After epic flooding in Townsville, witchdoctors are blaming climate change.
Queensland’s recent extreme weather – bushfires, heatwaves, coral bleaching, drought, Cyclone Penny, Townsville’s floods – showed Queensland is clearly experiencing climate change, Professor Ian Lowe said.
Thus spake the Druid of Runes waving a bunch of multifactor complex processes that have been happening forever, can’t be predicted and only have scary trends if you draw short graphs with no error bars. Verily we see doom, doth payth my grant, or whatever it is that keeps Prof Ian Lowe going. He is allegedly in the Queensland Climate Advisory Council (QCAC) — an organization so successful its only existence on the internet appears to be a sidebar on page 15 of a government PDF. But whoever they are, they’re experts, trust us, that the media doesn’t need to ask for an alternate opinion.
Wouldn’t you know it though, floods seem to happen quite a lot in Townsville
This is not to say that the current floods are not serious but just that Townsville is a floody kind of place. It’d be climate change if things stopped flooding in Townsville.
In the last ten days Townsville has had 600mm of rain (2 ft). Mt Stuart about 800mm. That’s a lot of rain, but it’s been done before.
In 1998 Townsville airport recorded half a meter of rain in 24 hours. It sounds recent but back then CO2 levels were 360ppm. Other parts of the city reached up to 1.3m of rain during the week. But Far North Queensland (FNQ) has a history of insane bouts of rain. Few places on Earth do rain like FNQ. The legendary Bellenden Ker Top is 250km north — the wettest place in Australia. Once in 1979, it got nearly 4 meters of rain in just eight days. Fully 1.5 metres of water fell out of the sky in one day. So who has a rain gauge five feet tall? One year it recorded 12m of rain. The whole area should be surrounded by pool safety fences to comply with council bylaws.
In 1946, The upper Ross River got 200mm of rain in just 2 hours. Call that a rain bomb? They would now, but back then CO2 was only 310ppm, and people just called it a downpour.
This was Townsville in 1946 when CO2 was 310ppm.
Townsville Daily Bulletin, 1946
This was Townsville in 1890 when CO2 was 295 ppm.
And this was before the 1892 flood when the Townsville Pilot Station recorded 487mm of rain on the 24th of January.
Images of Townsville in April 12th 1890
1892: Church wrecked, many small houses washed away, half the population cannot reach the city and business was at a standstill.
…
1892: 26 inches of rain in 24 hours (610mm).
1946: The stench of dead animals along the riverbank is unbearable. 200 people are living in the mail train at Townsville….
…
1953: More rain with Lucinda, Tully Cardwell and IUngham recieving around the same kind of rain (600mm in a week). These tallies below are in points. 4 points = 1mm.
For the record: Professor Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society and the former Head of the School of Science at Griffith University.
The BoM keeps a flood history but some of the floods (like 1892) only get a cursory mention. I’m sure it didn’t feel like a one-liner at the time.
Short memory, must have a….sho.o.ort memory!
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‘Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ George Santayana 1863 – 1952.
I think that is the quote that applies to the BoM people and all the watermealons
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My kitchen sink has been affected by Climate Change for many years. This is despite the drain, the airconditioned environment etc etc….. I have tried insuring the sink against flooding but no-one will take me seriously. They claim its my inability to control the tap and the fact that the sink is located under the tap. Do I need tap insurance? How can this be? I am the VICTIM. The sink does not comply with Federal Government regulation. As such if I leave the tap turned on it MUST be self draining, like my bathtub. What is the point of insuring the tap?
I have discussed this problem with CSIRO, the BoM and the ABC. They have said they have also been similarly affected by non-compliant sinks. The local university have started a new post-graduate degree for plumbers on sink compliance. The UN have instructed the IPCC to investigate GHGs that can affect sinks. Michael Mann has produced a “hockey” stick graph that proves all sinks are non-compliant and how this will affect the Earth’s climte in 12 years. Al Gore has started a sink company called Expen$ive $inks. There is going to be a movie.
Tony Abbott has said that a belief in sink -ing is bulls….. Typical. He wears swimming togs and does not care about non-compliant sink VICTIMS. However, my local member, Julia, is concerned about my sink. She wants to go to the Greek Isalands to investiagte their sinks. I asked her, “Why not just go to Bunnings?” She syas she was going to Townsville and would get back to me.
I will be voting GREENs. They care about sinks and have proposed a tax on rich anti-sinkers to subsidize new sinks. Why does the rich hate us? We are victims. We want a fair world. Everyone should have the same number of sinks!
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My sink continues to overflow. My cousin in Townsville has called about a BIGGER problem than my sink! “We are under water here mate and Julia Banks has turned up in a government boat with a TV crew asking us if we have any sink problems. I asked her about her electorate in Melbourne. I understand they need your help there. We don’t need politicians here, send some engineers and builders! Has she not heard that the people have gone off Banks?
Townsville needs our help, not our sympathy. They are not victims. Nor do they need media parasites to make them appear so.
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“Al Gore has started a sink company called Expen$ive $inks. There is going to be a movie.” Hoot! “Michael Mann has produced a ‘hockey’ stick graph that proves all sinks are non-compliant”. It gets better! Cheers for the laugh, Geoff, another green thumb for you.
I have two nieces born-and-raised in Sydney – one escaped (to Melbourne), one’s still there (bringing up two girls) – and all they’ve known for almost 30 years is cAGW / CCC / carbon pollution / the reef is dying / it’s all their fault. So when crazy Uncle Greg in NZ makes light of their fluffy new-age religious beliefs, oooh, and tells them to chill a little, awww, because no tipping point is about to go running away anywhere, aaah… it’s no wonder they think [feel] I’m an infidel unbeliever (old) non-compliant sink.
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Just up the Bruce Highway in North Queensland, Cairns in 2018 …
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-27/flooding-cairns-worst-generation-dozens-rescued-region-roads-cut/9590726
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I lived in Townsville in the late 80s and early 90s. When I first arrived, everyone was commenting that the place was in drought, and had been for about 9 years. But then, the Townsville region is a natural rain shadow, compared to places just 80km north or south.
Then we had a severe wet season, and the city was flooded. The Ross River Broke its banks and flood waters inundated the suburbs. I was living in Aitkenvale at the time. Water came up to the walls of my house. People were paddling boats up and down our street. And then we had a king tide, and the flood levels peaked.
Fortunately the flood waters receded within 24 hours. So definitely not as much rainfall as today’s flooding. But it was all weather back then, and still weather today.
I was living in a high set Queenslander, so fortunate not to lose anything. The problem was that newer houses were being built on slabs, ie at ground level. All those places ended up with flood damage. The local council even asked 4WD owners to stop driving around the flooded streets, because the bow waves that they were creating were going in through the windows and causing more damage.
And like the 2011 floods in Brisbane, the real culprit was the government allowing construction in known flood zones. Those owners will get annoyed in the coming weeks, because they will find that their insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, if you are in a recognised flood zone. But then, the land was cheap, so they will no doubt rebuild and wait for the next “once in 100 years” flood.
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We moved to Townsville around 1997 and experienced heavy rain before hitting Townsville, having to drive through almost a foot of water in our 4WD on the highway. Townsville was water everywhere for a day or so.
We too lived in Aitkenvale and apparently the place had flooded a few years prior to our arrival. You must a have arrived at that time. Of course these events are conveniently forgotten.
The regular flooding of Lake Eyre must also be a recurring climate change event.
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I lived in Maryborough Queensland for a few years, where the Mary River snakes around with the provincial city CBD buildings subject to regular flooding, the riverfront originally having wharfs serviced by a railway line. Cargo was carried on barges to and from the Port of Maryborough which is between Fraser Island and River Heads (Mary and Susan rivers meet there) where sailing ships anchored on the Sandy Strait.
Maryborough is one the the oldest provincial cities in Queensland and famous for the high set Queenslander homes.
Home buyers should obtain a flood map from the council before deciding to proceed with purchase.
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I wonder if records relating to flood plains are being quietly removed. It would be a bonanza for real estate developers selling on such plains, for when the 100 or so year floods happened, they could just blame climate change.
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Well, insurers could shoot themselves in the foot – no insurance in Australia. that will lower costs for business, so it could be a good thing.
Unless… of course the insurers will stay, but offer insurance at eye watering….er…..costs…..surely thats not the aim?
Will insurers become the new climate rent-seekers?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-06/could-climate-change-make-australia-uninsurable/10783490
“Could Australia become uninsurable?
“Townsville is underwater and large parts of Tasmania are on fire. As fires, floods and crazy weather become more frequent and severe, is Australia on its way to being uninsurable?
“The director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Australia Institute, Richie Merzian, says it’s a very real risk.
“We will get to a certain point, somewhere between say 3 degrees or 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and a world like that will see situations where cities, entire coastlines, do become uninsurable,” he said.
“He said in that instance, the burden will fall back on the taxpayer.
…………….
“So can it be avoided?
“Mr Merzian said it was possible, in the immediate future, to manage the risks to insurers in flood and fire-prone areas.
“Some insurers have basically decided to leave certain markets,” he said.
“Ideally the insurance [companies] that do want to stay in there need to work with the governments to make that happen.
“And that’s where you see more money and effort put into mapping the risks, improving zoning, building better codes and better safety measures.”
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And we need to de-industrialise Australia immedioately or we won’t get insurance:
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Snap.. you just beat me to it.
But if you deindustrialize, you dont need insurance…..bye bye insurance companies….
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I was born in Townsville and know well the smart, old time tendency to build on high stumps in the flat country.
Further south, years later, I recall being told by Jack Gaven, the member for the Gold Coast hinterland, when we were all building on concrete slabs in the new subdivisions, that all the farm houses on flat country had to be built on high stumps to survive the big wets.
He used to ride [and swim] his horse around those areas [that are now cities and suburbs] to visit his constituents in the “good” seasons.
Regular flooding is par for the course.
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I’ve been to Townsville many times over the last 30 years.
In that time I’ve seen in amazement developers build housing estates on what used to be flood plains of the local waterways. No surprises that houses now are flooded during a typical NQ very heavy wet season.
Recent years’ big increases in population into civic areas that have been historically flood prone in earlier times when floods came and went and were then considered usual is one aspect of newby climate alarmism that is unacknowledged in today’s media.
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Hi Bemused. I did move back to Townsville in ‘96 and 97, and all I recall was that the weather was particularly fine those years. Not dry or dusty like when I first arrived, and I can’t recall being hit by any cyclones during those years, either.
Interestingly, in late ‘97, PNG suffered a major crop failure, due of all things, to frost! Apparently, the monsoon storms had failed to show up that year, so no clouds or moist air. The clear skies and dry air caused this equatorial country to cool overnight resulting in frosts at the worst time of their growing season.
I was visiting PNG at the time, assisting their Emergency Management organisation. Old timers remembered the last time that happened – about 25 years before. But of course, these days, it wouldn’t be attributed to any natural cycles. Because climate scientists are far more knowledgeable these days. Right?
