Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently Anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for Australia’s wild weather swings between drought and flood. But “it’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld.”.
It’s not too late for Australia to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld
Catastrophic fires and devastating floods are part of Australia’s harsh new climate reality. The country must do its part to lower carbon emissions
year ago I lived through the Black Summer. I had arrived in Sydney in mid-December 2019 to collaborate with Australian researchers studying the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events. Instead of studying those events, however, I ended up experiencing them.Even in the confines of my apartment in Coogee, looking out over the Pacific, I could smell the smoke from the massive bushfires blazing across New South Wales. As I flew to Canberra to participate in a special “bushfires” episode of the ABC show Q+A, I witnessed mountains ablaze with fire. One man I metduring my stay lost most of his 180-year-old family farm in the fires that ravaged south-east New South Wales near Milton.
My experiences indelibly coloured the book I was writing on the climate crisis at the time called The New Climate War.
…
Tragically, many of the same towns that were devastated by the massive bushfires a little more than a year ago found themselves under siege from these historic floods. A climate contrarian would cry foul: “You climate scientists can’t make up your mind. Is climate change making it wetter or drier?” But in fact, that’s a false choice: It’s both.
…
Australians can’t seem to catch a break. But it’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/24/catastrophic-fires-and-devastating-floods-are-part-of-australias-harsh-new-climate-reality
Our rather violent weather extremes seem to have left an impression on Michael Mann. But are these extreme conditions unusual? History suggests not.
…
What did early explorers have to say about fire? Here are some quotes from early explorer diaries and records.
The natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they … lived on fire instead of water.’ Ernest Giles (1889), Australia Twice Traversed.
The natives set fire to the grass which is abundant everywhere, and at that time is quite dry… The conflagration spreads until the whole country as far as the eye can reach, is in a grand and brilliant illumination.’ Report from Port Essington, in Arnhemland.
Captain James Cook wrote that his crew ‘saw upon all the Adjacent Lands and Islands a great number of smokes — a certain sign that they are inhabited … ‘
… the very extraordinary devastation by fire which the vegetable productions had suffered throughout the whole country we had traversed – George Vancouver.
I wish it would rain and cause the grass to become green, so as to stop them burning… – Stuart (1865).
…
Read more: http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/units/env207/introduction/history.html
What about Mann’s assertion climate change is making the extremes worse? From a government website description of the Federation drought, 1895-1903;
…
In 1892 Australia had 106 million sheep, two-thirds of which were in the eastern states. By 1903 the national flock had almost halved to 54 million. The nation lost more than 40 per cent of its cattle over the same period, nearly three million in Queensland alone.
Drovers sought feed for hungry stock along travelling stock routes (known as the ‘long paddock’) or moved stock to pastures on the east coast and southern mountains where conditions were less dire.
Droving took an immense toll on sheep and cattle with losses of up to 70 per cent recorded, particularly in regions where watering points could be 100 kilometres apart. In 1902 local newspapers reported that more than 2000 steers lay dead along the Goondiwindi to Miles route in Queensland.
…
Read more: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/federation-drought
Michael Mann, What you call a land of Mad Max and Waterworld, we call home. Breathing a bit of bushfire smoke every other year, enduring floods and droughts, is as much a part of Aussie life as beach BBQs and beer, and always has been.
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I think China has been attacking Australia with CO2!
It is an act of war.
Come on Mann.
How do they get away with this crap…
…are they all bought and sold by China
From the article: “Catastrophic fires and devastating floods are part of Australia’s harsh new climate reality.”
No, they are part of Austrailia’s harsh, old climate reality.
There’s nothing unprecedented going on. It’s all happened before and had nothing to do with CO2.
Michael Mann is the problem.
“We don’t want him
You can keep him
He’s too fat for me”🎹
-The Michael Mann Polka
https://youtu.be/9h-a9cvsbMM
When certain trees and plants’ grains only germinate after a fire, you can be pretty sure that fire has been an essential part of the local ecology for very, very long time.
