Scientists predict… more of whatever we've just had Monday, 12 March 2012 9:21 am · 3 comments
by Simon
 Climate astrology
The role of natural variability in climate must be squashed at all costs. Just think of the consequences if natural variability were allowed to persist: we wouldn't be able to "control" the climate by tinkering with a harmless trace gas, and we wouldn't be able to shame Western civilisation into abandoning centuries of progress in order to "save the planet". We might have to just accept what nature throws at us - and adapt.
And, more worryingly for The Cause, we wouldn't be able to fill government and research coffers with taxpayers money, extracted by means of "carbon pricing". And that would be a disaster. So whatever weather phenomenon happens, we can be sure that we will get more of the same, and it will be blamed on "man made global warming" to keep the bandwagon rolling.
For the last decade, Australia has suffered a period of drought. Prior to its recent end, scientists were falling over themselves to say that this was the "new climate" that we must get used to. Paid government hacks like Tim Flannery wailed about dams never filling again, and billions were spent on desalination plants to cater for the future without water.
How things change. After some of the worst floods in recent history in New South Wales, the alarmist Sydney Morning Herald finds a scientist to say that in future we will have… more floods. In other words, more of whatever we've just had:
EXPERTS PREDICT SURGE IN FLOODS
SPORTS fields, car parks and parklands will be important assets; houses will have walls that open, and some people might need to lose their water views to prepare for bigger, more frequent floods due to global warming, according to experts contacted by the Herald.
As global temperatures rise, short storm bursts will increase in frequency and severity, resulting in more flash flooding, especially in urban areas. But the outlook for longer periods of extreme rain, such as those that caused the flooding of the Darling, Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers, and which made the Warragamba Dam overflow this year, is less certain.
There is consensus in the scientific literature that ''the flooding that happens on small urban type of catchments, which is a result of short rainfall bursts, is going up, because convection is intensifying'', Professor Ashish Sharma, an Australian Research Council future fellow in the school of civil and environmental engineering at the University of NSW, said.
He said it was ''99 per cent sure'' that the cause was global warming. A warmer atmosphere holds more water and releases it in shorter bursts, as seen in the tropics, Professor Sharma said.
And notice that they have a bob each way - claiming that long term trends are less certain - so we can have more floods AND more drought and they'll be right in both cases! There's more:
What scientists agree on is that the assumption the future climate will mirror the past, known among scientists as ''stationarity'', no longer holds. This has implications for flood planning.
''This represents a major break with past practice'', Seth Westra, a senior lecturer in the school of civil, environmental and mining engineering at the University of Adelaide, said.
''The notion that the climatic drivers of flooding are changing through time not only poses profound challenges on how we estimate future floods, but also challenges the way we design [for] and manage future floods,'' he said in a paper written for the federal government-funded National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. ( source)
How anyone could possibly "assume" that future climate will mirror the past, when climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, is almost incredible. Even without the AGW scare, climate has always changed, over every time period, and always will.
What's so amazing about this kind of article is the almost unbelievable lack of any historical perspective. So desperate are the Herald to link any weather phenomenon to global warming (especially with the Herald-sponsored Earth Hour just around the corner), that they will purposefully find a scientist who will say the right thing.
The unfalsifiable hypothesis gets stronger, and ever closer to climate astrology.
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