Time to Reject AGW – And Bob Brown
Posted by jennifer, January 17th, 2011 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change, Floods, People
EVER the opportunist, Bob Brown, Leader of the Australian Greens, yesterday blamed the Brisbane floods on the coal industry for causing global warming.
But there is no correlation between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and rainfall or flooding, as measured by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, anywhere in Australia.
There is, however, a correlation between patterns in the major atmospheric-oceanic oscillations and flood events.
Stewart Franks, a hydrologist at the University of Newcastle, has shown that the usefulness of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as a predictor of flooding depends on whether or not a more complex phenomenon also measured by sea surface temperatures known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is in a positive or negative phase.
In a series of peer-reviewed papers published in the best international journals since 2003, Professor Franks has shown that when the IPO is negative, as it was from 1946 to 1977, then there is a much greater chance that there will be flooding rains if a La Nina forms.
The IPO started to go negative in 1999, but an El Nino formed in 2001, and seven years of mostly drought followed – sustained by the El Nino conditions.
In February 2009, Professor Franks commented at this weblog that the Australian climate showed signs of entering another wet phase and warned that governments should prepare for a return to a 20-40 year period where La Nina dominates.
Just over a year later, in April 2010, the negative IPO now entrenched, a strong La Nina began to form and flooding rains followed.
Indeed the explanation for the recent devastating flooding is not carbon dioxide, but inadequate infrastructure and warning systems in the face of a combination of La Nina conditions during a negative IPO, a monsoon trough and already saturated catchments.
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Better Planning for Extreme Floods Possible: A Note from Stewart Franks
February 27th, 2009
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/02/better-planning-for-extreme-floods-possible/
With all this ENSO-ing going on building heat from nowhere, Cohers has invented Jack’s beanstalk. We should be at 1,000C by now.
To Jen re her post at 7.31 am: thanks very much for the background on the IPO = PDO. It seems to give 20-30 years of global warming then 20-30 years of cooling, making about a 60 year cycle in all. Stewart Franks seems to be one of the few who is giving this the attention it seems to merit. As I mentioned it seems to explain quite a lot about 20th century climate, especially the key 1977-1998 warming which solar variation didn’t explain (though the sun is important in other contexts).
Luke, ENSO doesn’t build heat from nowhere. But La Nina locks up heat in the tropical east-west-and-back Walker circulation (and causes cool upwelling behind it) – global temperatures drop; while El Nino with weakened Walker cycle allows heat to get out of the tropics and head north and south – global temperatures rise.
‘While La Niña conditions are indeed guaranteed well into 2011, it remains to be seen whether it can rally once more to cross the -2 sigma barrier, and/or whether it will indeed last into 2012, as discussed five months ago on this page. I believe the odds for a two-year event remain well above 50%.’
From the MEI Index, looking like a double dip. Wonder what BOM has to say on all this?
BoM predict ‘La Niña conditions will persist during the first quarter of 2011, but will gradually weaken with time as the central Pacific warms.’
Hmmm….this will be an interesting test on the validity of those models, especially if they have failed to consider the importance of solar variability.
A fine article from Ms Greer in the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/15/australian-floods-queensland-germaine-greer
one paragraph I particularly liked is this:
Ms Greer has land in the Mt Warning region of NSW near Tomewin.
John,
As usual our Germaine is full of it.
I had a farm next door to where she now has a property [actually Natural Bridge] and the Numinbar Valley in the 1920s was dairy farming and forestry and well cleared.
Since the early ’70s it has become the Hinze Dam catchment and it is now the site of wealthy farmers [it cannot be subdivided] and has more vegetation on it than it ever had then. The river runs like they do down your way [very clear] and SEQwater test it regularly and monitor it for erosion and nutrient problems and involve some of the local landholders who take great pride in proving to SEQwater how well they care for their river.
Anyway the Numinbah valley where the Nerang River runs didn’t even flood let alone get dirty.
Germaine Greer is correct with her observation about the topsoil anectdote – since similar events occurred around Port Jackson and north of Sydney.
