Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Fifteen years after former Australian Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery claimed that rain would not fill our dams, the Guardian asks whether the ongoing severe flooding in New South Wales is due to climate change.
One year after bush fires, is NSW flooding even more with climate change?
Experts say it is unusual to see so many places with so much rainfall in such a wide area. However, identifying the cause is complicated
Life-threatening floods have washed away homes and businesses with a flood of rain that inundates hundreds of kilometers of the New South Wales coastline.
The rains fell on already soaked soil and triggered dozens of flood warnings. Residents in parts of Sydney’s north and west also feared for their homes and their lives.
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So what about climate change?
Whenever Australia faces extreme weather events, the inevitable question arises: was this caused by climate change?
Some climatologists will argue that all weather events are influenced by human activity because we have rapidly changed the composition of the atmosphere.
As a result of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the amount of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by around 50% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
And While the amount of rainfall over the past few days has not yet been confirmed to be record-breaking, that does not mean that global warming has had no impact at all.
Professor Steve Sherwood of the University of New South Wales’ Climate Change Research Center says so Basic physics shows that a warmer atmosphere can absorb more moisture – approx. 7% for each degree of warming.
“So we know we’re getting about 5-10% of the rain now [in the current downpours] is from global warming and the rest would have happened anyway.
“It’s not a game changer, but it makes matters worse and that will get worse as emissions continue to rise. “
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/22/is-nsw-flooding-a-year-after-bushfires-yet-more-evidence-of-climate-change
Oddly enough, the Guardian overlooked former Climate Change Commissioner Tim Flannery’s explanation of the link to climate predictions. Flannery is still an integral part of the Guardian editorials. From the original interview transcript by ABC Tim Flannery;
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SALLY SARA: What does it mean for Australian farmers when predictions of climate change are correct and little is done to stop it? What does that mean for a farmer?
PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: We are already seeing the first effects and they include a decrease in the winter rain zone in South Australia, which is clearly an effect of climate change, but also a decrease in runoff. Even though We say that the precipitation decreases by 20 percent In some areas of Australia this means a 60 percent decrease in runoff into dams and rivers. This is because the soil is warmer due to global warming and the plants are exposed to more stress and therefore use more moisture. So Even the rain that falls isn’t really going to fill our dams and river systems, and that’s a real concern for the people of the bush. If this trend continues, I believe we will have serious problems, especially with irrigation.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/local/archives/landline/content/2006/s1844398.htm
I don’t remember many objections from the scientific community when Flannery made his absurd predictions. Despite this embarrassment, Tim Flannery, now head of the nongovernmental climate council, can still draw an impressive audience of mostly younger people with his apocalyptic rhetoric.
Below is one of my favorite climate videos – In Search of the Coming Ice Age. I remember watching it on Australian television as a kid. All adults worried and talked about falling global temperatures the day after the documentary was broadcast. Everyone believed the documentary, because the moderator was actor Leonard Nimoy, who was Dr. Spock played in the original Star Trek series. The Ice Age documentary featured an impressive array of scholars including Chester Langway, James Hayes, Gifford Miller (who described how the descent into the next Ice Age began 3,000 years ago) and Stephen Schneider, who discussed the use of nuclear energy to melt the Ice Age speculated ice caps to stop the great frost.
Climate researcher Stephen Schneider later returned and began promoting alarmism against global warming.
Has anyone settled in science? JoNova points out that similar severe flooding occurred in New South Wales in 1857. The floods of 1857 were clearly natural, while the current floods are due to our sinful carbon emissions.
h / t William – As if the flooding wasn’t enough, NSW farmers report mouse plague (link to spectacular video) affects large areas of NSW. Perhaps they shouldn’t have tried so hard to exterminate feral cats.
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