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Yep, Townsville, a place of weather extreemes…next please…
I was told recently by a work colleague, from Townsville, that its ho-hum, just another one (including cyclones) wait for the next disaster…
I assume that the Ross river dam wasnt built before 1892 – 1946? Someone may have the dam construction date..
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The dam was completed in the early ’70s. It was designed as a flood mitigation dam with a deep, narrow spillway. It has really proved it’s worth this past week, it has saved us from a real disaster.
Note that the dam wall was leaky so that was repaired and work done on the levees and radial gates were installed 10 years ago – thankfully.
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Oops. There’s surely just a little egg on face up there: it seems the council was preparing to bring in water restrictions over the next few weeks to take effect on March 17th. We do have to remember this is a council’s web page and council’s can move at glacial paces, and even forget their Internet presence needs to be kept up to date. No, no, I’m well aware there are no glaciers near Townsville — the closest one would be in Antarctica. (Could be one of the newly `re-endangered’ Himalayan ones to the far north in Nepal. Somebody must have found an old press release because the climate folks have made the same research as last time: none.)
The date shown could be last year’s but maybe it isn’t.
I’m sure all the Townsville gardeners (those with anything left) will be pleased the council won’t need water restrictions just yet.
The GBR is going to be all silted up by this huge influx of silty water in places. Watch out for fresh bleaching and cries of `it’s dying!‘; or maybe not: that researcher was sent back to Sweden.
Prof Lowe has shown himself to be yet another Science Denier and Grand Believer in 17th Century Witchcraft by alleging a perfectly natural event is Climate Change. Give that man a big raspberry. The Sun had a very very quiet week last week, the lowest I can remember seeing. (For those who came in late, like PFitz, the Sun is that little yellow main sequence star in our immediate neighbourhood, the one our little planet is parked next to and whizzes around. The kP index (solar magnetic activity measure) was almost non-existant, right down on the floor. Then it gave us a flurry of activity at the end of last week ( kP rising rapidly to 3 and peaking at 4) and hey presto, a nod from Sol, a short geomagnetic storm and what could have been a TC — but didn’t quite make it, — parked itself over the Townsville area. It leaked all over the countryside and the city
It successfully provoked poor Prof Lowe to make an absolute idjit of himself by invoking the supernatural and venting his favourite religion, about what is a purely natural event. The Poor fool doesn’t keep up to date to with our meteorological Science at all at all at all. Must be another Science Denier; the world is full of them.
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‘ the closest one would be in Antarctica.’ well almost, actually its South Westland NZ (where the council are climate change deniers!) Also the precipitation is about 25m/yr!
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Oops – forgot about the Franz Josef and the Fox. I’ll be saying “hello” to them again in a couple of weeks time as I make my annual summer ride around the SI. Fancy that! Forgetting my own glaciers! Really. Early Senility, must be.
Thanks theRealUniverse. An almost timely reminder … 🙂
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Surely, from Townsville, the closest glacier would be Irian Jaya / New Guinea’s Puncak Jaya / Carstensz Pyramid on Mount Jayawijaya / Gunung Soekarno, no? Hey, what’s a few disappearing glaciers between deniers… like the Himalaya… and the Franz and Fox… and Antarctica… and Chicago.
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Sophocles, the GBR is a long way off-shore at Townsville, so is unlikely to be impacted by flood waters from the Ross or Burdekin rivers. And despite all the hype from activists at JCU, bleaching is only a minor factor in reef damage (less than 10% attribution). Cyclones and storms cause the greatest damage, which I assume is wave action caused by storm surge and high winds.
But that does raise an interesting point. We haven’t heard from Peter Ridd lately. I wonder how his court case is going?
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From WUWT back in December. Case postponed until Feb/March.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/02/update-on-peter-ridd-legal-action/
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Hey Pauly, you know the Warmists never let a few facts get in the way of a good scare story.
So I cobbled up a Warmist one. Like them, I’ve never been to the area, probably never will and know absolutely nothing about it apart from how to spell it, That should be enough < grin >
Re Peter Ridd:
I read an update a few weeks ago but I’m afraid I can’t remember a thing about it other than that it is yet to proceed. Sorry.
Thanks Beowulf. (see #3.3.2.1)
I’ll try and keep a better eye out.
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I lived in Townsville for 5 years as a kid just after the war, then again near Townsville in the 70s & 80s.
One advantage the old town, & much of north Queensland had was that the houses were single skinned. Just one skin of VJ timber, with the framework exposed on the inside, or outside where the wall faced onto one of those great 10Ft wide verandas that made the homes so liveable.
This type of structure laughed off a flood, & dried out in just days, requiring only a good scrub to clean up, & perhaps a bit of paint if they had been under for more than a few days.
Today’s modern houses will be destroyed inside. When we went through such a flood a dozen or more men went from house to house, putting the more vulnerable furniture & appliances up on tables benches & even 44 gallon drums to help it survive. As most homes only had 2 or 3 Ft of water through them, this was an immensely valuable contribution to many homeowners.
Modern construction is much more vulnerable. When a flying branch took out the window in my granny flat, in a longer than usual thunder storm in SE Queensland we had to reclad 2 walls due to the damage clean water in moderate volume did to plaster.
Perhaps the old ways were better, but perhaps real timber is today, too expensive to use in our McMansions today.
Yes floods are common in Townsville. An old mate tells the story of steaming his 40 Ft boat from a flooded Ross Creek, into Flinders Street, the main street, & tying to a street light stanchion, to avoid the carnage of boats in the harbour.
When the flood went down quickly, & left him stranded, he needed a crane & a low loader to get his boat back into it’s normal element.
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Curious to know what st you lived in in Aitkenvale – we are in one of the old dha houses and our street went under with a fast current but water only made it under the house to the laundry. The thought of flooding coming up higher than the first floor is really horrifying.
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Past floods in Townsville are clear indicators of a stable climate. The present flood is a clear indicator of catastrophic climate change and perfectly consistent with the latest models. Note too that global warming has gone rife in the USA where temperatures have reached record lows. By the way, should there ever happen to be an event that might indicate the models are incorrect, please note that 1) it did not happen; 2) you can’t use single weather events to indicate changes in climate.
I went to James Cook University so what I say must be rite.
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I am pleased you commented “I went to”, today your comment could prove fatal to continued employment.
sarc
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4 Feb, 2019, JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister (Tasmania) Greens Senator Nick McKim says the fires have been made worse by your love of coal and you should be on your knees apologising to residents.
Will you be doing that today?
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-huonville-tasmania
Richard Di Natale 4 Feb 2019: , “Sen. McKim is absolutely right.”
We are seeing an increase in bushfires, a crisis in the Murray Darling basin and losing part of the Great Barrier Reef because we have a government in the pocket of the coal industry, refusing to take action on “dangerous and catastrophic climate damage”.
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/1092567797891182592
Wait.
Coal miners to blame for Queensland floods, says Australian Greens leader Bob Brown
https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/coal-miners-to-blame-for-queensland-floods-says-australian-greens-leader-bob-brown/news-story/cbfe12042fa9c4149ea3c10524f57344
Karma?
Townsville floods hits Queensland exports, Abbot Point terminal closed
https://www.afr.com/news/politics/townsville-floods-hits-queensland-exports-abbot-point-terminal-closed-20190204-h1atk2
And that is a trip down the rabbit hole to a crazy Green world.
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The correct way to answer to the Tasmanian Senator is to point out if they had only been allowed to dam the Franklin River we could have been powering the entire country with ‘Green’ and ‘Renewable’ hydro.
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Good job Jo. Yet more proof the hysteria over global warming/man-made climate change is nothing more than pure crap. Yet they are still winning here thanks to the sleeping public in general who continue to support the two major parties for endeavouring to keep reducing our CO2 emissions all in the name of saving the planet from nothing by ourselves while the rest of the world is moving on by building hundreds of new coal fired power stations and dozens of nuclear ones to boot. If Australia really needs to crash and burn to wake up then so be it.
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Will sea levels drop like they did in 2011?
Australian floods of 2010 and 2011 caused global sea level to drop
“Puzzled oceanographers who wondered where the sea level rise went for 18 months now have their answer – it went to Australia”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/23/australian-floods-global-sea-level
Of course … for the laugh …
Science!
Coal miners to blame for Queensland floods, says Australian Greens leader Bob Brown
https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/coal-miners-to-blame-for-queensland-floods-says-australian-greens-leader-bob-brown/news-story/cbfe12042fa9c4149ea3c10524f57344
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Errrummm, What part of, water evaporates from sea falls on land goes back to sea dont they understand?
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Most of it.
If the sea level falls it MUST be due to Climate Change (cause never stated as increasing ice levels are not permitted).
If there is heavy rain on the land (somewhere) it MUST be due to Climate Change.
Water running into the sea might be due to Climate Change – more research needed.
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Graeme No 3:
— You had better corral those research grants as quickly as you can before some University student up there gets the same idea and puts in for them ahead of you.
Good luck.
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Oh my giddy aunt!!!
Now that I’ve cleaned the coffee off my keyboard and screen, I can only say that that is probably the most daft, stupid, ridiculous, brainless etc., statement I have read in relation to “global warming”. And that is really saying something, given the constant stream of ever-more ridiculous pronouncements from the CAGW crowd.
The amount of rain that fell on eastern Australia in the 2010-11 summer, large as it was in our limited history and experience, would be so insignificant in terms of the overall amount of water in the planets oceans…..
Seriously, the mind bogles at that level of utter stupidity.
Yet someone somewhere has taken them seriously.
No wonder we’re in trouble.
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‘Clouds of mystery pouring
Confusion on the ground…
Who’ll stop the reign?’
Bob Brown, Greens Party and
fellow travelers, begone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEEFBTtofc
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Are we talking about Charlie here? Many Aussies won’t be too keen on him I ‘spose.
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Ohuh! Shouldn’t have played that. HEAVY rains headin’ for Melbourne!
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It would be fair enough to link events like the Townsville flooding, Tassie’s bushfires and the NSW/QLD drought to climate change – if these events were in keeping with any predictions/projections issued by the BOM &/or the CSIRO.
Their current wisdom suggests that the NW of Australia will get wetter – while the SE of Australia will get drier.
With Temp minimums in the higher latitudes increasing rather than Temp maximums in the lower latitudes.
EVERYTHING ELSE IS JUST WEATHER.
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I Love A Sunburnt Country ….. of droughts and flooding rains.
circa 1900
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In addition to all of what Jo documents above, Townsville’s wettest year was 1894 and its driest year was 1923. Worst cyclone was 1971…One could go on, but it’d be like talking to a brick advisory council.
Lax terminology is the key. And “climate change” is very lax and deliberately so. It’s always clear that everywhere is always experiencing “climate change”. Handy that.