In addition I learnt from a geomorphologist that shortly after the introduction of sheep, especially in the more arid regions of Australia, that a once only erosional event occurred that caused a massive movement of the residual soils downslope, exposing vast extents of bedrock on the undulating uplands.
The TV raconteur Jack Absalom also mentioned in one of his shows that the myriad of evaporative pans dotting the Australian landscape appeared after the introduction of the sheep etc into Australia, according to the Aboriginals.
Pilbara Aboriginals recount a time when the land was soft underfoot, and this might be interpreted as a period not so far distant in the past, when much of the Pilbara was covered in topsoil and vegetation.
Which leads me to another muse that I’ll post on my own blog – as I just realised why it might be so hot in the Pilbara during the summer, and nothing really to do with solar radiance or there is a connection.
Louis,
As a very general statement maybe. But she is referring to a valley that doesn’t have this problem in the least because it has very little livestock these days and has a huge unstocked dam catchment and wall that wont allow that to happen.
If you’re referring to claypans, they were always between sandhills where, until white man arrived with a boring bar, no livestock [including kangaroos] could exist. In parts of the Great Sandy Desert that have never had livestock there are huge claypans. They are essentially dry lakes.
In western creek and river valleys which were often overstocked, the water holes silted up from erosion. Cattle did much more damage than sheep.
So that’s where she is SD. I came across her once in the IGA in Murwillumbah and locals said she was from Tomewin.
I once read that the Clarence and Richmond rivers had clear white sandy bottoms when the settlers first arrived which agrees with her remarks.
Nothing terribly new here Jennifer, and anyway who cares!? Nobody ever listens. Dangerous men like Bob Brown are the ones that grab the headlines, not some unheard of scientist who heaven forbid might actually bring science and observational evidence to the table.
We are indeed due for more flooding events in the years ahead. A cool PDO (Im assuming what Prof Franks is refering to as a -ve IPO) means more prevalent La Ninas and stronger ones as well. Combine this with a low solar activity (as was the case in the 1970s – when there were many floods) and we’ll have more events like the ones in Vic and Qld recently. Lower solar activity typically means a general slowing of jetstream activity and a slowing of weather systems. As rain-bearing weather systems move slower, these systems will drop more rain over a concentrated area, rather than spread their rain over a larger area.
The “30 year cycle” has been known by farmers, earth scientists and climatologists for some time – but the broader education of the fact to the public would be an act of heresy to the Church of Carbonology.
John,
I feel Germaine builds her rep on a lot of [sometimes well deserved] crit of Aust in London for which she gets a ready reception.
The trouble is she often does it by selling us drongo-class of ex-convicts short by belittling our historical efforts in the face of adversity.
But about coastal rivers and yes there have been some horror stories but these days we have improved a lot.
Rivers with long tidal flood-plains were never very sandy banked in the lower parts when they got regular floods but dredging for navigation and bar stabilisation didn’t help either.
Above the tide limit I often find platypus close to cultivation.
John,
This is a bit I wrote in the woodenboat log a couple of years back. It gives a bit of an insight in to what was going on with our rivers:
“Coolangatta”— the schooner and the two districts
Whilst cleaning out my shed the other day after building “Gert by Sea” I came across a lump of old weather beaten timber which I recognised as belonging to the schooner “Coolangatta” wrecked at Coolangatta Creek in 1846. It occurred to me that if the museum were interested they should have it.
You all probably know the story of “Coolangatta” but for those who don’t it’s worth repeating.
She was an 83 foot topsail schooner of 88 tons built for Alexander Berry by James Blinkcell in 1843.
Berry had started the “Coolangatta Estate” on the Shoalhaven River in N.S.W. in 1822. The town nearby is named after him. It was worked by tenant farmers and convicts and was self supporting and very diversified. “Coolangatta” is aboriginal for good lookout.
Their most profitable industry was cedar getting and the schooner set sail from Brisbane on the 6th of July 1846 under Captain Steele together with crew and convicts, for the Tweed River to load 70,000 ft. of cedar bound for Sydney but upon arrival found the river bar to be uncrossable so they did the next best thing [they thought] and anchored up in Kirra Bay. They then proceeded to bring the cedar overland from Terranora and load it off the beach.
