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Showing posts with label Queensland floods. Show all posts

As a further illustration of quite how childish our newspapers have become, we can set the scene with a robust opinion piece in the Australian Sunday Herald Sun, addressing the continuing scandal of the Brisbane floods.

Exploring the role of management of the Wivenhoe Dam, under the heading: "Greens be dammed, we need protection," this piece notes that: "Eco-catastrophists always cite the precautionary principle: if they are right and we don't reduce CO2 emissions, we face Armageddon. If they are wrong, all it costs is dollars." It then goes on:

But when money is allocated and attention prioritised to making contingency plans for vague hypothetical scenarios in the distant future, real priorities are neglected and real risks overlooked.

When leaders proclaim climate change as the greatest moral challenge, the entire machinery of government becomes preoccupied with the busy work of solving an imaginary problem. It is then easily blindsided by a real emergency.

This all-too-human phenomenon of selective attention is depicted in the famous psychology experiment with a gorilla. Volunteers have to watch a video showing a group of people passing a ball and count the number of times the ball changes hands. Most people concentrate so hard on the ball they don't notice the big gorilla that walks through the middle of the screen.

We have been so busy fretting about carbon dioxide that we have neglected the real challenge - how to adapt and protect ourselves from natural disasters.

As important as the sentiment is the debate – the fact that there is one. And the issues being rehearsed are not just local to Queensland or even Australia. The piece explores tensions between rampant greenery and public protection which are manifest here and everywhere in the developed world.

Kick-starting that debate is what Booker tried to do last week in The Sunday Telegraph, while the main newspaper focused on stream of consciousness and human interest copy.

One might have thought, though, that with the dam management and the green involvement prominent in the Australian media, this week's newspaper might actually acknowledge the extent of the debate and the strength of feeling. But not a bit of it. They ignore it. We have instead more human interest as we are regaled with a half-page illustrated account of "the desperate attempts to save a family from the Queensland floods."

This retreat into childhood truly is disturbing. Never more so do we need these important issues debated and when the so-called "broadsheets" sell the pass, we really are in trouble.

COMMENT THREAD

The questions over the Queensland floods raised by Booker in his column last week are now increasingly being asked by the Australian media.

With state premier Anna Bligh having appointed a formal inquiry headed by Justice Cate Holmes, it is now certain that these issues will be raised in a formal venue and be fully explored.

The inquiry, which has the status of a Royal Commission, will be assisted by former Queensland police commissioner Jim O'Sullivan and international dam expert Phil Cummins who have agreed to serve as deputy commissioners. An interim report on flood preparedness issues is due by 1 August and the final report is expected by 17 January next year.

Particularly active at the moment, in raising questions, is The Australian which has obtained evidence of what it believes are failures in the water management system, published in a piece headed: "Engineer's emails reveal Wivenhoe Dam releases too little, too late."

Leaked e-mail communications from a Wivenhoe Dam engineering officer, it tells us, "underline concerns that the Brisbane River flood was mostly caused by massive releases from the dam after it had held on to water too long over a crucial 72 hours before the severe rainfall that hit the region last week."

These emails, which become increasingly urgent in tone as the situation became critical as the dam's levels rise rapidly, were provided to The Australian by a source who said the stream of data had convinced him the river flood of Brisbane could have been largely avoided if the dam's operators had taken action much earlier.

A further article in The Australian tells us that river height data measured every few minutes shows the operators of Wivenhoe Dam let its levels rise back above the height at which the spillway gates were raised a day earlier in a bid to urgently dump a huge volume of water that largely caused Brisbane's flood.

Engineers who are closely studying the data are claiming that the water management company, SEQWater, now realises it had unnecessarily released too much water at the worst possible time in the late afternoon and early evening of Tuesday, January 11.

Outside this loop and thus slightly on the back foot and it reacts to the Australian's "exclusive", the Sydney Morning Herald is taking what appears to be a different line with the headline: "Dam releases 'could not curb floods'".

However, this tendentious piece actually says that the dam operator could not have curbed the floods that ravaged Brisbane without breaking established procedure and outguessing the freak rain storm. That would have required overriding the guidelines released by the Queensland government.

Working in accordance with the approved manual, the operator followed a flood mitigation strategy "based on a reasonable expectation that drastic releases would not be necessary because dam levels would not threaten an emergency spillway".