Does the professor know that the 1946 flood described above came after nine months of drought? And that the 1892 flood broke a worrying summer drought? That, after some heavy rain earlier, in 1883 there was no rain whatsoever on Townsville for five months? That the 1946 big wet was followed by almost no rain for ten months…before another sharp bucketing (like now) in Feb 1947.
Of course, a professor would have checked all that. Silly moi. He was just a bit shy to talk about it.
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Cyclone Althea in 1971 was certainly a doozy. It hit Dec 23rd when the RAAF base was on stand down so the only Neptune flown out was the standby search and rescue aircraft. The rest sat on the tarmac but came out unscathed bar a small nick on a fibreglass radome – easy fixed. It totally destroyed many homes.
But the city’s worst was Leonta:
Cyclone Leonta – Wikipedia
Cyclone Leonta. Cyclone Leonta was a tropical cyclone that caused severe damage in North Queensland on 9 March 1903. It lasted for around twelve hours, and was the most damaging cyclone ever to hit Townsville at that time, surpassing Cyclone Sigma of 1896, with approximately 14 lives lost (12 in Townsville and 2 in Charters Towers ).
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Mosomoso said:
One would have thought so. Being a Professor is a hard job, and requires a careful approach.
They’re hiring/appointing/creating/breeding very careless professors these days, having gotten rid of all the ones who actually did know what they were talking about like Murry Salby and Peter Ridd. Serves those Universities right. John Cook is keeping quiet at present so perhaps we can expect a burst from there after this is all over.
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It’s not over yet, the dam is still @ 189% and there has been a few inches of rain o’night.
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We’ll all be rooned if .. it doesn’t rain, warm up, cool down, stop raining – as predicted about a hundred years ago by Hanrahan.
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Jo-brilliant article again, I hope you do not mind this unrelated notice.
For all those inspired by Jacinta Price, there is a gofundme site, to assist her get elected.
https://www.gofundme.com/6tv0qvk
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I wonder what the Insurance companies will say this time about their customers flooded homes.
Perhaps ‘Climate change did it and we are not responsible”
Or “This has happened so often before that it is not insurable” !
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With the help of the ABC – which has no awareness of history – the insurance companies are already saying “we are not responsible”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-06/could-climate-change-make-australia-uninsurable/10783490
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Their bankers “names” will be worried as the insurance companies call for them to sell assets to fund the claims.
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I don’t understand what the insurance companies are saying.
If climate change makes Australia uninsurable, and if rising CO2 levels are
responsible for the climate change then there is nothing Australia can do to arrest it.
It is simply so small a contributer from its own domestic and industrial activities,
and indeed some have suggested that it is a net sink of CO2.
Australian coal may contribute to China’s emissions but China can get coal from many other places
and would do so if denied Australian coal.
So if Australian property cannot be insured, then no one pays premiums.
So what do the insurance companies do then for income?
Disband?
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All the insurance companies are doing is making noise so that people won’t be upset about premium rises.
They’ll exclude as many things as possible but will always want to sell policies.
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It’s a crash and burn strategy. They just haven’t figured it out yet. Australia can huff and puff all it likes about the absolute necessity to reduce our CO2 emissions but the rest of the world is moving on and building hundreds more coal fired power stations. I sometimes wonder if too much sun has fried the brains of too many people in both major parties and most of the voters as well. We now have a deadly situation where we have both major parties stuck on policies to keep reducing our emissions at all costs and most of the people keep voting for one or the other. It will end in tears.
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A link to this page has been sent to my local Federal member (Sharkie) as she is an avid climate change warrior.
Her web site states that she is also a student of history so it will be interesting to hear from her how Townsville had floods when CO2 levels were so much lower
I live in hope for a rational response.
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Don’t hold your breath while you wait for ant logical reply – it could be a long time before she can think one up.
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John I am also in Mayo with Rebekha as the local member.
I do not have any hope that she will change here mind.
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This seems like a good place to recount a story I have. I was acting as a surveyor for Fitzroy Shire Council, doing a survey around the Ridgelands ares. Don’t be fooled by the name, it’s all flat flood plain. It was the usual hot summer day and a little black circular storm came in from the west. It was a very tight little storm so I kept working and kept an eye on it. It was passing north of me somewhere North of the Fitzroy River, when it met the easterly wind from the ocean. It hovered in place for about 30 minutes before heading directly North.
The next day I heard that it parked over a single farm and dropped 400mm of rain in 30 minutes. Washed out everything on the farm, like it’s pretty flat there, so reports were that the entire farm was covered by food of water. All the while I was working in the hot blazing sun just a K or three away from it.
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Micro Climate Change?
70
… it’s worse than anyone thought!
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Getting through to the fools that ‘weather’ ISNT ‘climate change’ is banging a brick wall.
Actual climate changes fairly slowly decades, centuries, warming to (mini)iceages and back.
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When POTUS Trump makes a sarcastic remark about massive snowfall and Global Warming the press deride his comment for confusing weather with Climate Change.
When professor Ian Lowe connects Townsville flooding with Climate Change the press promote the comment as gosphel from the all knowing guru.
I wonder how many people observe this inconsistency and obvious bias.
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I wonder if the extreme Greens have ever wondered why the classic “Queenslander” style housing features timber stump foundations raising the floor level a couple of metres above the ground?
It is of course because Brisbane, Townsville and other cities are on flood plains surrounding a river.
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True Dennis.
In all the photos and footage I’ve seen fo the current flood in Townsville, all the old Queenslanders up on their stumps are still high and dry, while all the new houses and businesses built on ground level slabs are inundated.
The old-timers who built on 8 ft stumps either took the time to look about before they built, or listened to the local indigenous people who told them of “big waters” when there were “big rains”.
A relative in the Army based in Townsville had a married quarter in what I reckoned at the time was flood prone, although they moved before any floods affected them. It was barely 50m from a gully/creek, low-set and on flat ground. I haven’t checked, but I’d be very surprised if it’s not one of the hundreds that have been flooded.
It’s no joke for those affected, that’s for sure, but responsibility has to be laid at the feet of councils that approve the wrong type of buildings in the wrong places – like low-set houses on flood plains.
As to council planning and people purchasing houses on flood plains, there’s a really good hint as to the future in the very name – FLOOD plain.
120
They also built them on hills so there must be a bit more to it . . . . . . .
20
And while bushfires rage elsewhere, we have idiots like this blaming climate change.
‘Astounded’: former fire chief unloads on politicians over climate change inaction
Decorated Australian firefighter Greg Mullins says climate change is contributing to bushfires so horrendous that homes and lives cannot be protected, and the federal government will not acknowledge the link because it has failed on emissions reduction policy.
210
A Green member of the Climate Council sitting there with people such as: Tim Flannery and Will Stefan.
His story was first published in 2016 from memory, ABC and SMH and other alarmist fake news sources.
I note that as the 2019 federal election date approaches that story and others are being used by the Green Labor Turnbull GetUp backed candidates masquerading as Independent.
The GetUp targets are the real Liberal MPs like Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton, not the “LINO” mob (Liberals In Name Only) otherwise known as Turnbull Party (now moved out of Liberal Party since he let to avoid the leadership spill last year) and his “Black Hand Faction” MPs.
120
Tasmania has been the centre of fire concerns this year. Well, if you look at Hobart’s rainfall you see it is quite a dry place, and its driest month on average, February, is the wettest month in the north of the continent (Townsville, for example!).
The February of 1967 produced Tassie’s worst fire disaster, and it came in a very dry summer there after good rains in the middle of the previous year. Conditions in the continent’s north were completely different. Hobart’s handful of floods had no relation to conditions on the north of the mainland. (In fact it’s a big island with European levels of variation, so even to expect uniform weather within Tassie is a stretch. Launceston missed those rare but memorable Hobart floods while Zeehan has four times the rainfall of Hobart.)
The connection between Hobart and Townsville is political, not climatic. It makes as much sense to average out rain or temps between north/south or east/west as to lump our climate with NZ’s or New Guinea’s. If you average out rainfall for 1950 nationally you get a completely wrong idea of what happened in Qld and NSW in that freaky year.
The manipulators will always be able to point to climatic extremes in Oz, and often the extremes will be concurrent. Being able to push it through our Luciferian slave media, they don’t hesitate to do so.
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Both the Guardian and News.com carried an article about the effect of controlled burns. A quote: “They found that firefighters would need to carry out prescribed burn-offs across 31% of Tasmania in order to have a significant impact on reducing the threat from wildfires” 31% of the state year after year. Forestry and Dams (run off from burned areas fills them up with silt) would love that.
36
I love it when people quote such reliable sources. Do you donate to the Guardian to keep it afloat?
Odd that every Royal Commission into bushfires all come to the conclusion that the states don’t do sufficient fuel load reduction during the winter season and state governments all agree, but then go back to the usual do nothing stance.
BTW, I note that you didn’t bother to respond to the other thread where you kept calling men ‘toxic’ but said nothing about the 1,000,000+ babies being killed in the US. This murder is now becoming legal, up to and possibly including after birth. Women’s ‘choice’, Planned Abortion, sorry Planned parenthood.
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It was in News.com as well and they were both quoting from this journal https://www.iawfonline.org/international-journal-wildland-fire-ijwf/
I would like you link to “every Royal Commission”
And if you think having 60 odd women murdered in Australia by men every year is not toxic, then you must be OK with that.
Tell me: you are walking home late one night and you see that 3 women are following you.
Do you
A. Get on the phone
B. Walk faster.
C. Clasp you house keys in your fist as a makeshift knuckle duster.
Also, try to stay on topic
39
Spoken like a true Leftist.
The killing of millions of defenceless babies annually (in the US alone) is ignored, while a small proportion of bad men is inflated into something beyond the pale.
And have you reported yourself to the authorities as a toxic male ready to go on a rampage? Or are you a toxic female in disguise?
When it comes to you, any topic is valid.
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The answer is none – 3 women were killed were each using one of those methods. That is a toxic culture in action
I checked for royal commissions on bushfires and there was one (i guess that counts as every), which mentions climate change
In its formal hearings the Commission took limited evidence on the subject of climate change because it was persuaded by Mr Hennessy’s conclusions, which, as noted, are consistent with the opinions of the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, Australia’s leading climate science agencies. The Commission is aware of debate in the scientific community about the causes of climate change, but it did not see value in entering this debate when the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, as well as Victoria and the Commonwealth, have concluded—as have the Commissioners themselves—that climate change is affecting the Australian environment and its weather patterns.
but it’s recommendations stop short of criticising the mosaic method of controlled burning which was the practice at the time.
And if your anti-toxic argument is invalid
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You sound like Clem Ford. She now apparently has plenty of time on her hands to troll forums and attack men, given that her previous pulpit has been removed.
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So PF, are you admitting to being toxic, or accepting part responsibility for a toxic culture around you? If so, quit your evil habits now.