They found, also, that there were 5 other sailing ships bar bound inside the river which made them think it was the right move.
After 6 weeks of hard yakka the ship was not half loaded when a southerly buster arrived and drove the “Coolangatta” ashore near the mouth of Coolangatta Creek. That’s about where George Giltrap had his auto museum [not at that time though].
Captain Steele was ashore and he damaged his boat trying to get through the surf and he could only watch in despair as his ship was wrecked.
The crew and convicts got ashore safely and all walked the 70 miles in 6 days to Amity Point being fed along the way by friendly aborigines and finally boarded the “Tamar” for Brisbane.
Whilst surveying the township in 1883, government surveyor Henry Schneider named it Coolangatta prior to auction in 1884.
After the 1974 floods the wreck was exposed and a couple of friends of mine who were both keen historians and wooden boaties collected some of the timbers.
If the museum is interested they are welcome to this relic.
SD – I’ve spoken to old fishermen and farmers who remember when the Tweed River estuary below Terranora had a clear white sandy bottom.
John,
Yes, there was sand everywhere. But it still has. Not like it was before the whole of Tweed Heads city was built on Greenbank Is which was part of the sandy floodplain until it was dredged up and the rock wall built about 1960. I’m pretty sure it was sand-mined before that too.
That little sandy inlet behind the services club is one of the few pockets left but back in those days and before, the bar was a high risk entrance and the NSW govt had a good policy of improving the Northern Rivers’ ports.
This policy was to cause great anguish to the Gold Coast in later years as it changed the flow of sand but it was finally rectified with the Tweed sand by-pass.
I think much of those expanses of brilliant white sand of that era are all still there but are either paved, built on or vegetated over.
John,
I don’t need to tell ya I know, but the Gold Coast beaches, Stradbroke, Moreton, Bribie and Fraser Islands all came out of the mouths of the Northern Rivers of NSW and still are.
I often wonder how long did it take for the sand at the top of Mt Tempest to get there from the top of the NSW great divide?
SD – as I understand it the sand for Stradbroke, Fraser Island etc has all come from the sandstone cliffs of Sydney. It moves up the coast driven by ocean currents that take the sand out to the continental shelf, then brings it back in further north in a zig zag pattern – over the millions of years it’s final output is Fraser Island where it suddenly drops to the deeper water at the edge of the continental shelf and the process stops.
I’ve watched the process when I lived at South Golden Beach through the 90s. After a storm you’d find that all the sand dunes had been eroded and there was a 3m drop to the beach yet 6 months later it was all back again.
http://www.fraserisland.net/fraser-island-formation.html
John,
If Qld relied on Sydney for sand we would be in trouble. When the last extension was done on the the Tweed training walls in the 60s, the Kirra “point break” that Rabbit Bartholomew keeps rabbiting on about as the surfies heaven, actually developed because Kirra ran out of sand almost overnight. Prior to that it was like it is now.
Also as a result of that extention, the spit at Fingal increased enormously from sand coming from further south [which also would have normally put some sand on the GC but the Tweed River sand was deposited just offshore from Kirra in water just too deep to cause it to be washed ashore so the GCCC had to employ the “Kaptan Nielsen” to pump it ashore.
This all happened when the Gold Coast had been “cyclone proofed” with a boulder wall and the lack of sand combined with the exposed boulders was denuding the beach even further.
The dredging was very successful but really a stop-gap measure for decades until solved with the by-pass.
The by-pass system had been tried and tested with the Southport Seaway by-pass in ’88 which indicated pretty plainly how the sand transports along the coast.
John,
The whole of the Tweed Caldera which was possibly as big as Everest 20m y ago [with Mt Warning the core plug and all that remains] is just a tiny fraction of the spoil that has marched north.
Yeah – you are probably right Jim – I’m aware of the Caldera – I lived high on the core for almost 7 years – Originally it was 2 km high and Tambourine Mountain is it’s furthest point north.
[...] I’ve given some background to Professor Frank’s work here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/01/time-to-reject-agw-%e2%80%93-and-bob-brown/ [...]