Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate Prophet TIm Flannery, who predicted in 2007 that rains won’t fill Australia’s dams, only to see record busting floods in 2011, and who encouraged investment in “straightforward” hot rock geothermal energy, which kind of went nowhere, feels time has vindicated his climate track record.
Vindicated’ Tim Flannery unfazed by climate change critics
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist and author
October 10, 2021 — 5.00amDr Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, is the most famous environmentalist in the country and was one of the first people to warn of the dangers of climate change.
Fitz: Tim, despite the flak, you talk as a prophet ahead of your time. Most sensible people will now concede you were right on warning of the dangers of climate change and the denialists were wrong. Do you feel tragically vindicated?
TF: I do feel vindicated. Not sure about “tragically”. We do still have time to get on top of climate change, but we have to move quickly.
Fitz: Even now, however, your critics bring up some of your predictions that were wrong, or at least not yet true, like predicting Perth “will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis”. Have you been scarified by that constant bitter criticism?
TF: Not in the least. It goes with the territory I am in. They always leave off the last half of that quote, which was that they’d be the first ghost metropolis unless they made changes. Well, they made changes. Half of Perth’s water now comes from desalination and a few years ago their water commissioner personally thanked me for sounding the warning they needed to get things done. As to the critics, most of them are just doing a job. They are paid lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. I cannot take them seriously.
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Fitz: Do you believe the federal government has genuinely found religion when it comes to taking action on climate change, with more and more of its parliamentarians now beating the drum, or is it all a put-on?
TF: Certain elements within the government know that it is absolutely vital that they change, for the country, for the planet and to win the next election. And the electorate has changed. They all saw what happened when Warringah changed but Tony Abbott didn’t. And I think even Scott Morrison sort of gets it now. I believe he learned a lesson from the bushfires. We had been trying to get to him for months before then, warning of what was to happen. Then when they did happen he went to Hawaii and the electorate reacted accordingly. There was a lesson in that.
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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/vindicated-tim-flannery-unfazed-by-climate-change-critics-20211008-p58yjc.html
The following is Tim Flannery’s dams won’t fill quote, straight from the ABC transcript of his interview in 2007. Flannery notes in his interview that one of the desalination plants he inspired, the Perth desalination plant, is in regular use. He might have forgotten to mention Perth’s population grew from around 1.5 million in 2007 to around 2 million people in 2020.
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SALLY SARA: What will it mean for Australian farmers if the predictions of climate change are correct and little is done to stop it? What will that mean for a farmer?
PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: We’re already seeing the initial impacts and they include a decline in the winter rainfall zone across southern Australia, which is clearly an impact of climate change, but also a decrease in run-off. Although we’re getting say a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas of Australia, that’s translating to a 60 per cent decrease in the run-off into the dams and rivers. That’s because the soil is warmer because of global warming and the plants are under more stress and therefore using more moisture. So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush. If that trend continues then I think we’re going to have serious problems, particularly for irrigation.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/local/archives/landline/content/2006/s1844398.htm
Here’s Flannery on geothermal power;
Flannery backs geothermal energy
PM – Friday, 9 February , 2007 18:22:00
Reporter: Nance Haxton…
NANCE HAXTON: Geothermal energy is still in it’s infancy in Australia, with experimental sites in South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, but none as yet connected to Australia’s electricity grid.
One of the industry’s greatest proponents is Australian of the Year, Dr Tim Flannery, who told ABC’s Lateline program that the electricity source is one of Australia’s most reliable options for reducing carbon emissions.
TIM FLANNERY: There are hot rocks in South Australia that potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run the Australian economy for the best part of a century.
Now, they’re not being fully exploited yet but the technology to extract that energy and turn it into electricity is relatively straightforward…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1844491.htm
Plenty more where they came from.
Given Flannery’s concern his quotes are taken out of context, I encourage readers to read the full references and let me know if you believe I missed anything important.
I think it is fair to say there is a reason why Flannery’s views get less attention in Australia than they once did, except perhaps amongst inner city liberal MPs sucking up to Flannery in the hope of squeezing a few more votes out of his devoted fans.
There is one person in the Tim Flannery saga who has been more than vindicated.
When climate skeptic Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott was asked why he planned to fire Tim Flannery from his well paid part time government climate advisor post if he won the election, he reportedly said he did not see the point of paying Professor Flannery about $180,000 a year, for sharing views on climate change which Flannery was obviously willing to share freely with the public.
The man who predicted that the Sydney Harbourside Opera House would be underwater by 2000, that many dams would never fill again because of insufficient rainfall and who owned two waterfront properties on the Hawkesbury River just north of Sydney.
It is obvious this professor dude is talking out of his hindquarters about subjects he knows nothing about. He is certainly no hydrologist or botanist when he claims that drier weather “causes less runoff due to more stressed plants taking up more water in the soil”.
Utterly ignorant poppycock!
I think everybody can understand and agree that drier weather causes less moisture available to plants, and that having less moisture results in less density of plant growth. The reduced vegetative cover density in turn lowers the resistance of the ground surface to precipitation runoff … which speeds runoff and increases both peak flows and total volume of runoff. Engineers cal this “time of concentration” or Tc… and that peak flow rates and total runoff volumes from a given storm in a given watershed are inversely proportional to Tc.
Practically speaking, anybody who knows anything about desert landscapes (such as a lot of Australians do) knows that deserts are far more prone to dangerous flash floods than are densely vegetated landscapes.
The second part of his claim, concerning “plants taking up more water” and thus reducing runoff simply reveals his complete ignorance of surface water hydrogeological modeling. Tc’s are proportional to the maximum flow distance, slope, and vegetative cover, as explained above … and are typically measured in single or double digit minutes for smaller watersheds, or in hours for larger watersheds. The time it takes for a green plant to take up excess moisture via its roots is measured in days, not minutes or hours … and thus is negligible for purposes of determining storm runoff.
Virtually every one of the world’s millions of civil engineers, ag engineers, farmers, horticulturalists, and foresters understand these principles far better than does this obviously in-over-his-head pretender.
There are also other factors affecting runoff peak flows and total runoff volumes, called “antecedent moisture content” and porosity that works in the opposite direction from vegetative cover density. If soils are very dry and porous such as sands in a typical desert environment, the initial runoff is soaked up by the soils before surface runoff begins. Whereas wetter and less porous soils like clays runoff faster, and saturated soils runoff even faster still. All of this is accounted for in typical hydrological runoff models that engineers use to design storm water management systems.
Finally the average slope of the ground surface has a very large effect – runoff peak flows and volumes are proportional to surface slopes.
Again, for this self proclaimed “expert” to make the claims made in this interview is misleading and wrong.
It’s climate science he does not understand, for he is the Wombat Man.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJJzsAP0Iw
I love the picture
shows what a jester he really is
shame he still gets airtime by the likes of the ABC
need to defund these socialist national broadcasters
Plenty more where they came from.
You can say that again as there are still plenty of doomsters about-
BOM severe weather outlook for 2021-22 suggests floods, cyclones on the cards (msn.com)
But don’t let those declining numbers lull you into a false sense of security.
Sounds like those pesky dams are gunna fill and runneth over again or maybe not eh Tim? Howsabout I toss and you choose?
Was that in the Glasgow Chronicle special edition for the climate conference later this year?
Same here in the getting ready for summer left leaning media publications and television.
I am still waiting for the climate change idiots to show PROOF that manmade climate change is anything other than a hypothesis. I am waiting for them to make some specific predictions using the “science” they have uncovered and for that prediction to be 100% accurate. Until that happens, it is just a bunch of government shills that get paid tens of millions of dollars per year, saying exactly what they are paid to say!