11
Certainly Robber, as a man I would have to. I hope to be part of the solution though
14
If only you were a man.. missed by “that much” !!!
You will never be part of any solution. That is not your aim.
You are filled with hatred and confrontation… that is why you are here.
31
A. Killed because she was on the phone?
Its a wonder any woman is still alive, anywhere !!!
B: Killed because she walked faster?
Maybe she should have looked whare she was going? Much haste…
C: Clasp you house keys in your fist as a makeshift knuckle duster.
Ok, so who is the aggressor in that case ????
And what the heck did the guy walking in front have to do with any of it !!!
01
Just Google Royal Commission into Australian bushfires and you’ll find every link that you require. There are many summaries and evaluations at hand. Your link provides no information whatsoever.
Here’s a link to an article by an authority (an authority that has on the ground experience, not sitting at a desk using climate models) and written in words that you may understand (though will clearly reject): https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/11/bushfires-global-warming/
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Voice of reason, Roger Underwood, but reason’s sadly out of fashion,
deliberately so.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/11/bushfires-global-warming/
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D. Turn around and say HI, just like I would if it was 3 men.
Always good to meet new people.
pfutz is obviously a little girl’s blouse, and would run crying to mummy.
pfutz, you are the ONLY toxic male on this forum.
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It’s always nice to see so many former students of [snip].[ Proof is what you need here and so far none. ]ED
25
As opposed to a student of NOTHING, having never learnt anything. hey pfutz.
You really are a toxic influence on the forum pfutz.
But that is your aim, isn’t it.
31
I wrote about bushfires last year and this video from California perfectly represents the issues that we have in Australia (I’m not sure if I’ve posted this before):
https://youtu.be/ajPpP3vbD5c
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More flooding expected from climate change when the glaciers melt .
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-06/third-of-himalayan-glaciers-can-no-longer-be-saved/10783600
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I thought they have been melting since the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago.
An inconvenient truth.
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The ghost of Rajenda Pachauri, who is still fighting for “keeping it up” when it wasn’t wanted.
I read the article and “wot a load of crap! it is.
Most obvious shortcomings:
– no thought nor any discussion about how the Himalayan glaciers are formed
– no thought nor any discussion about how Himalayan glaciers function
– most importantly: absolutely nothing about Himalayan precipitation quantities and patterns.
It’s obviously written to be an Oh migod! The glaciers are gonna melt! Run away!
In the absence of any consideration of precipitation quantities and patterns, that article and its claims are nothing but Climate Porn.
Ok, I decided to go for the article’s “data” and find the actual report. I had questions I wanted answering, like:
What is causing the reduction in the glaciers? It can’t be “just” melting! Oh silly me: more CLimate Porn: it’s Climate Change.
-glaciers are fed by “global warming white stuff” (snow) from reservoirs or catchments.
– has changed in the snow/ice catchment? Righht: Snowfall facts required here.
– when did it last happen? This stuff is cyclic.
– how long did that last?
Those will do for now. For anyone else who is interested, the report is available from
http://lib.icimod.org/record/34383 link for downloading is rhs panel on the target page (you can read all the PR and other guff if you’re really interested) Find Download:. It’s within a few lines of the top. I chose `full report‘ so I will be reading it for a few days….
I’ve got a feeling, just a small niggly one, that given the previous two very cold NH (Northern Hemisphere) winters and the current one, those glaciers won’t be melting away anymore but will start really packing on some weight … we’ll see.
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Professor Ian Lowe must be from the same class as Professor Clive Palmer and Professor Julia Gillard (and Professor Tim Flannery).
Donkeys one and all. To be sure, to be sure, to be sure.
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Yeah, but money can’t buy you love.
lol
40
Must have performed together in the end of year “Climate Review: It’s All a-Changin’.”
00
Do remember that ‘professor’ is just a job title that doesn’t bring with it magical insight. Sadly, the media children are impressed by the job title and believe the holder has ‘prestige’ and therefore they should gather in a circle in awe when they speak. If journalists did research they would find that most of their prestige sources talk bollocks.
00
Hang on, here we go …
Feb 5, 2019: Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us
“Two years ago the then treasurer Scott Morrison picked up a large lump of coal.
At the same time Tasmanians find themselves living in a frightening new world where summer is no longer a time of joy, but a period of smog-drenched dread that goes on week after week, and it seems inevitable, month after month.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmania-is-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laugh-at-us?CMP=share_btn_tw
Exaggerate much?
Jan 31, 2018: Summer in Australia… snow in Tasmania
That’s just days after they saw 32 degree temperatures on Saturday.
“By 6.15am we were in the middle of a blizzard it was amazing,” she told Tom Elliott.
“The last time we had a significant snowfall that was out the season it was the 3 December (2017) and we probably had eight inches.
“It’s still only January!”
https://www.3aw.com.au/summer-in-australia-snow-in-tasmania/
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Not Townsville, but I was in Brisbane in the 1974 floods and recall 24 inches of rain in 24 hours. Of course there was flooding, but not as bad as the 1893 floods.
History, especially local history should be compulsory in schools.
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more objectivity from theirABC:
VIDEO: 4 Feb: ABC Q&A: The Boats, the Banks, and the River
FROM TRANSCRIPT:
Question: AISHEEYA HUQ
Many people are frustrated with politicians in our major parties not representing them. I’m one of thousands of young people who went on strike last year for climate, for that very reason. With a group of other students, I’ve also set up a campaign and organisation, Climate Leaders, to take the next step of finding people who will represent us. Oliver Yates, who is running in Kooyong, is currently working with us and has been endorsed by Climate Leaders. So my question to all the panellists is, what will you do in parliament for our climate? Will you join us, the young people of Australia, as our climate leaders?…
ADAM BANDT: …I went to some of the student strike and there was more sense in…and those people seemed to have learnt far more in their classrooms than our Prime Minister had. And I… Seeing those people there, those young people taking the time out to go and stand up, gave me a lot of hope…
But we have just had our hottest month on record ever – not our hottest January ever, our hottest month on record everywhere. They are digging now mass graves to bury fish. We have large parts of the eastern seaboard on fire. And meanwhile we’ve got a Liberal government that is having a debate about whether climate change exists, and saying maybe we can take some public money from schools and hospitals and put it into new coal-fired power stations. We’ve got a Labor Party that is likely to be the next government, that is happy to open up new coalmines. Opening up new coalmines, for goodness sake. It’s like the patient is presenting with signs of heatstroke and the Liberals are saying, “Well, let’s stick her in a taxpayer-funded sauna and see if it gets any better,” and Labor’s saying, “Oh, no, we don’t want the sauna to be taxpayer funded.” Like, it is time…
KERRYN PHELPS(LAUGHS)
ADAM BANDT: It is time now to vote for climate change. This election has to be a climate change election. And I think it’s time for everyone… If you want to make sure that your kids and your grandkids aren’t going to every summer holidays wondering how many people are going to die from the next bushfire or in the next heatwave, it is time to, I would say, vote one Greens, vote…give your preferences to some good-minded independents, and to send a message to the next lot, whoever form governments… I hope people take the opportunity to kick out this rotten, climate-denying, inequality-turbo-charging government, but the next lot needs to be told. The scientists have told us not only that climate change is real, but if we’ve got any hope of winding it in, we need to replace one coal-fired power station with renewable energy every year between now and 2030…
TONY JONES: …to actually ban the mining of coal, the export of coal, and the development of coalmines in Australia by 2030. Will you have any support at all for a measure like that?
ADAM BANDT: Well, we’ve been…
TONY JONES:Among the crossbench we’re sitting with now, or anywhere?…
JULIA BANKS: Mm. It (NEG) was very serious, and it was devastating. But first, may I say, Aisheeya, thank you for your leadership, because you are the future. And your leadership, and young people around Australia, and certainly in my electorate of Chisholm, and everyone I talk to in Flinders, are really, really frustrated that the major parties have been faffing about on climate change for so many years now. And I think… You know, the National Energy Guarantee, it should have gone through. It’s not perfect, it’s not perfect, but, you know, perfection is the enemy of good. I mean, it was a good platform to build on, and it was extremely frustrating.
TONY JONES: Do you accept Adam’s position, the Greens’ position, that, in fact, the Liberal Party is full of climate change deniers?
JULIA BANKS: Certainly the hard right wing are definitely climate deniers…
ANDREW WILKIE: Yeah. And look, we’d be…it would be unforgiveable to tonight not talk about the flooding in Far North Queensland and the shocking fires in Tasmania. You know, for a long time, we talked about climate change as a trend, and people had to be very cautious about talking about specific weather events or weather-related events. But, you know, on the news tonight, I’m listening to a senior fire official from the Tasmanian Fire Service, and he’s not talking politics, he’s just talking facts. He said the fire season is longer. The fire incidents are lasting longer. I mean, the rain statistics coming out of North Queensland at the moment, I don’t know if they’re unprecedented, but must be near-on unprecedented. There can be no doubt that we are getting much more extreme weather events and we’re getting them much more often. And it’s destroying property. It’s making sick. It’s resulting in some people dying. You know, surely, it’s just so far beyond time to be having a debate about, “Is climate change real?” Let’s have a proper conversation about, “What are we going to do about it?”…
I mean, personally, I think we should be putting the country on a pathway to zero net carbon emissions and 100% renewable energy. Now some of you are there thinking, “Well, he’s a dreamer.” But you know what? The Americans put someone on the moon in less than a decade in the 1960s with the computing power of a pocket calculator. Surely, we can mobilise the whole country and have a whole-of-country, whole-of-government… Maybe it’s a bit aspirational, but why don’t we just go for it? Just go for it. And show the rest of the world what we can do…
https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2019-04-02/10735038
20
Long time since I bothered to watch Q & A. Their ‘objectivity’went missing about 15 years ago.
60
Yes, the ABC underwent a reset about then and informative programs were replaced by buffoons airing their tiresome bilge.
And yes, as I remember it from a decade ago Q & A would only be watched by family and friends of the participants as it’s simply a propaganda vehicle.
Imagine a panel with Jo Nova and a selection of contributors to this site with say Bob Brown as the token out of step loser –Tony Jones would be having a baby…
20
Serp, -it’s tricky explaining what is essentially atmospheric physics in a palatable public forum. The dilute science teaching in Au schools means that these days the average watcher is poorly versed in the basic principles of physics. Sadly, I think a real climate forum would fly over the heads of most Australians.
00
Off topic, but some good news. The spot price of Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) has dropped below $40/MWhr, compared to $70-80 for most of 2018.
Many retailers enter long term agreements with “renewable” generators for prices that include both the wholesale price and LGCs.
