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Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

I was struck by a comparison of this week's flooding, South Australia's power failure, and the talk not even a year ago (15 Dec 2015) on "their" ABC: [update: link added]

Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?

Yet here we are today with much of south east Australia in flood. It's a great pity they listened to climate "scientists", when the facts have been known almost from the beginning. Or, at least, since 1911 (from Dorothea Mackellar's My Country):

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

But regardless, on the ABC drones:

Climate change: droughts more severe and frequent

Hmmm.. I wonder. Here's what the Bureau of Meteorology has to say about it:

In other words, their ABC wrote a piece on climate change without going to the nearest source and asking the obvious question, an exercise that took me about five minutes.

Typical. But the thing that irritated me about this was the fact that I could find no quote from an actual climate "scientist" in the piece. Now the ABC website does not allow comments, so there was no obvious place to look for feedback from actual professional climatologists, but as far as I can find, no expert ever contradicted this article. But then they didn't contradict Tim Flannery when he said much the same in his official capacity as Julia Gillard's climate expert.

There is a pattern here, obvious to anyone who takes the time to look:

Alarmism is propagated with much noise and fanfare,
Experts do not disagree (plausible deniability),
When it all goes south, everything is quietly forgotten.
People who aren't aware of the trickery are left with the emotive effect of the panic, which is never defused by discovery of the truth.

 

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Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Firstly, a link to the article would be nice.

Secondly:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=tr...

"Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?"

Have a look on google maps earth view of the region. It's mostly desert, and the relatively small lush area they are talking about, is indeed getting less rain.

Wouldn't it have been wise to at least find out if rain has decreased in the south east of South Australia before talking about it? Rain has decreased there, even when using the 1900 (Federation Drought) as the starting point.

Our country is big, and mostly desert. We have relatively little land that can be described as lush. So what happens to the productive land does matter.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Oops, fixed the missing link.

My trend graph was a response to the headline: "Climate change: droughts more severe and frequent", not to the specific location in SA - as the fact that my rebuttal immediately followed this headline should have warned you, as my description "...Bureau of Meteorology has to say about it" - "it" being the claim that climate change is making droughts more severe and frequent. Even if one insists they are only referring to droughts in that small region, the IPCC have admitted that their (false, but let that pass for now) theory and models cannot reliably predict small scale trends such as one that picks out a tiny part of the country and assigns its vagiaries to the grand overall climate change theory.

And if you take issue with that, you demonstrate my general point that these alarmist articles seem to follow a similar pattern: huge alarm and horror is blared out in headlines, the smaller text adds provisos and moderations (sometimes to the point that the blaring headline becomes "so what?"), and then if a real scientific paper is ever referred to, it will add even more hedges and restrictions. It is propaganda, not genuine news.

But despite that, the conclusion you draw from the trend map is laughable. Look at:

http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climate_averages/rainfall/index.jsp

The area you are talking about gets between 400 and 1,000 mm/year. The trend map you refer to shows changes of less than 5mm/decade, and the part with the least rain is on the increasing side of the trend line. Look closely, there is a heck of a lot of productive land getting (small) extra rainfall. And anything within 5mm/year of zero is little different from random chance, especially as the border between negative and positive passes right across this zone. The recent storms have probably wiped out the deficit in one hit.

The article was claiming a "new normal" of permanent drought, with images of cracked fields and failed crops. The weather in this country is extremely variable; drawing "permanent drought" conclusions from the bad years is utterly absurd, and quibbling over millimetres on a trend will not change that conclusion.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

"I was struck by a comparison of this week's flooding, South Australia's power failure, and the talk not even a year ago (15 Dec 2015) on "their" ABC: [update: link added]

Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?

Yet here we are today with much of south east Australia in flood. It's a great pity they listened to climate "scientists", when the facts have been known almost from the beginning."

What exactly are you trying to say. What does the flood caused by an individual large storm have to do what you quoted from the ABC? What does the power failure have to do with it?

What is the comparison you are talking about? How are you comparing predictions that the south east corner of SA would get drier, with the recent flooding and power cuts?