This is entirely compatible with our earlier assertions and particularly those concerning the dam. What has yet to be addressed, though, is why the operational parameters were set up the way they were, and the extent to which green ideology influenced them.

For the moment, though, Anna Bligh and the others who may have been responsible for the flooding disaster are hiding behind the inquiry, particularly Bligh, who says the operational issues are "... matters for the commission of inquiry." She does not, she says, "intend to speculate on technical engineering questions that the inquiry has all the expertise required to answer."

The intense media scrutiny under way, though, is not going to go away. Ms Bligh may be finding that she can hide, but she cannot run.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

I don't recall the exact time, or even whether I made a conscious decision, but at some time fairly recently I resolved to distance this blog still further from the MSM and its attempts to dominate the news agenda. For long enough, we have argued that the poison of the MSM is as much in what it tells us is important, as what it actually tells us – the fact that it expects us to fall in with its values.

It has, therefore, been something of a delight to have followed the Okhotsk Sea crisis so closely, even adding to what the Russians were telling us, and anticipating some of their moves. This makes blogging fun, as well as important. We are adding value. Equally, it is encouraging to see other blogs take up the cudgels and cover issues, either in parallel or separately, and we are always very pleased to link to them, blogs like Autonomous Mind, Subrosa, Biased BBC and Witterings from Witney (who is doing extremely good work).

Here, though, there is one of the few agreements I had with Iain Dale. His dictum was: if you don't link to me, I don't link to you. It took some bloggers an inordinate amount of time to learn this lesson, and some still do not seem to be able to grasp the principle. But I have no time for the prima donnas or the "precious" bloggers who think they must "own" an issue in order to discuss it, and present themselves to their readers as the only toilers in the vineyard.

With that, one can only express an element of pride in the way bloggers, in Australia and here, have been leading the field in unravelling the events behind the tragic floods in Queensland. The essence was recorded by Booker yesterday, the first British MSM journalist to step outside the box, rehearsing events which the Australian media is only just beginning to look at.

As we, the bloggers, more and more frequently set our own agendas, this would be to no avail if the readers were not there. But, of late, those that do the work – this blog included – are experiencing healthy increases in readership numbers. Individually, our hit rate may be small but, collectively, we have a huge reach and those of us who work together (albeit informally) are reaping the benefit of such co-operation.

The MSM, on the other hand, become but shallow bulletin boards. With rare exceptions, they do not inform us any longer - merely they identify stories that we, the bloggers, can look at. We can then research them properly (there will always be bloggers who know more than the media about a given subject), and post without the (self-imposed) pressures and limitations of the dead tree press and their equally lame broadcasting counterparts.

Given the way MSM circulations are declining, we'll still be there when some of them have gone. By then, we hope, even the politicians will have woken up to where the action is ... although they may be gone too, judging from current performance. On the other hand, blogging is beginning to come of age. We are ahead of the game.

COMMENT THREAD

As time passes, the issues relating to the Queensland flooding begin to become clearer. But, as always, the blogs (and Booker) take the lead with the MSM trailing far behind. Posted on the Booker column is a comment from another blog, originally posted by an Australian who lives about 140 miles north east of the Brisbane River catchment, on the coast.

Of the floods that devastated Brisbane, he notes that the rain depression had formed weeks earlier and had caused disastrous floods in Rockhampton, 250 miles to the north, and caused wide spread flooding in the central Queensland coalfields.

This rain depression was slowly moving south without losing intensity and flooded the Burnett river catchment to the extent Bundaberg city suffered serious flooding. Still the rain depression moved south with very heavy rain, with the north easterly air flow carrying the rain right into the Brisbane river catchment.

Thus, the Wivenhoe dam management had plenty of warning that this rain was on its way and had been so for weeks. Yet the policy of the Queensland Government was to keep the dams full because of their advice from the likes of Tim Flannery et al.  This was that, because of global warming, Queensland was going to remain in drought.

What is then crucial here, we are told, is the timing. This is one of the points made by Regionalstates: it was "all inconvenient". The rains increased in the Brisbane River catchment on Thursday 6th. By Friday afternoon the spillways were releasing 8000 cubic meters a second - just a trickle for this dam. This was in order to maintain 100 percent capacity as per government policy.