60
Since we are off-topic (and no mid-week Unthreaded), for prices since 1999 to end Jan19 at day/week/month/quarter/season/cyclic resolution and at 30 minutes for the last 120 days, see
http://redcentresoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/AEMO_Demand_and_Price_by_State.xlsx
http://redcentresoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/AEMO_Demand_and_Price_All_States.xlsx
10
The main difference that I can see with this rain event (and the previous high temperatures) is the persistence. Normally the monsoon trough would move down for a few days then retreat. This time it came as far south as about Bowen and then stopped. Below the Tropic there has been almost no rain- I’ve had about 10mm in the last 4 days here in Rocky. All due to a persistent blocking high in the Tasman Sea which has given us very strong SE trade winds for over 6 weeks (lovely and cool), stopped the normal west-east progression of systems through central Australia thus leading to the long period of heatwave in western Qld, and stopped the very strong north-west monsoon from coming further south. Unless ‘climate change’ causes persistent blocking highs, this is just weather.
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The blocking high in the Tasman Sea, the result of a meandering jet stream and collapse of the subtropical ridge, is a global cooling signal.
91
Same here Ken, about 100k South of you. It’s so frustrating watching that damned high just sitting there preventing the trough from moving East.
We’re in what we call “green drought” here – enough rain to keep the grass green, but all creeks are still dry and dams are getting low or dry.
40
A few weeks before the STR collapsed, the intensity of the subtropical ridge is a global warming signal, apparently.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/updates/articles/a025.shtml
10
Great comment Ken. It would appear to me that the new climate pattern is towards slower tracking pressure cells so we receive longer periods of the same weather. My observation is that in the higher latitudes we are seeing jet-stream meanders that shift pools of polar coolth deeper into the mid-latitudes.
Sadly, for Townsville residents, it appears they have covered every part of the flood plain with buildings so it was an inevitable disaster. We know that tarmac and hard surfaces absorb minimally so the rapid flooding was to be expected.
00
Look at the Burdekin River between 1801 and 1870, it looks droughty, but the authorities seem to think the arrival of Europeans changed everything. I’m of two minds on this.
/Users/gordonnewlyn/Desktop/nature01361-f2.2.jpg
The other point worth mentioning is that the world was sliding into a Gleissberg Minimum in the 1890s, also the late 1940s and 1950s were also a time of global cooling.
31
That didn’t work, here are the words.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10878714_Coral_record_of_increased_sediment_flux_to_the_inner_Great_Barrier_Reef_of_Australia_since_European_Settlement
21
This should work.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coral-record-of-increased-sediment-flux-to-the-Reef-McCulloch-Fallon/0d37c47097ed0c9b815f920c9f8505242b4f771a/figure/2
21
Europeans, graziers in particular, DID change the Burdekin dramatically. When I was a boy there were still swimming holes where you could catch barra in the lower reaches. The decking of the then road bridge is now permanently covered by sand and there is no where to swim. I’m assuming that all this sand was once on cattle properties upstream.
41
River sediment is a big factor in flooding. Wonder is the Ross has ever been dredged?
30
Not really a problem. The sand bar at the river mouth has been dredged to allow access for the trawlers once they were kicked out of Ross Ck. In all earlier floods the bar would have restricted outflow.
The local fishers don’t like the mouth being dredged because the river and creeks empty out too much at low tide.
10
‘Pastoralists had established runs along the river during the 1860s, with some along the lower reached taken for selection in the 1880s.’ wiki
The evidence seems overwhelming.
10
Rivers can fix themselves given the chance. The Hunter River did after the 1970s. When someone had the bright idea of a charity raft race in 1971 it had to be abandoned because there was only 6 inches of water in the river. We had been through a very large flood earlier that year, so it wasn’t a dry year, it was just silted up. You could walk ankle-deep in the river for miles. I should point out that the river is actually tidal to that point and large boats used to come up past Maitland to ply their trade in the old days. A century and a half of erosion had taken its toll.
The Hunter had not recovered from the massive load of sediment dropped by the 1955 flood. Some former vege farms were covered in 10 feet deep pure sand after that flood. Newcastle Harbour was choked with silt for years after and required constant dredging.
The problem was fixed by tackling erosion and by a few decent floods when the river cleared its own channel back down to bedrock in places. Where there was 6 inches of water in 1971 there is 12 feet or more water now; where you could literally step over the channel in ’71, the river is now 30 metres wide and full of mullet and perch.
11
All good, thanks for the insight.
00
Taking it a little further, it was wetter in Queensland during the LIA.
‘The 337-year reconstruction thus increases by threefold the length of record for considering interannual to decadal climate variations in northeast Australia. Instrumental and reconstructed Burdekin River runoff are closely related to an index of summer monsoon rainfall in Queensland.
‘Thus, the reconstruction provides insights into the behaviour over the past three centuries of both a major tropical river system and the highly variable summer monsoon rainfall in northeast Australia.
‘The reconstructed series shows wetter conditions (higher runoff) in the late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries and in the late-nineteenth century. Drier conditions (lower runoff) are reconstructed in the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and in the mid-twentieth century.
Israel et al 1998
11
Damn auto correct, the author is Isdale et al.
00
The science is settled, Queensland had a hundred year drought.
‘Comparisons with various independent climate proxies are equivocal: the magnitude and significance of relationships with, for example, a proxy ENSO index vary through time. An extended drier period reconstructed from approximately the 1760s to the 1850s is associated with lower interannual rainfall variability.’
Janice Lough 2011
10
Thanks Jo, that’s a keeper. You found one image I had been trying to trace, still looking for the one of Ross Island Hotel when it was actually on an island. Apparently there were occasions when patrons could entertain themselves shooting crocs from the balcony.
You can add the flood of 2000 to your list along with March ’18 maybe. Possibly four 200 year ARI events in 20 years. They have now slightly corrected these to 1% AEP (eg 100 year). The reason for the statistical nonsense is the standard text, “Australian Rainfall and Run-off” assumes high intensity events will move over the catchment, but here, the “rain shadow” regularly becomes the opposite. Spent cyclones, rain depressions, and now a monsoonal trough, tend to get stuck. This one has moved a bit, but continues to rotate slowly and dump water on the city. The water in the swale at the rear of my property is currently (8am) sitting at the ’98 level for the 4th time in less than a week. So, is this one event or four? 🙂
It used to be my job to establish design wind speeds, and encourage people to go over the minimum floor level, or better still, build on stumps. Items like floating cars and drowned cattle can change flow paths. Stumps can be vulnerable if there are 6 tonne trees floating past. One customer constructed a second line of defence that collected about 20 tonnes of timber.
The problem is, you can’t fix stupid. I have had developers threatening me personally, and clients of mine, with legal action over breach of covenant for building on stumps. My standard response was “Go ahead make my day” or similar quote. No one has ever taken me on. Developer covenants are still in place that have up to six provisions that are a clear breach of s.246O of the Building Act 1975.
Nothing I have designed myself has gone under, and a couple of people who listened to my advice rang to say that the extra bit I recommended has kept them dry.
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I wonder if anyone ever compared the numbers:
a) overall flood damage cost to the area – infrastructure, people, industry, agriculture, etc,..
b) payments to claimants from all sources – insurers, governments, private donors…
and
c) cost of capital works for prevention of the above.
30
I don’t think, in this particular case, that any extra capital works could have helped. The dam is fit for purpose and in good repair.
30
A history of headlines in the Australian media:
1881 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
1892 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
1946 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
1953 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
1998 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
2019 – Townsville Flooding – Unprecedented!
131
All weather events are now ‘Unprecedented!’ Or the scam wont be reinforced into the sheeples minds.
80
Trust me, this event IS unprecedented, at least in my lifetime, possibly not in severity [without the dam it prolly would have been the worst EVA] but it most certainly is in duration. There are still 9,000 homes without power and have been that way for days and could take days more to reconnect. Others have been in evacuation shelters for 5 or more days with no certainty when they can return. Normally they are only needed for one or two nights. In the tropics floods are normally fast to rise and fast to fall again, with some exceptions, but the Ross is not one of them having a small catchment.
The ’46 flood was pretty severe, I don’t recall the ’53 flood althoughI was 11 and the ’98 one was flash, local flooding. The river never broke its banks.
41
The important words are “at least in my lifetime”! Unfortunately, I had a grandfather who was born in 1894 and he was capable of talking rationally about what he had experienced as a child. It may be once in a lifetime event for you but it is NOT unprecedented!
11
So we learn all over again
Firstly, that traditional Queenslanders on stilts make perfect sense in a land of droughts and flooding rains. Modern slab based housing will be flooded, eventually. They are probably uninsurable as well. A steel frame base Queenslander would be a good modern technique with lightweight panels, not brick. A metre of flood waters would not touch a Queenslander.
Then if you know there are periods of long drought, build dams to capture the water in flood times. It’s real insurance, the sort that provides water and protects your home. Insurance does neither.
Do not build in a flood plain. It’s not just the water, it’s the speed of the river which will sweep everything away including trees which crash into houses.
Or you can blame Climate Change. Why do our intelligentsia who are supposed to be repositories of collected wisdom reach for ridiculous explanations for the obvious and the predictable? The real puzzle of Townsville is why it is so dry, sandwiched between two of the highest rainfall areas on the planet. Surely a drover’s dog could see flash flooding was probable but not our academics.
Once in a hundred year events are not Climate Change. They happen every hundred years.
141
True , I dont get why houses are built on the ground on a flood plain. Maybe its the ‘wont happen to me in my lifetime’ syndrome.
110
One of the worst hit areas is also one of the newest but I doubt any home there had more than a few inches through it, but that can be expensive. One more masonry block in the depth of foundation would make a big difference.
WH&S makes building more than a meter or so high expensive and covenants on new estates prolly ban homes on stilts anyway. Besides, it is just sooo low class to be walking up steps into the house. AND most builders will only quote slab on ground.
90
I’ve posted this before but in 1981 I went with my parents to Windsor on the Hawkesbury river (settled over 200 years now), and it took my father 10 seconds max. to ask how bad the floods were. When I asked how he knew he pointed out that all the old houses were built on the hillsides.
I mentioned that there were 3 subdivisions being built on the flood plains just upstream of the town. The houses had barely been occupied when the floods started. Some were flooded 3 times in one year.
The only occupier who didn’t get flooded built his house on piles. Normally he parked his car underneath, but during floods on a nearby headland. He’s had his electricity arranged so it didn’t get flooded, so during floods he’d go back and forth to the headland in a tinny and sit on his balcony with a cold beer watching household items floating by.
Thinking ahead isn’t necessarily compulsory but it saves money and inconvenience. Unfortunately our politicians, public servants and the media all think it unnecessary, especially when it comes to climate.
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Graeme No 3, the flood marker at Windsor is on the stone wall outside the pub, at the top of the hill from the old Windsor Bridge. Perhaps that’s why they built Waragamba Dam.
10
On the contrary, politicians LOVE crisis. It gives them a myriad of reasons for increasing the Taxpool, the bureaucracy and the regulatory burden… Politicians Never let a crisis go to waste… Even if they have to create one.