You then say:

"But regardless, on the ABC drones:

Climate change: droughts more severe and frequent"

In the actual article this is immediately followed with:

"The south-east of South Australia has long been understood as a safe, high rainfall farming area.

With a second year of less than half the region's average rainfall, many farmers have questioned whether this is the new normal.

"Climate change, farmers by and large try to avoid the topic, but in my opinion since 1992 we've seen colossal change in climate," Mr Hunt said.

The year Mr Hunt began farming, 1967, was a drought year, but it was 16 years before he saw another drought."

They are talking specifically about this region.

You then said:

"Hmmm.. I wonder. Here's what the Bureau of Meteorology has to say about it:"

and present a graph of national rainfall, which doesn't make the damnedest bit of difference to the area of SA that they are talking about, or the farmers there.

"In other words, their ABC wrote a piece on climate change without going to the nearest source and asking the obvious question, an exercise that took me about five minutes."

Lol, that's funny because you didn't get any data about their situation either. I had to provide that. And the ABC was right. Rainfall has decreased there. The trend since 1900 isn't huge, but it still puts it as at least slightly drier than during one of the worst droughts on record, at a time when the overall rainfall nationally is higher than during the 1900's droughts. If the record didn't start right in the middle of a serious drought, the trend would be even stronger

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Short version, if you wanted to criticize them for other things they said, you should have quoted that, and not just said "yeah well, they were talking about a specific region there, but other times...."

Well, quote those other times then

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

" and the part with the least rain is on the increasing side of the trend line. Look closely, there is a heck of a lot of productive land getting (small) extra rainfall."

How much do you know about our geography. Only around 6% of Australia is arable land. Have a look at the trend in the WA wheat belt. It's even worse than SA.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Philip, droughts don't happen over one small corner of SA. If there's a drought there, there's a drought over a significant chunk of the whole continent. Can't you see that the article was written as a scare piece about the evils of global warming? All the big print implies we are talking about big general forces, with this corner of SA as an example of what is happening everywhere. Otherwise, no sense at all can be made of phrases like "new normal".

As you said, "What does the flood caused by an individual large storm have to do what you quoted from the ABC?" Well, what does a few years' drought in (we have now established) a tiny area (since you dispute any evidence from any larger area) in a country prone to extended droughts throughout its known history say about global warming or climate change?

Sorry, but the alarmists want to have their cake and eat it. Every bad news story is evidence of climate change, every story in the opposite diection is just weather.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Lets just deal with things one bit at a time.

You said:

"I was struck by a comparison of this week's flooding, South Australia's power failure, and the talk not even a year ago (15 Dec 2015) on "their" ABC: [update: link added]

Is drought the new normal for the once lush south-east of SA?

Yet here we are today with much of south east Australia in flood. It's a great pity they listened to climate "scientists", when the facts have been known almost from the beginning."

I said:

What exactly are you trying to say. What does the flood caused by an individual large storm have to do what you quoted from the ABC? What does the power failure have to do with it?

What is the comparison you are talking about? How are you comparing predictions that the south east corner of SA would get drier, with the recent flooding and power cuts?

So, please do explain. I don't want any shortcuts. Every statement should stand on its own, should it not?

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

"Philip, droughts don't happen over one small corner of SA. If there's a drought there, there's a drought over a significant chunk of the whole continent."

Well, how do you explain the national rainfall levels being much higher than during the 1900's drought, but at the same time there being less rain in the relevant part of SA than during that drought?

Australia is a vast continent, and different weather patterns effect different parts differently.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Frankly, there is a lot more to this business than simply stating that the national trend since 1900 is potitive.

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~matthew/TE_Aust_rainall_ms.pdf

Increases in rain in northen WA, the the NT don't mean that we can just pack our farms up an move them there. Ain't much in the way of topsoil over most of the area of increased rain.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Hi Philip, I have to relocate the site to an upgraded server in the next few days, I'll reply to your thoughts when that is finished & any disruptions are over.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Hope the move goes smoothly.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

The site has now shifted. It'll take me a little while to get back to the blog because I had to shift 8 sites at once and have to check them all out thoroughly, back up the lot etc.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Finished! I simply had to get the store back in order before turning to other things. (The store is now secure (https) only, whereas this site and my others can be accessed through either normal http or encrypted https.)

