Are These Australian Floods Really Just a Warmist’s “Event”?

By Andrew Bolt

Warmists are now claiming they predicted these floods, with The Age – that Bible of the Left – running two we-told-you-so pieces today.

One is from Ian Lowe, head of the Australian Conservation Foundation:

The Queensland floods are another reminder of what climate science has been telling us for 25 years, like the recent long-running drought, the 2009 heatwaves and the dreadful Victorian bushfires. As well as a general warming, increasing sea levels and altered rainfall patterns, climate modellers confidently predicted more frequent extreme events: floods, droughts, heatwaves and severe bushfires.

The other is from young enthusiast Ellen Sandell, head of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition:

Scientists such as Professor Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at Britain’s Met Office, and Dr Kevin Trenberth from the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research have pointed to the evidence showing a warmer world is a wetter world, due to increased water vapour and energy in the atmosphere leading to more frequent and intense storms.

In The Age this week, Professor David Karoly from Melbourne University’s school of earth sciences was quoted as saying that the wild weather extremes were in keeping with scientists’ forecasts of more flooding and more droughts as a result of high temperatures and more evaporation.

But this self-justification is curious.

First, warmists have insisted for years that the drought – which affected large parts of now-flooded Queensland – was in fact evidence of global warming, and we should expect fewer dam-flling rains:

Example one: Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery in 2007:

Over the past 50 years southern Australia has lost about 20 per cent of its rainfall, and one cause is almost certainly global warming.

Example 2: Flannery again, in 2007:

We’re already seeing the initial impacts and they include a decline in the winter rainfall zone across southern Australia, which is clearly an impact of climate change, but also a decrease in run-off. Although we’re getting say a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas of Australia, that’s translating to a 60 per cent decrease in the run-off into the dams and rivers. That’s because the soil is warmer because of global warming and the plants are under more stress and therefore using more moisture. So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush.

Example three, the CSIRO’s global warming models in 2007:

5.2.1 Median precipitation change by 2030

Best estimates of annual precipitation change represent little change in the far north and decreases of 2% to 5% elsewhere. Decreases of around 5% prevail in winter and spring, particularly in the south-west where they reach 10%. In summer and autumn decreases are smaller and there are slight increases in the east…

By 2050, under the B1 scenario, the range of annual precipitation change is -15% to +7.5% in central, eastern and northern areas, with a best estimate of little change in the far north grading southwards to a decrease of 5%.

The range of change in southern areas is from a 15% decrease to little change, with best estimate of around a 5% decrease. Under the A1FI scenario changes in precipitation are larger. The range of annual precipitation change is -20% to +10% in central, eastern and northern areas, with a best estimate of little change in the far north grading to around a 7.5% decrease elsewhere.

Example four: Queensland Premier Peter Beattie in 2007:

Given the current uncertainty about the likely impact of climate change on rainfall patterns in (South Eastern Queensland) over coming years, it is only prudent to assume at this stage that lower than usual rainfalls could eventuate.

Example five: warmist scientist David Karoly:

This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950…. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.

Example six: Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in September 2008:

There is a great deal of scientific advice about the impact of climate change on rainfall, particularly in southern Australia.

I’ll just give you a few examples. We know the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said by 2050 that Australia should expect around about a 25 per cent reduction in rainfall in the southern part of the Australia.

We also know that in the two years before our election, what we saw were the lowest inflows into the River Murray in history, 43 per cent lower than the previous lows… So there is a very, very sound body of evidence that indicates that climate change is and will have an impact on rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin and in southern Australia.

As it turns out, almost every big dam in Queensland is now full to overflowing. The drought is gone. Floods have drowned parts of the state for weeks. So how can the warmists still claim to have been vindicated in their predictions and in their theory?

By “events”, dear boy.

Yes, say the warmists, we did say global warming will dry up the rains, but it will also cause more extreme weather events that will give us floods in between the longer dries:

Professor Karoly stressed individual events could not be attributed to climate change. However, he said the wild extremes being experienced on the continent were in keeping with scientists’ forecasts of more flooding associated with increased heavy rain events and more droughts as a result of high temperatures and more evaporation.

The question then is, are these floods in Queensland caused by a mere extreme weather “event” – most usually described in warmist literature as a storm, heatwave, sudden flood or hurricane. Yes, that definition is also often mischievously stretched to include longer-term droughts, but Isn’t an “event” in fact something that is out of the ordinary, temporary, short term?

The problem for the warmists is that these floods are severe because the rains have fallen for so very long, saturating the soil and filling the dams, meaning that the rain from any fresh cloudburst just feeds straight into the flood waters. The amazing downpour that triggered the deadly Toowoomba floods may well be described as an “event”, but is that really the way to describe the heavy, almost ceaseless rains that have fallen on the rest of Queensland for many weeks, inundating so much of it?

Indeed, the heavy rains that ended the drought in eastern Australia aren’t just a fleeting “event” but a phenomenon of many months – and nor are they unprecedented:

 

Eastern Australia Rainfall Chart

(Incidentally, does that rainfall record indicated above reveal any recent trend that seems to you as evidence of “climate change”?)

When warmists start describing these rains which they didn’t predict as the “extreme events” which they actually did, we see how a trick of language or definitions makes their theory unfalsifiable. “Extreme events” becomes the label that’s stuck on anything that doesn’t fit with what was predicted, to make it the exception that was predicted. And so no matter what happens, the warmist is always right.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog

Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and is a regular commentator on Channel 9′s Today show and ABC TV’s Insiders. He will be heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of new radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.

Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Australian Flood Crisis, Brisbane Floods, Climate Change Religion, Climate Change Scaremongering, Queensland Floods

Posted in: Australia, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Leftists (In the USA aka as Liberals-Progressives)