00
Well with all that, some more media, mostly ‘other sources’ have now started to post that the poles are shifting…FAST. This isnt actually just discovered its been on the cards for a year or 2. The North pole is heading towards Canada at 55km/year! compared to 2000 when it was about 10km/year. Thats massive acceleration. Also the South pole is heading towards..Australia, welcome to the new land of polar lights!
Well that being said, this isnt good. If they worry about climate wait till there’s a reversal, there’ll be climate alright.
And where do they go? One idea is possibly one pole is at/under the Bermuda triangle. How long that lasts is unknown.
We dont know exactly what will happen during a reversal. Everything form disasters, fire form the sky to a blink. I would guess the magnetic disruption will have a big effect on power and electric systems and must bring in more high energy particles to the earth surface. But odds are it is going to happen, sometime soon. No guesses how long the ‘soon’ is.
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“Reversal occurrences are statistically random, with some periods lasting as little as 200 years. There have been 183 reversals over the last 83 million years. The latest, the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago, and may have happened very quickly, within a human lifetime.
A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. That reversal lasted only about 440 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. During this change the strength of the magnetic field weakened to 5% of its present strength. Brief disruptions that do not result in reversal are called geomagnetic excursions.”
Both occurred when our ancestors were roaming the planet. Homo erectus (possibly H. neanderthalensis and H. altaiensis (Denisovans)) were roaming the Earth then, along with a raft of other sub-species in Africa. None became extinct that we know of, although who knows what the result of mass hysteria being wipped up would be.
10
interesting that the field may weaken so substantially, which I am guessing would lead to extra impact from the sun. Not good for our tech reliant planet.
30
5 Feb: NYT: Climate Change Could Leave Thousands of Lakes Ice-Free
by NADJA POPOVICH
In a study published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists for the first time quantified the effects of rising temperatures on ice cover across 1.4 million lakes in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that, from Wisconsin to Japan, thousands of lakes that used to freeze reliably every winter already see some years without ice, and that “an extensive loss of lake ice will occur within the next generation.”…
With temperatures hitting record lows in the midwest last week, John Magnuson, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-author on the Nature study, warned that it’s important to understand that the loss of lake ice won’t happen all at once.
“In reality winters are very variable. It isn’t going to be like we have ice, ice, ice, ice and then bang! No ice,” he said. “It’ll be an increasing frequency of winters without ice. That will play out over the next decades.”
“Our grandkids are not going to have the same experiences we did,” Dr. O’Reilly added. “They’re just not going to have these winters every year.”…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/05/climate/melting-lake-ice-global-warming.html
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26min30sec: BBC Newshour: Tim Franks: next we’ll be hearing about the climate change crisis that hasn’t had a lot of attention up to this point. before that, Tasmania. Hywel Griffith (BBC Australia and New Zealand correspondent) reporting.
“global warming” could effect the tourism boom. Dr. Tom Remenyi of Uni of Tasmania argues Tassie’s cool climate could give Tasmania a natural advantage.
followed by what scientists who led the research call “the climate crisis you haven’t heard of” – how two thirds of Himalayan glaciers will melt by the end of the century if emissions are not reduced, etc. BBC: in other words, the time for real curbs on emissions is NOW. Scientist: I’m sorry to inform you, we only have 8 years left, then we are off the chart. ENDS 34min53sec:
AUDIO: BBC Newshour: Tim Franks:
Also in the programme: Our reporter tries to get answers from the mining company linked to Brazil’s dam disaster, and the climate catastrophe you may not have heard of.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172w25mhb5jcbz
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Back in the 1980s I was accepted at Griffith Uni into the Environmental Science degree course. That course was run/overseen by Ian Lowe.
I was aiming for a job in National Parks at the time, keen on the Australian environment, and actually being able to enjoy it. The national estate, to my mind, was there for all Australians to enjoy, and should be managed accordingly.
Personal pressures meant that I didn’t complete even the first year.
I’m now so very glad I didn’t!
I’d hate to think that I might have become one of the indoctrinated followers of his climate fashion.
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a must-read:
5 Feb: FinanciaPostCanada: Peter Foster: Climate activists cheer corporate ‘carbon disclosures’ — and regular investors get burned
PG&E has been the very model of climate concern. Fat lot of good it seems to have done them
The climate crusaders of the mainstream media have been atwitter with claims that PG&E represents the “first climate bankruptcy.”…
One of the most prominent promoters of the disclosure of emissions and climate programmes is a London-based NGO named CDP (previously the Carbon Disclosure Project). But one problem for CDP’s credibility — and the whole notion that confessing to contrived carbon crimes is, as disclosure advocates claim, “just good business” — is that the now bankruptcy-threatened PG&E has been the very model of climate concern. CDP had dubbed it “one of the leading companies in the world when it comes to openly sharing public information on greenhouse gas emissions, emissions reduction targets, and the implications of climate change for its business.” Fat lot of good it seems to have done them.
CDP’s latest rankings note that PG&E’s climate score for 2018 is “forthcoming” (due to “methodological changes,” according to a CDP spokesperson), but the company’s filing is available online…
***Perhaps they should have concentrated more on trimming dead trees near transmission lines…
One of the successes of the Climate Industry has been to conflate all natural disasters or extreme weather with climate change — which is now conventionally taken to mean “catastrophic man-made climate change.”…
If climate bankruptcies are taken to include those caused by climate activism or perverse climate policies, then there are many companies in Alberta made bankrupt by the Climate Industry’s campaign to close off their expansion. And what about those alternative energy companies that went under when their subsidies were withdrawn? If Tesla fails, will it become the world’s largest “climate change bankruptcy”?…
But who and what exactly is the CDP?
The Carbon Disclosure Project was reportedly founded in 2000 with money from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (CDP did not respond to questions about its founders, backers and past chairpersons), which is closely linked to forces that have been trying to close down the Alberta oilsands and which also supports initiatives such as the late Maurice Strong’s subversive Earth Charter.
Carbon Disclosure’s clever founding concept was to drum up professed climate concern among big investors, who were already being softened up by radical NGO campaigns. In some cases — such as those of state-run or state-influenced pension funds — the institutions required no softening up…READ ALL
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/peter-foster-climate-activists-cheer-corporate-carbon-disclosures-and-regular-investors-get-burned
being picked up by MSM:
5 Feb: AP: Belgian climate minister resigns after protest march scandal
By RAF CASERT
Belgian environment minister resigned Tuesday after claiming she had confirmation from state security services that massive climate demonstrations in recent weeks were staged as a plot against her.
Though regional environment minister Joke Schauvliege initially failed to step down after admitting she had no such information from intelligence officials, she resigned after talks with her party leadership.
“I said something that was not correct,” Schauvliege said, but insisted it didn’t amount to lying…
The opposition said it was outrageous to lie and abuse the name of the state security organization for personal purposes and also said she sought to discredit a just cause that is widely shared in the nation.
“This way, it is tough to continue on as climate minister,” she said at an emotional news conference.
Over the past two months, tens of thousands of protesters have demonstrated across Belgium for better climate protections and have often targeted Schauvliege’s policies, which they consider woefully insufficient…
At first she welcomed the marches, but over the weekend, she said “a lot of people in these marches don’t realize that they are part of a system which is a setup.” She added that “state security has told me about this.”
In her apology, she said she overreacted because of social media criticism and lack of sleep.
Anuna De Wever, the 17-year-old driving force behind the Thursday student protests that gathered up to 30,000 demonstrators, said she was dumbfounded when she heard it. “At first, I had to laugh really hard,” she told VRT network, denying she was a pawn in a plot against anyone.
A new march of schoolchildren and students is set for Thursday. Two weeks ago, 70,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Brussels for the biggest march up to now.
Schauvliege was the environment minister for northern Belgium’s Flanders, the biggest, most populous and richest area of Belgium.
A previous version of this story has been corrected to show that the first name of the 17-year-old protest organizer is Anuna, not Aruna.
https://www.apnews.com/beeb2c620147439bbe5f2b141048c3cd
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5 Feb: Daily Caller: Liberal Campaigner Calls ‘Green New Deal’ A Plan To ‘Redistribute Wealth And Power’ From Rich To Poor
by Michael Bastasch
A progressive activist who worked on New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign and helped draft an outline for a “Green New Deal” characterized the global warming plan as a “proposal to redistribute wealth.”
“America’s ruling class is freaking out about [Ocasio-Cortez’s] proposal to redistribute wealth and power from the people on top to the people on the bottom,” Waleed Shahid tweeted Tuesday, referring to a Fox News segment on the “Green New Deal.”…
Shahid, the communication director for Justice Democrats and former policy director for Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign, is among a handful of activists and staffers who wrote the initial draft (LINK) of the “Green New Deal.”
The plan “was written over a single December weekend by the staff of the freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three like-minded progressive groups,” The New Yorker reported (LINK) in January…READ ON
https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/05/ocasio-cortez-green-deal-redistribute-wealth/
5 Feb: Fox News: ‘Green New Deal’ details emerge, as Ocasio-Cortez preps big reveal of WWII-level mobilization
by Gregg Re; Adam Shaw contributed to this report
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday unveiled new details on the so-called “Green New Deal” she plans to introduce in a matter of days, as she worked behind-the-scenes to rally congressional support for the proposal that could cost as much as $7 trillion…
To raise awareness for the measure, Markey announced Monday he had invited Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement environmentalist group, to be his guest at President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night…
Several analysts, meanwhile, have cautioned that the liberal firebrand is in over her head, even though the as-yet vague and uncertain details about the Green New Deal render a precise calculation impossible at the moment. Physicist Christopher Clack told The Hill that the cost would easily be into the trillions…
Institute for Energy Research president Tom Pyle was more blunt: “One hundred percent renewable energy defies the laws of physics. It would be impossible to achieve.”
And Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute, said progressives were overcompensating. “I understand the value of aspirational goals,” Bledsoe said. “My personal view is, that undermines the credibility of the effort.”…
While there is no legislative text yet available for the Markey/Ocasio-Cortez proposal, a draft circulated by Ocasio-Cortez last week called for a committee to be formed to create a plan, and lays out a framework that includes eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and agriculture, while “dramatically” expanding energy sources to meet 100 percent of power demand through renewable sources.
To cover what would presumably be a gargantuan cost, it envisions financing by “the federal government, using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
As it stands, any such proposal would be almost certainly dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, and also possibly the House — where it is not clear if a majority of Democrats would back a plan.
Even if Congress managed to pass a version of the Green New Deal, the White House could veto the legislation, and a two-thirds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate would be needed to override the veto…
In 2006, a NASA scientist and leading global warming researcher declared that the world had only 10 years to avert a climate catastrophe (LINK)– a deadline that has come and gone.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/green-new-deal-details-emerge-as-ocasio-cortez-preps-big-reveal
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3 Feb: Financial Times: Pay for Green New Deal now or spend even more later
by Robert Hockett
(at bottom: The writer is a law and finance professor at Cornell Law School and advises Ms Ocasio-Cortez)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to halt climate change will be cheaper in the long run.