It was a man-made catastrophe. Many of those fires that made the news, burning old forests near population centres, were known to be lit by humans. The source for many others are unknown. This was buried in propaganda that didn’t distinguish between these fires with the annual grass fires lit by lightning.
Worse, one man was arrested in August for trying to light a bush fire to blame CC. There is no shadow of doubt that there are more people like this, and you don’t need many. Australia’s worst bush fire about 150 years ago was lit by a careless bullock team.
“A land of drought and flooding rains” Dorothea Mackeller 1904.
Gradually the climate became drier from about 130,000 years ago and rainforests retreated and were replaced by eucalypts, today about 3 per cent of rainforest remains.
And over thousands of years the original migrants, The Australian Aborigines, learnt how to manage the land, traditional seasonal burning in patches, a technique being revived today in Western Australian and Northern Territory.
Unfortunately major bushfires usually following periods of drought and dry conditions have been worsening because of UN Agenda 21 – Sustainability preservation of public lands from which National Parks have been created and not well managed to remove bushfire hazard material, land management.
There are a number of fire-adapted trees in the eastern US whose numbers/range have declined due to fire-suppression, for ex, Table Mountain pine in the central Appalachians and longleaf pine in the southeast.
Why does anyone take Prof Mann seriously any more?
I filmed in Australia in 1983 for the BBC1 Farming programme in the middle of a drought. Farmers were using the long paddock then! That was followed by bush fires that left 75 people dead. Very impressive and much worse than the recent ones…
There is no substitute for checking back over the decades, to put our recent “weather” into perspective!
His crap brings in huge government grants. Follow the money.
When did anyone take him seriously anyway
He is a joke to most Australians and our response export more coal and gas 🙂
Ban Mann.
I would had said Bat Mann 😉
Bann Mann too. Australia should purchase a Thorium Molten Salts Reactor….desalinate seawater over night.
Where would you put the fresh water? In the dams that are currently overflowing?
The issue of drought-proofing Oz is apparently beyond the abilities of any government.
Wait, what, full? I thought Flim Flam Flannery said that could never happen again.
I’m sure the oz media have been pressing him to comment, no?
We’ll all be rooned!
WELL, WHEN YOU DON’T NEED IT – DON’T PRODUCE IT.
Yet they still get MSM attention because it fits the narrative, not reality or history.
Has the fat fool fraud paid climatologist Dr. Tim Ball’s money yet?
http://www.principia-scientific.com
put Ball defeats Mann in search box.
I was on a whale watching trip once with a Canadian attorney who explained to me the difference between the American and Canadian System. Be careful who you sue N of 49 N
Alternating “between Mad Max and Water World,” and even just the term “Dystopia” shows a complete failure to understand the words fiction and allegory and to discern either of those from the real world. No wonder he lost the suit.
MM would make a nice export item as long as it is permanent.
That mann is a fool.Any competent and honest scientist should be embarrassed to be in any way associated with him.
Mann IS a dystopian future.
‘Apparently Anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for Australia’s wild weather swings between drought and flood’
yes, it is.
Typically unsupported assertion comes along, while being unaware that La-Nina phase tends to cause flooding in parts of Australia.
Try educating starting with this link: Carbon dioxide radically lower but floods destroy houses, cover beaches in debris across NSW in 1857
“yes, it is.”
Griff says with absolutely no evidence to back up this claim.
I just listened to Biden’s first press conference and it appears that Biden thinks he can stop the sea level from going higher. He must be getting pointers from Obama.
Griff will probably chime in and say “Yes, he can”.
No, it isn’t.
Look at the history of Australian droughts and wildfires. Usual, not unprecedented.
more SCIENTIFICALLY UNSUPPORTABLE BS from griff.
Run away from producing evidence, village idiot.
Just mindless, regurgitated, AGW manta spew, is all you are capable of.
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2?
2… In what ways has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be of human released CO2 causation?
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
An excerpt from ”My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar, 1908
Griff stop using fossil fuels every day you flaming hypocrite, you are the laughing stock here.
