climate change - bolt on the ball

andrew bolt is worth reading, when it comes to climate change, he highlights the changing positions of the alarmists.. when there was drought, the alarmists were warning of permanent drought... now that we have floods, the alarmists are now claiming, that this is what the models were predicting.

mmm - there is a saying - something along the lines of "when the facts change...."

the reality, is that the likes of flannery, bob brown etc - have no idea - what they know, is that people have short memories ((mmm - all pollies know that people have short memories - about things that do not affect them directly - eg there were floods in qld in 1974 - watso was a avid news watcher (newspaper and tv) in 1974 - yet he can not recall the flood - but he recalls every detail of his love life))

it is so easy to be a skeptic. the following is bolts latest blog on the issue





THIS year we face two new taxes, one to deal with the floods, the other to deal with global warming that was supposed to leave our dams empty.

It?s not just the floods but the new taxes that prove the global-warming alarmists have made fools of us.

Consider: the Gillard Government now threatens us with a ?carbon tax? to ?stop? the warming we were told would give us endless drought, but also a levy to deal with the floods we got instead.

Hello?

More fool taxpayers for ever having believed the warming preachers who so profited from the greenhouse scare.

But more fool us if we now believe their latest claims that they predicted we?d actually have a third of Queensland under water, the Murray-Darling Basin in flood and dams overflowing after a year of heavy rain and a summer only Noah would love.

Just hear those brazen I-told-you-so?s. There?s Greens leader Bob Brown, of course, pretending the Queensland floods followed his script, and even blaming our coal miners for them:

?It?s the single biggest cause, burning coal, for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now.?

Ian Lowe, head of the Australian Conservation Foundation, also made the floods seem just as he predicted:

?The Queensland floods are another reminder of what climate science has been telling us for 25 years . . .?

Ditto young Ellen Sandell, head of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition:

?Scientists . . . have pointed to the evidence showing a warmer world is a wetter world . . . 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 . . .?

And, it?s true, warmists did warn of all kinds of general disasters and ?extreme events?, from floods to droughts, hurricanes to wild fires, and insect plagues to lousier beer (true).

So if we got a flood followed by a drought, they could always say they predicted both, which is very handy.

But what did they specifically predict for those parts of Australia now in flood?

Something very different, actually. In fact, Brown in 2006 warned not of floods but an endless drought:


?From melting polar ice to the spectre of permanent drought in previously productive farmlands, the (World Meteorological Bureau?s) report makes clear that climate change is not just a future threat, it is damaging Australia now.?

And in 2008 he warned not of a Murray in flood but of a Murray empty:

?Already, (Rudd government adviser Ross Garnaut?s) daunting data of a 10 per cent chance of no flow at all in the Murray-Darling river system in future years is being overtaken by data indicating that drought is the new norm across Australia?s greatest food bowl.?

As Garnaut himself told the National Press Club about his influential report:

?It almost had an exciting title. When our team in Melbourne finished the draft of the draft a few weeks ago we held a naming competition and the winner by acclamation was No Pain, No Rain. [Laughter]?

The media laughed, yet pushed no climate story harder than this claim that manmade warming doomed us to drought. From The Age, August 30, 2009:

?A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed . . . that the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change . . .

?In the minds of a lot of people, the rainfall we had in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was a benchmark, [said the bureau?s Bertrand Timbal]. . .

?But we are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.?

The Sydney Morning Herald likewise unblinkingly reported claims we?d never again see good rain. From January 8, 2008, under the headline ?This drought may never break?:

?It may be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent . .. ?Perhaps we should call it our new climate,? said the Bureau of Meteorology?s head of climate analysis, David Jones.?

The mantra was that global warming meant drought for us, and the 2007 Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the Vatican of the warming faith - made no mention of more floods in Australia from rain.

Its predictions, co-authored by Prof Karoly, ran all the other way - that by 2030, our ?water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia? and ?production from agriculture and forestry is projected to decline?.

No surprise, professional alarmists amped up the scare, with Australian of the Year Tim Flannery in 2007 warning our dams would run dry and only desalination plants would save us:

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

?In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.?

Added Flannery:

?Even the rain that falls isn?t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems . . .?

You may scoff now, but these alarmists persuaded our politicians, and with costly consequences. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie was so sure manmade warming would dry our rains that he ordered the desalination plant that?s now mothballed, the dams being so full.

As he said to justify his decision:

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

Same story in Victoria, where the Labor Government refused to build a dam on the Mitchell River, claiming that warming meant it wouldn?t fill:

?Unfortunately, we cannot rely on this kind of rainfall like we used to.?

Yet the Mitchell promptly flooded Bairnsdale in 2007, and the desalination plant the Government commissioned instead for four times the price and a third of the water has been delayed by the rains we were told were vanishing.

The Rudd government was also sucked in, and told Murray-Darling farmers they?d have their water rights cut to ?save? our rivers. Here?s then-Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in 2008:

?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.?

This unquestioning faith in warmist predictions may even have contributed to the drowning of Brisbane, since we now know the Wivenhoe dam built to protect the city from flooding was left too full to do its job well.

Why? A clue may be the Queensland Water Commission?s 2010 South East Queensland Water Strategy:

?The majority of climate modelling done to date indicates that SEQ is likely to become hotter and drier, with reduced inflows to dams and increased demand for water.?

If you thought that, you?d also think twice before draining drinking water in Wivenhoe to make room for the flood that eventually overwhelmed it.

But the final insult is this. For years the CSIRO spruiked the warming faith, even claiming of Al Gore?s error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth that its ?scientific basis is very sound?.

Of course, it blamed the drought on manmade warming, but last November - with the rains returned - it issued a report conceding ?climate change plays little part in the SEQ rainfall reduction?, which it said was caused by an El Nino, a cooling of the seas off Australia.

What?s more, rather than ?permanent drought?, the region could expect a ?renewal of a rain-generating process with La Nina bringing higher rainfall? - a natural shift which ?might be expected to last for 10 to 20 years?.

So not dry rivers but floods. Not permanent drought but years of plenty. Not manmade but natural.

And still these warmists insist they were and are right. You must laugh them to scorn before they cost you even more.