The new Democrats in the US Congress already have done something no American politician has managed for decades: to get people talking about massive — and massively transformative — public investment as a real prospect.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan for a Green New Deal to fight climate change envisions massive spending on carbon-free products, services and infrastructure. It would be larger than any other American government undertaking since Franklin D Roosevelt’s original New Deal and the US mobilisation for the second world war. This is true no matter which measure is used: real expenditure or expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product.
Ambition on such a scale always draws naysaying from the timid, the cynical and the economically uninformed, and this time has been no exception. Predictable expressions of scepticism have been accompanied by jibes of “how will you pay for it?”…
Green New Deal supporters recognise not only that we must act but also that going big here is actually to go more affordably too. That might seem counterintuitive but there are three reasons why this makes sense.
Firstly, there are economies of scale: like all productive activities, climate mitigation occasions both fixed costs and variable costs. Fixed costs tend to diminish proportionally as the scale of activity rises, reducing average cost per unit, at least until the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Where climate mitigation is concerned, the scale of the threat that we face is so monstrous that we are unlikely to run into that threshold for many years to come.
A bigger Green New Deal would also will be more affordable in the long run because of what is known as the snowball effect. The pace of climate change will accelerate as early harms damage the environment’s capacity to compensate for later ones. This leads to accelerating costs and negative feedback. As a consequence, it is clear that acting faster will yield greater impact than acting sluggishly. And acting faster here means spending more now rather than later…
When you are fighting for your very survival, you do not pinch pennies. That would be false economy. In this case it would also be suicide.
https://www.ft.com/content/046e7c30-23c8-11e9-b20d-5376ca5216eb
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a must-read”:
4 Feb: Daily Mail: Dominic Lawson: The High Priests of the Green lobby and a shaky claim to the moral high ground
Oh look, another member of the great and the good is in the soup. And, not for the first time, it’s one of those who preaches to us about our duty to ‘save the planet’…
A few years ago, Gummer’s Tory colleague Tim Yeo, as chairman of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, was caught out by Sunday Times reporters posing as representatives of a solar energy company pushing for new laws to help their business.
Yeo appeared to gobble at the chance to act as their paid advocate. After the Sunday Times published, Yeo sued.
But the judge in the case, Mr Justice Warby, said the story was ‘substantially true’, and that parts of Yeo’s evidence were, variously, ‘unreliable and untruthful’, like ‘a fish wriggling on a hook’ and ‘unworthy of belief’…READ ALL
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6664081/The-High-Priests-Green-lobby-shaky-claim-moral-high-ground.html
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still no coverage whatsoever showing up for CAGW-infested BBC, ABC, Guardian, Fairfax, NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc etc etc etc:
5 Feb: GWPF: from UK Times: Matt Ridley: Lord Deben Should Come Clean About His Ties To Business
The revelations cast doubt on every report the Committee on Climate Change has produced since 2012, when Lord Deben became chairman and made it vigorously partisan.
Imagine that a Conservative chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), tasked with giving impartial advice to the government, had a consultancy firm, but he said there were no conflicts of interest. Imagine that it then emerged that nine of that firm’s clients were oil companies that had paid it more than £600,000 during his tenure as chairman of the committee.
Suppose the committee had recommended policies that were good for oil companies; and the chairman had been warned that a “clearly unethical” conflict of interest with one client would cause “embarrassment” if made public. Imagine that nevertheless the firm had since earned a further £37,000 from this client.
The scandal would be a top story, not least at the BBC, and there would be hollow laughter if the chairman claimed that his firm’s work involved matters unrelated to the decisions of the committee and that “I do not think anybody could properly say . . . that I have any interests that would pervert my views”.
It now emerges that Lord Deben, who actually is chairman of the CCC, and who tweets disapprovingly about other people’s vested interests, is in precisely this position, but with green energy clients rather than oil firms…
But the news has been wholly ignored by the Beeb and by most green pressure groups, normally so quick to accuse capitalists of greed. This double standard is known as noble cause corruption. So long as the ends are “good”, nobody wants to know if the means are not…
Climate change policies provide a huge financial opportunity for investment funds and energy companies, because governments are skewing markets and loading consumers with the costs of subsidies. Inevitably, green businesses are keen to get close to decision makers. It is critical that the latter declare any clients. I declare my vested interest (in both coal and wood) whenever relevant. So should others in far more influential positions.
https://www.thegwpf.com/matt-ridley-lord-deben-should-come-clean-about-his-ties-to-business/
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Beeb/Harrabin, as usual, prefer to spruik for RE:
5 Feb: BBC: Climate change: UK CO2 emissions fall again
By Roger Harrabin
PIC: Chimneys, black smoke
The mass closure of coal-fired power stations has helped reduce UK greenhouse gases whilst global emissions (GHG) are rising.
The finalised official statistics show Britain’s GHG in 2017 were 2.7%lower than in 2016 – and 42.1%lower than in 1990…
But critics point out that huge challenges remain to reduce emissions.
These sources include transport, farming, homes and parts of industry…
The CCC says the most difficult areas will be transport, agriculture and parts of industry. And critics say many recent policies are driving in the wrong direction…
On aviation, planes are getting more efficient – but that’s being overtaken by the growth in the amount people fly – and the government is expanding capacity at airports.
On energy generation, there’s dismay amongst environmentalists at the government’s decision to virtually ban all new onshore wind farms which supply the UK’s cheapest clean energy…
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said: “It’s shocking that emissions from agriculture and waste actually increased in 2017 and transport’s contribution has inched down by just 2% since 1990…
A recent analysis showed that many young people in cities are abandoning cars of their own accord.
Cars are still essential in rural areas – where bus services are most expensive to subsidise.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47121399
elsewhere it’s 39%:
4 Feb: Carbon Brief: Analysis: Why the UK’s CO2 emissions have fallen 38% since 1990
by Zeke Hausfather
The UK’s CO2 emissions peaked in the year 1973 and have declined by around 38% since 1990, faster than any other major developed country.
Here, Carbon Brief presents detailed analysis of the reasons behind the decline in UK CO2 since 1990. The most significant factors include a cleaner electricity mix ***based on gas and renewables instead of coal, as well as ***falling demand for energy across homes, businesses and industry…
Lower non-electric energy use in the industrial and residential sectors has been another major factor (yellow wedge), responsible for 31% of the emission reduction in 2017. Savings in industry was the largest part of this…READ ON
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissions-have-fallen-38-since-1990
4 Feb: iNewsUK: How UK carbon emissions tumbled
by Tom Bawden
The amount of carbon dioxide the UK pumps into the atmosphere through its power generators, car exhausts, wood burners and industry has dived by 38 per cent since 1990.
To put the decline into perspective, the volume of CO2 we produce has tumbled from an astonishing 600 million tonnes in 1990 to a much smaller, if still astonishing, 367 million tonnes a year now…
***On one particularly windy day last March, turbines generated 37 per cent of the country’s entire electricity supply…
Less heavy manufacturing
***A reduction in heavy manufacturing and stricter rules on vehicle emissions have also played a role…
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/how-uk-carbon-emissions-tumbled/
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oops – should be:
elsewhere it’s 38%:
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4 Feb: AmericanThinker: Freezing weather and the left’s charlatans
By Alex Alexiev
More to the point, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker tells us in a perceptive piece (LINK), the deep freeze affecting his home state of Minnesota has much to tell us about the futility of green energy as the putative panacea of global warming doom. It turns out that as Minnesotans were freezing, renewable energy was nowhere to be found. The wind wasn’t blowing, and in the entire MISO area (15 states in the Midwest and the South), it generated a measly 4% of the energy, operating at a miserable 24% of installed capacity. That prompted Hinderaker to ask pointedly: “Why do we need wind farms?” Why, indeed? To answer this question, it is worth delving into some of the other figures, which Hinderaker provides…READ ON
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/freezing_weather_and_leftist_charlatans.html
lengthy…read all:
1 Feb: HoffmannCentre/ChathamHouse: What Electric Business?
Is the electric business doomed? That may seem a foolish question when every analysis indicates that global electricity use will continue to increase rapidly in the coming decades. But that depends on what you mean by ‘electric business’. Electricity was not originally a business. It might, once again, no longer be.
by Walt Patterson, Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources
The electric business worldwide is still defined by the electricity meter more than a century after its invention in 1885. The focus of the electric business today is selling and buying metered and measured kilowatt-hours in an electricity market. But no one actually wants kilowatt-hours…
In southeastern Australia and the southwestern US, for example, the monopoly electricity companies, expecting increased electricity demand, invested heavily in expanded transmission networks. But customers instead installed rooftop solar photovoltaic generation and reduced demand from the network. The companies, to recoup their network investments, responded by increasing their electricity rates. That in turn prompted customers to add battery storage and disconnect completely from the network, producing what analysts called a ‘death spiral’ for the companies…
Attempts to create an electricity market in commodity kilowatt-hours are complicated by a simple physical fact: electricity is not a commodity…
When you generate electricity by using fire and consuming fuel, charging the user for using up a commodity makes some sense. However, when you generate electricity with wind or solar PV you do not consume anything – nothing at least that belongs to any owner, nothing you must pay for…READ ALL
https://hoffmanncentre.chathamhouse.org/article/what-electric-business/
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Go Jo!
Keep beltin’ ’em with the undeniable historical record.
Harder please.
30
Thank you Jo, in 1965 I took part in a Tactical Military Exercise in the Army training area near Townsville, where on day one, the rain began, and 3 full weeks later, the rain stopped, which just happened to be the last day of the tactical exercise. We were informed at the time that Tully was known as the wettest place in Australia, with which I fully agree. The “science” being referred to these days is Political Science, not empirical science.
50
Has anyone ever thought that Townsville might have been built in the wrong place, and should be moved?
10
Sydney is in the wrong place – The Blue Mountains cramp its growth.
Have you ever been here?
10
Flood plains exist because that’s where extreme rain events gravitate towards ie floods. Why would you reside there and not expect there to be floods on occasions! Nothing extraordinary and not unexpected. As for extreme weather equatable with climate change and GHE – that’s just a stupid notion. Coal good, greens bad.
22
Townsville residents told Guardian Australia on Tuesday they believed more water should have been released progressively from the dam, rather than allowed to build over a week of heavy rainfall.
“How about the fact they didn’t do it gradually over the whole time like they should have, and they’re celebrating when they should have been in panic mode,” Idalia resident Leah Kim said. “We didn’t get flooded by the rain alone, we got flooded when those waters came down.”
This also was a problem in the Brisbane floods.
It seems lessons were not learnt
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Bill Scott the poet had something to say about the rain and it’s beenputto music
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ztV_SvOA20
10
Good stuff… Haven’t heard that song for so long. Macca’s “Australia all over” radio show back in the 80’s was probably the last time….
