Thursday
Jan132011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Australian flood news
Jan 13, 2011 Climate: WG2 Some excellent coverage of the climate change angle to the Queensland floods from Andrew Bolt, including some shameful attempts to exploit the situation by arch-warmist David Karoly. There is a strongly worded rebuttal from another academic, Prof Stewart Franks.
Is it enough for you that your pronouncements sound correct, irrespective of science? Have you learnt nothing?
You are arguably the best example of the corruption of the IPCC process, and the bullshit that academia has sunk to.
Anthony Watts meanwhile points us to evidence that the flood risk was ignored to enable building development to continue.
Reader Comments (14)
And yet, shamelesly, Kevin Trenberth and a host of other " climate scientists " have linked the Australian floods to Climate Change.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_climate_australia_floods
There seem to be no limit to the lows to which the Climate Scientist community can stoop to.
People like Karoly have no shame, or indeed feelings for human suffering. They are prepared to spread misery and death in the name of the environMENTAL cause.
Thank goodness there are people like Prof Franks prepared to speak up. The media is complicit in allowing Karoly to propagandise and to prevent Franks from speaking the truth to the public.
Hungarian State Radio this morning a big piece on the floods.
The main question to the Hungarian Lady on the telephone in Australia? "This is linked to climate change isn't?".
Answer: "Well you cannot say it is linked to Climate Change..." then she went on to explain weather and floods.
I do think think they expected that answer to a totally loaded question.
Too early... "I do think think"... should be "I do not think..."
As a physicist, over the years I have attended many classes in statistics for scientists. One of the major examples that always cropped up was flood risk; the hundred year flood, the thousand year flood, that kind of thing. It was always stated that there would at some time in the future be a flood higher than the previous recorded highest. The question based on statistics was, how much money was it worthwhile spending to prevent or minimise the damage of a future flood? As I recall, the height of the Thames barrier was based on this sort of cost/risk analysis.
If you ignore scientists, engineers and statisticians, you get what Brisbane has been getting. With today's technically-challenged green politicians/bureaucrats we get unnecesary flood damage, wind farms, solar farms etc etc.
I have always taken those statistics lessons to heart and have always bought houses that cannot conceivably be subject to flooding (he said, watching the river at the bottom of the garden slowly rising). I am always amazed at people who buy houses in flood plains. They are not called flood plains for nothing.
The trouble is, these warmist 'scientists' (I use the parentheses deliberately) seem to think that the planet is only thirty years old - so OBVIOUSLY these floods are caused by global warming.
Except, of course, for 1974..
and 1961..
and 1924..
and 1893..
and 1890..
and 1844..
and 1841..
Karoly is indeed an extreme specimen, and hence the state broadcaster ABC (which makes the BBC look like Fox News by comparison) regularly brings him on to answer puffball questions. The transcripts of these make interesting reading.
He says things which are flat-out wrong, and which he probably knows are wrong.
He is another of the breed which will say and do anything to achieve the result they want, under the absurd premise of "saving the planet."
Take a look at the Queensland Flood History here: http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/index.shtml
The amount of flooding in that area over the last couple of centuries boggles the mind. Here's one sample:
1857
19th and 20th May: Great floods at Ipswich and Brisbane; river at Ipswich rose 45 feet, and at Brisbane 12 feet.
May: A correspondent of the Brisbane Courier furnished the following information on 29th June, 1907, regarding the flood in the Brisbane River during May, 1857:-
The flood of 1857 was the result of eight weeks' continuous but not heavy, rain. There had been a strong fresh in the river for several weeks, and during a portion of this time time all vehicular traffic between North and South Brisbane was suspended, as the horse-punt at Russell-street was unable to cross on account of the strong current. At Ipswich the river rose 45 feet, and waterside stores were submerged to the roof; in the Brisbane reaches, however, the flood waters did not rise more than 7 feet above ordinary springs. Rowing boats were plying in Margaret, Mary, and Charlotte streets, but except near Edward and George streets there were few houses in the streets named. There were only a couple of houses in Albert-street between Charlotte and Alice streets, and the whole of the low-lying ground from Elizabeth Street to the river was a muddy lake. At South Brisbane one could stand on a hill at Cordelia-street near Boundary-street and see an unbroken sheet of water stretching from Melbourne-street to Tribune-street. Stanley-street was submerged from Walmsley-street to within 100 yards of the present dry dock. A good deal of the land at Hill-end was submerged, as was also the land on the opposite side of the river, now known as St. Lucia, and which was then a dense vine scrub. Most of the scrub lands at Oxley were also under water, as was Montague-road from Stanley-street to the present West-end Reserve."
Extract from Brisbane Courier, 13th June, 1857:
"We have been informed that the head station of Mr. F. North and the public house belonging to Mr. J. Smith at Wivenhoe, on the Upper Brisbane, were completely inundated during the recent flood, and people were compelled to take refuge in tents. The people at Balfour station were also washed out."
Rick Bradford,
those comments on the North West Passage by Karoly reminded me of a conversation with a Guardian-reading brother of mine a while ago, where he was coming out with the same line to prove the Arctic was melting.
So I asked him when he'd first heard the term "North West Passage"? He said that he'd no idea, is was probably when he was a boy some 40+ years ago, just part of what everyone knows.
So I then asked him why the term "North West Passage" was well known so long ago, if it didn't exist until recently?
And that at last made him think, so he got out his iPhone, got onto Wikipedia, and discovered that it was first navigated around 100 yeas ago. He'd just assumed that since some Guardian article said it was there due to global warming, it must be true.
A theory which predicts everything, but only in retrospect, predicts nothing. That it also deliberately ignores history says much.
The important question is, when will people in Oz, the UK, the USA, wake up to these charlatans and vote in people with some sense?
Phillip,
The first question my father in law asked when we told him we were buying our current house was "how high is it above river level", which sent me off to inspect the detailed OS maps! At 70m and on a hill I feel reasonable safe, but I do feel for the farmer in Cumbria who was up at over 200m and was flooded by an overflowing beck last year. The lie of the land is as important as its height.
The stories of suffering coming out from Queensland are harrowing, and I really hope that the politicos out there start to engage their brains and ask awkward questions. As with our own energy issues, it's time to realise that real people suffer when things go wrong, and airy-fairy 'greenness' will not keep people safe and warm in the future.
"He is another of the breed which will say and do anything to achieve the result they want, under the absurd premise of "saving the planet."
Jan 13, 2011 at 8:28 AM | Unregistered CommenterRick Bradford
Another Bob Ward then!
Maybe we ought to institute a Goodwin Law for meterology. This could be in the form of a contest to see who is the first to link any significant weather event to AGW / Climate Change / Disorder. One could then run a league table.
Could we please have comments related to the topics please, and not people trolling for the fun of it. This is serious, and then there idiots who just start to slag each other off.