Griffypoo evidently believes anthropogenic CO2 has magical powers.
So convincing… let me try.
“Griff’s a moron”
Yes, he is.
Cb,
There still needs to be some discussion about whether moron is the correct term; idiot and imbecile are definite possibilities. I always like think of him as just another ignorant griffter!
You know as well as the rest of us that there has been no human caused climate change and that all we are experiencing is easily explained by natural variation. Increasing CO2 is not causing any warming but it is casing greening. You need to find a new cause to champion.
Griff old mate, here in my neck-of-the-woods in Australia (Hunter Valley region), the history of significant flooding of the Hunter River are 1820, 1893, 1913, 1930, 1949, 1952, 1955, 1971, 1977, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015.
The 1955 flood still remains to this day as the largest Hunter River flood recorded.
The Troll strikes out again. Ignorance is not a justification for repeated uninformed comments. You can do it once but in your case you have exceeded your limit. An intelligent person will research so as to not to make repeated false statements. We Australians have been used to our climate of cyclic variation experiencing drought, fire and flood going back into Indigenous history. Just STFU and learn.
hee, hee, hee
and I thought mann was a nincompoop
but hey, I needed a laugh…
I am unaware of any theory that equates weather phenomena with atmospheric CO2 levels.
Apparently, Griff is aware of at least one. I’ll wait while he cites those theories to support his claims.
No worries Griff troll … tell you what lets export more coal and gas and see if you are right … wink 🙂
No it isn’t or I’ll scweam and scweam and scweam.
The distopia that Mad Mike would create given the chance would have nothing on Mad Max
“Catastrophic fires and devastating floods are part of Australia’s harsh new climate reality.”
Why are there over 100 Australian trees, plants and shrubs that have adapted to fire or have they changed their DNA to adapt to fire in the last few years? There are also vegetation where their seeds won’t open unless burnt.
And…
Arid and semi arid landscapes are prone to flash floods.
Solution: Land management based on knowledge of the land.
Trees, plants and shrubs? Heck, there are BIRDS that have learned to spread fire for flushing prey from cover! That takes some rather intense behavioral transformation!
Since the start of the industrial revolution around 1800, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from about 280 to 400 ppm [Keeling, 2020]. This has produced a decrease in the LWIR flux of approximately 2 W m-2 at the top of the atmosphere in the CO2 band emission with a similar increase in the downward LWIR flux to the surface [Harde, 2017]. For a CO2 ‘doubling’ to 560 ppm, the change in flux increases to approximately 3.7 W m-2. At present, the average CO2 concentration is increasing by about 2.4 ppm per which corresponds to a change in LWIR flux near 0.034 W m-2 per year.
The weather related cause of brushfires in parts of Australia and other places such as California is a mix of downslope winds and ‘blocking’ high pressure systems. There is often a combination of low rainfall following a wet year that leads to the formation of more dry vegetation fuel than normal for the fires. The lapse rate for dry air is -9.8 K km-1. In this case what goes up can come down. For downslope winds, the dry air compression can produce an increase in air temperature of 10 C in a couple days or in more extreme cases, a few hours. Similarly, there is a downward air flow within a high pressure dome combined with recirculation that can produce a temperature rise of 10 C or more over a period of about 5 days.
The figure shows the temperature record for Woomera, SA for December 2018 and 2019 [BOM, 2020]. The upper plots show the max and min temperatures and the lower plots show the rainfall and total daily solar insolation. There was an increase in temperature produced by a ‘blocking high’ in both years as indicated by the arrows in the temperature plots. For 2018 there was in increase in maximum surface temperature of almost 18 C over a period of 7 days. For 2019, there was an increase of almost 22 C over a period of 8 days. This was associated with record temperatures and major fires over a large region of Australia. There was also a record ‘spike’ in the Indian Ocean Dipole index [IOD, 2020]. The surface temperature of the Indian Ocean near Australia was below normal with reduced rainfall.