Then, as we also learned from Regionalstates, no one could be contacted over the weekend of the 8/9th to make the decision to go against government policy, and open the spillways to lower the level in the dam. Thus, over the weekend, the dam went from 102 to over 144 percent in just two days - and this is a massive dam.

By Monday it was too late, the die was cast. The inflows to the dam were greater than could be released. Yet the gates should have been throttled back because of the enormous flow in the Bremer river and Lockyer Creek which join the Brisbane below the Wyvenhoe dam.

The level in the dam went to within an inch or so of having the emergency spillway plugs failing and releasing an unbelievable amount of water to save the main rock and earth fill wall. They are saying, behind closed doors, just over an inch more of rain and the dam would have failed. Brisbane would be no more.

Because of bad policy, policy makers asleep at the wheel over the weekend, the Wyvenhoe Dam did nothing to reduce the flooding in Brisbane. In all, building the dam was a waste of time if it could not be managed in the way it was designed.

If the dam had been at 40-60 percent when the rain started, there would be no flooding in Brisbane and the dam would have done the job for which it had been designed.

Perversely, straight out of the "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted" department, water is now being released from the Wyvenhoe Dam (pictured), although levels remain at 160 percent, which is what caused the problem in the first place.

This is matched by a weasel-worded, "on the one hand this, on the other hand, that" article in The Australian, which completely misses the point about the impact of the global warming obsession on water management policy.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

With the waters having peaked and now beginning to subside, and with the clean-up starting, there are now calls being made for a full-scale inquiry into the reasons for the Brisbane flood disaster. Initially, they have comes from the blog Regionalstates, which has been picked up and developed by Jo Nova, with significant input from her readers' comments – demonstrating yet again the value of a properly organised comments section (or forum).

The attention falls on the management of the largest dam in the region, the Wivenhoe dam (pictured above). This was built in 1984, as a direct response to the 1974 record flooding which inundated much of Brisbane. And, at the time, premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen said the dam would mean the floods of 1974 would never happen again.

The current claim is that the water authority mismanaged the water flows from the dam, waiting until after last weekend, when the dam was near overflowing, before releasing water – thereby adding to the natural peaks. By this means, the flood, which the dam was designed to prevent, was actually caused by the dam managers, which would make it a man-made disaster.

Regionalstates is asserting that controlled releases of water from the dam over the weekend, before the volume in the dam had peaked and when there was only low level flooding in Brisbane, could have avoided the situation later in the week. By then, with flooding at a higher level, the dam was at risk of overflowing, forcing a massive release which added to the peak flows at just the wrong time.

However, it is not just bloggers who are making the running. Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman wants a judicial-style inquiry into the flood disaster, and appears to be gunning for the state premier, Anna Bligh. She may well be in the frame, because the roots of this disaster could go back to last spring. Local pundit Cameron Reilly points to her insistence on maintaining water conservation measures, even though dams were then at peak storage capacity.

As Brendan O'Neil remarks, the obsession with global warming may well, therefore, have contributed to the floods. In particular, it may have influenced decisions on water levels maintained in dams and release policies. Better planning, suggests Reilly, might have allowed the water company to keep less reserves in the dams in the lead up to summer, which would have meant smaller releases during this current crisis.

Given that, despite all this, the actual peak of the Brisbane River scraped in just under the 1974 peak - surprising most of the experts, as the general consensus for the previous few days had been that it would exceed the 1974 peak – there do seem to be strong grounds for a full inquiry as to the causes of the disaster.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

Water has peaked at almost three feet below the level of deadly 1974 floods in Brisbane, giving the city some respite from the disastrous floods. However, this has not stopped the state premier's favourite warmist launching a pre-emptive strike claiming the floods for his own.

This is professor Will Steffen, the executive director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, who is forced to concede that there is "no direct link" between global warming and the flash flooding in Toowoomba, but he claims that climate change would lead to heavier, more frequent rain.

Never mind that the prevailing warmist orthodoxy has been for prolonged droughts – which is why, of course, the Australians have spent over $13 billion on desalination plants. Now, Steffen says that, "As the climate warms, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere ... This means that there is a probability that there will more intense rainfall events around the world".

