noted that it takes humans years to adjust to ‘inconvenient discoveries’, citing cigarette smoking and prolonged exposure to the sun as two examples. A more urgent change is needed and a far shorter lag time when it comes to stemming greenhouse gas emissions. We need to move quickly to the action step, as the implications of not acting are severe and wide reaching…”
So, even though he didn’t mention AGW there, he’s spreading it elsewhere.
This is enraging, especially coming from idiots who don’t even seem to know what the “normal” climate is for Queensland.
Queensland floods. Australia floods. Always has always will. Just as it has always suffered severe and extended drought.
One can only attribute such comments to stupidity of dishonesty.
Robw says (above):
January 14, 2011 at 9:27 pm
“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.”
Robw – you can buy the bridge. Try reading the IPCC 2007 Technical Report – Regional climate change projections, in which it is predicted that Australia will become dryer overall, but that when (rarer) extreme rain events do occur, they are likely to be more intense. Not only that, the prediction that more extreme (southern hemisphere) summer rain events will occur mostly in the eastern half of the country while the southwest will be dryer in summer matches the current situation remarkably well. Good science is pretty sceptical, but your scepticism is way over the top.
The priests of voodoo science are still sticking their pins into Mother Nature. If they were fair-dinkum about their belief’s they would lead by example and abandon all their life’s choices and standard of living and return to the cave from whence they yearn to live, and leave the rest of us alone.
However, they are not fair-dinkum because there is no conned taxpayer money in being fair-dinkum.
Global Warming just means “extreme weather of all kinds” – Rachel Maddow
tough to argue with that.