How does an average increase of 2.4 ppm in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 associated with a ‘radiative forcing’ of 0.034 W m-2 change the residence time and temperature rise in a blocking high pressure system over the Australian Bight by 1 day and 4C?
References
BOM, 2020, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/
Harde, H., ‘Radiation Transfer Calculations and Assessment of Global Warming by CO2.’ Int. J. Atmos. Sci. 9251034 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9251034
Keeling, 2020, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
IOD, 2020, https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Data/dmi.had.long.data
I could smell the smoke from the massive bushfires blazing across New South Wales
A smell those in the arid West experience every year. News flash, leftists: arid regions frequently have wildfires. It’s normal. If you want to reduce them, reduce the fuel load. Reducing atmospheric CO2 to reduce wildfires is as efficacious as doing a rain dance to summon more rain. Actually less efficacious because at least the rain dance will get your heart pumping and endorphins flooding your brain to make you feel better even if the rain doesn’t come.
stinkerp,
Where I live in the high desert Southwest we don’t have the usual four seasons; we have five!
Winter starts in November or December when it gets really cold and sometimes even snows. Starting about March we get Wind, where the gentle zephyrs blowing across the Continental Divide try to take your roof if not your whole house.
After Wind comes Smoke where the air is filled with particulates from far away places like Commifornia and their tinderbox forests. Smoke usually starts in April or May, and can last until July depending on how long and how strong Wind was!
Our blessed time of year is the Monsoon; which is like Spring but occurs in Summer! The rains and thunderstorms of Monsoon are a pleasure to experience and it comes with hordes of migrating hummingbirds as well!
Fall comes along eventually and sometimes lasts a month or two before we start over. The dividing line between Fall and Winter seems to be when my tomato plants freeze!
“Climate stability”? Where do these imbeciles come up with these idiotic phrases?
Agree just look at the history of the Holocene have a image but can’t past it
Why are you surprised? This goes along with “climate justice”, “existential threat”, “global warming”, “woke”, “systemic racism”, the names assigned to congressional legislation and the rest of the misused language the left uses as emotional triggers. In this case, the implication is that the climate is supposed to be stable, which if it was, it would be broken.
Distinguished nonsense from Michael Mann
The constant burning witnessed by early explorers of the aboriginals was their recognition that if they didn’t set fires at a time convenient to them, nature would likely do so at a time inconvenient to them, or worse, a fire they couldn’t escape from.
Given the devastation that uncontrolled fires bring to a modern society with all the technology at it’s disposal, it should be obvious that in order for earlier inhabitants to survive that it was a case of using commonsense and addressing the basic issues in the most basic fashion. One of the mast basic rules which continues today and is stressed to those engaged in fighting wildfires is, stay on the black. In other words utilise the areas already burnt to attack the fire from, or to use as a safe refuge, something the early inhabitants instinctively knew and practiced.
Reduce Michael Mann emissions to restore sane public discourse.
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,“If this rain doesn’t stop.”
July 1919 – John O’Brien
Cut your emmissions NOW, or the koala get’s it !!
ROFL … New market deep fried Koala Legs?
To soon?
There goes Fraudy McFraudpants again, coloring outside the lines of science and truth to push an ideology based on nothing but lies, lies, and ,more lies.
Yes. He has a new gig writing Colouring books. 😉
MM is the scientist who yelled Fire! in a crowded theater to get attention. Coming to a theater near you.
I apologize in advance for correcting you, but MM is not a scientist.
Drought, bush fires and floods are normal Australia.
It has always been this way; long before the Aborigines turned up; long before the British turned up; long before the Greenies created the term “Man-made Climate Change”; and long before Michael Mann created his “hockey stick”.
Sure the floods, drought and fires are real, but they are normal and Aussies have to learn to live with them.
Extracts from Said Hanrahan, by John O’Brien 1919.
http://boreelog.com.au/the-poems/said-hanrahan
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.
And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop.”
And stop it did, in God’s good time;
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o’er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.
There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”