Professor Neville Nicholls, an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at Monash University, is another one getting his oar in, saying that scientists would look at possible links between flash floods over the past 24 hours and global warming.

With the sort of weasel words we have come to expect from these people, he stresses that no "current link" can be made between them, arguing they were the result of a strong La Nina event. But he then goes on to say, "Is the La Nina that strong because of global warming, or is global warming exacerbating the effect of La Nina? Honestly, we don't know. But just because we don't now doesn't mean it's not happening".

"You'd have to be a brave person to say it [climate change] is not having some sort of effect," he adds. "I can guarantee you in the next couple of years people will start looking back at this event and asking was it so unusually strong because of global warming."

Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is also getting in on the act. "I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change," he says. "The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon."

David Jones, head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, then chips in. "We've always had El Ninos and we've had natural variability but the background which is now operating is different," he says. "The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world." That means more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.

And then we get US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth. He says the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors. He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.

But the fact is that, within the bounds of natural variability, there is nothing exceptional about the intensity of the rains, and they accord entirely with a well-observed long-term cyclical pattern. Further, as always, the actual levels of flooding are nothing exceptional, as the historical record shows.

Local problems, though, have been exacerbated by urban development and the lack of sensible precautions, about which the Queensland government and the city council were warned a decade ago. Needless to say, with greed, stupidity and latterly the obsessive focus on "climate change", the warnings were ignored.

All of this was pre-ordained. It was bound to happen, but now it has, the warmists are going to be the last people on this earth to admit the flaws in their religion. This is, and has to be, another example of climate change. No other explanation is possible.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

Posted originally on the comments to Booker's column, Dellers has picked up a contribution from "Memory Vault" who lives in Queensland and, with increasing concern, is watching the devastation that has so far claimed more than 70 lives.

But the issue here – as it was with the horrendous bush fires in Victoria in 2009, is that the disaster could by and large have been prevented, or the effects reduced, but for Greenie intervention. And two individuals are particularly in the frame, the first being environment minister Peter Garrett, who took it upon himself to block a proposed dam that would have prevented the flooding of the town of Gympie.

But "Memory Vault" particularly condemns a second individual, Tim Flannery, a professor of earth and life sciences at Macquarie University, chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, and the 2007 Australian of the Year. It is he, above all, who managed to convince the state government that the predicable cycle of droughts and floods will no longer happen, and that the state, instead of beefing up defences from the last major event 30 years ago in 1974, should prepare for long-term water shortages.

"Growing evidence," declared Flannery, "suggests that hotter soils, caused directly by global warming, have increased evaporation and transpiration and that the change is permanent. I believe the first thing Australians need to do is to stop worrying about 'the drought' - which is transient - and start talking about the new climate". It was input such as this that had the state government spending $1.2 billion on desalination plant, instead of flood defences, a plant now mothballed, as the flood waters mount.


This trend was well established four years ago in 2006, when the city of Perth opened the first large desalination scheme at Kwinana (pictured). Visiting the plant on 18 June 2007, Australia's minister for the environment and water resources, Malcolm Turnbull,was telling the world that Perth was the "canary in the climate change coal mine," a city scrambling to find other sources of water for a growing population.

In December 2008, Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, was telling Discover magazine that Australia was "the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of climate change on water resources." He added: "Many people thought there would be adequate time to adapt to less water. The lesson from Australia is that the shift has been very dramatic and has occurred in a very short period".

By 10 July 2010, the New York Times was reporting: "Arid Australia Sips Seawater, but at a Cost". In one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects in its history, the paper told us, Australia’s five largest cities were spending $13.2 billion on desalination plants. And, with a startling lack of originality, Ross Young was repeating the mantra: "We consider ourselves the canary in the coal mine for climate change-induced changes to water supply systems," he said, describing the $13.2 billion as: "the cost of adapting to climate change".

Needless to say, the Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh is now talking of "exceptional events", and the BBC happily chirps about a "freak of nature" – an attempt to reinforce the subliminal message that nothing could have been done.

But the real story is bizarre, another classic example of the greenies forcing major distortions in policy which cost money we haven't got and eventually kill people. Increasingly we see that the obsession with global warming is not a risk-free option. It costs money we can't afford, and lives. This must stop.

COMMENT THREAD