Philip, having read your latest thoughts carefully, I think you are missing the point(s). The remarks about storms and powercuts were there for context only, and to mention the straw that broke this camel's back. The key fact is that vast tracts of the country, including the region discussed by the ABC, is washed out and/or in flood, and has been for months now - not the result of just one storm. Yet drought was touted as "the new normal" for this place. The future prognosis in the article was wrong.

The second point is that we all know - even you, if you admit it to yourself - that the ABC article was just one plank in a slow and steady drip, drip, propaganda campaign intended to convince everyone that terrible things are happening due to global warming - misnamed "climate change". The headlines painted a quite different picture from the text, and the text, it turns out, was wrong anyway. But all that will be forgotten. The next time some spot on the continent has some negative weather pattern, it will then be the subject of yet another drip, drip article on "climate change". And when people like me point out this dishonest pattern of misinformation, people like you will bury down into the carefully-crafted, misleading wording beneath the big bad headlines and say "Well, they didn't actually say THAT, you know." But THAT is the message they quite purposely intended that we should read into the article.

Lastly a general thought about your remarks on my past three posts. It seems to me that the common thread in all of them was: "You should not have posted this blog article." We have, quite literally, billions of dollars being spent chasing this absurd scientific nonsense, the CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) theory. Some of it is direct grants to researchers to "find" evidence in support, some is encouragement to people to do counterproductive things like erecting wind powered bird mashers, more is involved in propping up a "market" in suppressing creation of more plant food to green the planet.

On the other hand, virtually everyone who opposes this mass insanity is completely unpaid and unsupported, including me. What we do to bring this hoax to public notice is crammed into all the other responsibilities of life. I, and we, all those who are appalled by the public waste, the dishonesty, the descent of science into superstition, the threats of legal action against "deniers", all of us who fight the good fight, need to draw a line in the sand about what we have the time and energy to respond to. I have decided that my line in the sand is "You should not have posted that." All such comments will be ruled out of order, as they waste my time justifying myself instead of discussing the issue. Instead, if you don't like my article, reply "Your statement X was wrong, moronic, stupid, whatever, because Y." I can deal with facts and rational argument, but given that we skeptics are working in our own time on our own money, justifying whether I should have, previously, wasted time worrying about whether I should have made a post, that is time I don't have.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

"The key fact is that vast tracts of the country, including the region discussed by the ABC, is washed out and/or in flood, and has been for months now - not the result of just one storm. Yet drought was touted as "the new normal" for this place. The future prognosis in the article was wrong."

Did I just read that a few wet months disproves the long term trend? That a few wet months can't happen in a place where drought may be becoming the new normal?

Why do you think a few months of rainfall is more important than the long term trend when determining whether or not the predictions are correct?

Anyway, I'm signing out. I wouldn't want to get between a true believer and his ideological war. You may be happy to throw a bunch of stuff together, and stand far enough back that when you squint hard enough you see the big picture, but not the gaping holes in it, but I can't handle it. So, goodbye.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

I didn't mention in my previous reply to Philip, my speculations about his sudden appearance and postings. All I mentioned was my conclusion: I won't discuss whether I should or should not have written any given article, I'll only discuss the content of it. People are free to post here any kind of critique of what I have written, but whether I should have written it - that is an open-ended, undecidable time-waster.

But the thoughts behind that decision? I asked myself: what is the real motive of Philip's comments? Is it indeed to question or challenge my assertions - or is it to shut me up?

In response to my decision to only discuss evidence and reasoned argument, Philip picks up his marbles and goes home. Question answered.

Re: Droughts, floods, what's the difference?

Well, I wish you the best for your future. Bitterness never gained me anything worth having.