20
Just before Christmas 2001 a downpour in Sarina Beach was heavy enough to fill two 40,000 litre water tanks in under 30 minutes.. I was digging a trench to stop my sisters house from flooding and it felt like I was being floged with a stick.
10
Assuming the house or shed had a roof area of 100 square metres connected to the tanks. 1mm of rain is 100 litres, 10mm of rain gives 1,000 litres. 80,000 litres would take 80mm of rain in 30 minutes. No problem at all in the tropics. I lived near Sarina Beach from 2003 to 2012. We had more than a couple of downpours of the order of 100-125mm in half an hour.
That produces flash floods. Riverine floods require consistent heavy rain over a large area for a decent length of time- as in Townsville.
20
The latest engineers edition of Australian Rainfall and runoff c2018 . Factors in more intense storm cells. It also factors in less riverine flow volumes compared to the previous edition c1990s. This manual is widely used by water planners and engineers across Australia.
00
Sigh….Like most towns of coastal Queensland, Townsville is built along the banks of a river on a flood plain.
It isn’t rocket science to understand why it floods during the MONSOON SEASON!!!…. and looking at the old high set Queenslander style houses in the Older parts of Townsville, that are built on stilts, it should be a friggin’ hint.
Ah, but no. It’s climate change wot dun it. FMD.
32
Watching the midday news on Monday on ABC2, Ms Palaszczuk was explaining what the govt could do to help Townsville inhabitants with the flooding but they should realise (that she) said “I have no control over the weather”! Does any one have the control over the weather and the means to change it? Cloud seeding was tried last century and stopped because of lack of viable success/cost. If the answer is NO then, as we know, climate is average of the weather in a particular region over a period of time, and so we cannot control/alter the climate as it is a function of weather (not controllable). Climate will vary with the weather and not the CO2 concentration which changes minimally over the year and cannot explain the huge variations in temperature on a particular day between cities/measuring stations! Its time the ‘profits’ stopped misleading the populace! Maybe they should pay more attention to the sun and radiation/heat it bestows upon this planet earth to make life viable.
30
I wondered how long Townsville had been around to actually record weather events and good old internet
Lo and behold they had a nasty and fatal TC in 1896-
bearing in mind the population was only 13000 in 1891 and I wondered how much money that 600,000 British pounds represented in todays BP. Well the project cost of that 600k in 2017 GBP is around 66million or 118.5 MILLION Aussie dollars and they would have had to paddle and row around and hitch up the horse and cart to sort it all out with largely hand tools. A lot lot more than that in labour value to be sure.
10
Thanks for digging up those newspaper cuttings. Townsville Council have no excuses.
My first comment at seeing the TV footage was that all the homes seem to be on concrete slabs. The “Queenslander” up on piers is the obvious solution even if it costs a few thousand dollars more per house.
My house is at 2700ft in the Blue Mtns (absorbent sandstone) but I built it with 3ft ground clearance as we see phenomenal mountain rain storms and often the water cannot get away fast enough so we see 6 inches of ponding beneath the house despite a specific footing drain having been put in place.
In concrete slab construction I quickly do a rough levelling of the site with a skid-steer loader (e.g.Bobcat) and fill it up with cheap gravel made from crushed recycled concrete. The detailed levelling is then done with sand and the raft slab ends up at least 3″ higher than normal. It’s surprisingly inexpensive and offers significant flood protection tho’ my primary objective is to be able to have a clean 4″ visible concrete footing edge all round the house for termite inspection.
11
Jo, looking at those 2 sites, I get 10 day totals up to and including Feb 6th of a tad over 1250mm (50 inches)and 1325mm (53 inches).
00
Good point. I’ll update the stats. Now the continuous wet spell across both Jan and Feb at Townsville Aero is nearly 1.5m of rainfall. That is a lot of water! That may even be a “two month” record, but bear in mind, there were about 8 single months between 1870 and 1950 which recorded over 700mm each.
In Feb 1877 Townsville got 870mm of rain.
So far it’s not a three month record (though it may yet get there). In the summer of 1890 Townsville got 1.75m of rain over three months. In 1953 it got 1.65m. Is that climate change or just noise. We know what a scientist would say…
A modern record “proves” climate-change no more than an old record disproves it.
Annual rainfall for 1870-1950 is practically the same as annual rainfall from 1941 – now. (1167mm versus 1127mm)
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Natural variability. In 2013, the river running through our farm matched flood heights from 1942 and 1971 (the highest in our records). We noted that if the system had moved slower or stalled, it would have been higher again. The land surrounding looks like it could have been many times. One day we’ll get around to scouring ancestors’ diaries for figures pre-1906.
The coastal city of Gladstone, 50km away, had 3 month totals exceeding 1400mm in 1892/93, 1898, and 1970/71. 2013 was still 280mm short of those.
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We’re fortunate to have the rainfall records for Port Macquarie in 1848. 1387 mm fell in one month (Jan). Going by the very thin reportage available, it was a concentrated fall, leading to some severe maritime problems. Of course, nothing else in the records available for Port comes even close to 1387 mm, though 1895 tried. Nor can we know much about rain and temps elsewhere in 1848. The only thing certain is what would be said by Our Green Betters if so much rain fell over a few days now, nowhere near the tropics. Yes, there at least we can have some certainty.
We do know that the worst February flooding for Port Macquarie was over a few days in 1929, during its wettest February. And what was happening out west? Bourke, in the wake of one its worst heatwaves, was desolate, with no rain at all in February after half a mm in January. Yes, Bourke driest year was 1929, while out here on the midcoast we were splashing in well above average precip.
Where I live, north of Port, our wettest autumn was in 1963, our wettest winter was in 1950, our wettest summer 1889-90, our wettest spring 1914. In all these cases, there were opposite conditions elsewhere, most famously in 1950 when the whole continent of Australia was divided between big dry and big wet.
See how easy it is? You wait for extreme weather, keep your claims as flexible but as dramatic as possible, and point to contrasts always available on a vast continent. The only thing you need then is a meaningless term with an emotional charge achieved through constant repetition. “Climate change” is the perfect manipulator’s term, meaning nothing and everything.
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Great post Joanne. The weather bureau had predicting cyclones and flooding for North Queensland in 2011 but NOTHING spectacular for the south East. What did we get? A massive flood in Brisbane and virtually nothing in the North if I remember rightly!
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Ross River dam was built in 1971 to provide Flood Protection
– The level of rain required to flood in 1881, 1892, 1946 and 1953, would not impact on townsville today, and would not cause a flood (due to the dam)
– The Dam was upgraded in 2007 with aditional spillway construction increasing Dam flood capacity by approx. 9%
The article takes no account of the 5.7Gl capacity of the Dam – which did not exist during those floods.
Today we have floods of this magnitude, even though there is 5.7Gl of flood storage – the difference is indeed climate change.
(Now if only we could move all that excess water over into the Murray-Darling basin…. where Climate Change has led to drough, in conjunction with unhelpful overutilisation of water in agriculture.)
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David, at the time I wrote the post the rainfall that caused terrible flooding was of a similar order to what has happened before and even if it ended up being the worst recorded that doesn’t tell us anything about cause and effect.
A scientist can’t anything about this region to “prove” anything about climate change. It’s a multivarible system. Floods are not just caused by rain and dams, there’s streamflow, groundcover, runoff, concreting, construction in floodplains, architecture, etc etc etc.
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Ross River dam was built in 1971 to provide Flood Protection
– The level of rain required to flood in 1881, 1892, 1946 and 1953, would not impact on townsville today, and would not cause a flood (due to the dam)
– The Dam was upgraded in 2007 with aditional spillway construction increasing Dam flood capacity by approx. 9%
The article takes no account of the 5.7Gl capacity of the Dam – which did not exist during those floods.
Today we have floods of this magnitude, even though there is 5.7Gl of flood storage – the difference is indeed climate change.
(Now if only we could move all that excess water over into the Murray-Darling basin…. where Climate Change has led to drough, in conjunction with unhelpful overutilisation of water in agriculture.)
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Wasn’t the dam already nearly full before the rain? Hence the debate over whether water should have been released earlier. How much rainfall is 5.7 Gl of storage equivalent to, and is tht total capacity or flood reserve?
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DL,… In terms of the total inflow, 5.7GL is nothing.
Seems you don’t even know the capacity of the dam you are yapping about. so funny. 🙂
Anything else you say is meaningless
The difference is that you haven’t got a clue.
“Climate Change” has not lead to anything.
That is a brain-washed fabrication, unsupported by any rational science.
The rainfall event and drought are well within natural variability.
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Hi Jo,
The flooding itself was of a similar order of magnitude to those floods prior to the building of the Ross River Dam.
However you are right about the multi-variable nature of such disasters – the disaster is bound to occur whenever the total in-flows into the Townsville area are sufficiently above the out-flows to cause the water to pool and flood. (yes i know obvious…)
The difference between pre and post dam periods – is that there is a 5Gl+ Bucket above townsville in which to catch the massive rain inflows, which have always in the past been of a magnitude to be relatively easily contained within a 5Gl capacity… the water then gets released gradually, during the subsequent normal period.
Climate Change involves the increase in both number (frequency) and magnitude of extreme weather events….
This February (2019) townsville has received 999.2mm of rainfall in 9 days
The Wettest EVER february recorded for townsville was 1990 with 960.8mm (over the entire month)
Put simply – there is no comparison in townsvilles history for the rainfall experienced this year. – Even the wettest Feb on record, does not come close to the rainfall received in less than 2 weeks.
It would require access to more precise day by day data to further this analysis.
But this very much fits into the precise type of situation that is expected and foretold by Climate Change modelling.
The events prior to 1970 bear no comparison to this – although the overall trend in terms of monthly rainfall has been a decrease (yep – look up the long term statistics!) – the trend has also been to an increasing number and severity of extreme weather events.
So when a major monsoon rainstorm hits – it is a much much larger rainfall event than previously.
The trends are clear, the predictions were made some years back, and the outcomes are currently tracking to the predictions – it supports Climate Change. (without even considering the heat wave we just experienced right around the country)
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Plenty of similar rainfall events in the region though.
This one just happened to hit Townsville.
Totally within natural variability.
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A few weeks before the floods in Queensland, when the Weather Bureau was not predicting the Townsville floods, the news was about the fish dying in dried up rivers in NSW, rivers that have never dried up before. In the next few months, the flood waters will probably find their way to NSW and the rivers will flow again. As the headline says, it would be climate change if Townsville didn’t flood, as it is where the dry rivers are in NSW, before Townsville flooded.
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1881, 1892, 1946, 1953 major floods in townsville
1882, 1893, 1947, 1954 major floods in SEQ
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Robber,
as designed originally the primary purpose of the dam was flood mitigation…. seems to have been successful since 1971 – reduced number of floods….
How the dam has been used since then is a different question … but the dam levels are in the chart here:
https://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/water-waste-and-environment/water-supply-and-dams/dam-levels
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