February 27, 2022 By jennifer
Flooding continues to wet south-east Queensland. My heart goes out to everyone affected by the flood waters.
I looked at the rain gauge at Lowood (Station #040120), located just 10 kilometers south of the Wivenhoe Dam upriver Brisbane.
A total of 240 mms fell yesterday (Saturday 26order February) is the record for any day since 1888 when they started measuring daily rainfall at Lowood!
I feel like I can finally use that word: unprecedented.
While experts (remember Nicholas Stern) have stated that it will be drier along Australia’s east coast, some of us have theorized that it could get wetter.
The data for Lowood is interesting. Excluding this year, or this summer (because it’s not over yet), the wettest year on record was 1889-90 with 1,445 mms and the wettest summer was 2010-2011 with 987 mms.
But the totals for any given day appear to be growing.
This is consistent with the idea that an increase in Earth’s temperature, from any cause natural or human, will increase the amount of evaporation over the oceans, providing more energy for the planet. Tropical convection leads to greater rainfall.
Drs Peter Ridd and Marchant van der Walt explain how this could lead to a strong negative feedback mechanism that could counteract the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations on global temperatures in Chapter 12 of my book Climate change: The truth 2020.
When Brisbane last flooded in January 2011, I thought that would be the end of it. Not the end of Brisbane, but the end of everyone obsessing over the man-made global warming catastrophe.
We’ve heard about reservoirs that never fill up again for years. How Australia has suffered in a future thirty. Later. Suddenly. Much of my city – including the entire central business district of the city – was submerged. Not from direct rain, but from the emergency release of huge amounts of water from the Wivenhoe Dam. A dam was built to mitigate flooding but was overfilled with water because it was mistakenly thought it wouldn’t rain anymore: below-average rainfall was expected.
Again, as I write this from Noosa – 120 km north – it is raining. It has been raining for three days; not the bitter kind, but torrential rains accompanied by strong gusts of wind, like when Brisbane flooded back in January 2011.
I call Brisbane my city, because I went to boarding school there, and then returned, to support my daughter’s education. We were there during the drought years before the floods in January 2011. Back when human-caused global warming was becoming all too common, and a lot of people in Brisbane started bragging about it. how quickly they showered – to save water – because rainfall had dropped across the east. Australia.
Except rainfall never declines if one considers the whole record, in the first place.
The release of the climate change report by Sir Nicolas and the UK government in 2006, more than any other event, gave the impression that it was becoming drier. The idea of an endless drought because of the myth lingered after that.
Precipitation observational data for the entire east coast of Australia are available from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology with annual averages for all sites from 1900. Contrary to Stern’s report, the data are not shows a decrease in rainfall; rather, it turns out that rainfall was very low in the early 1900s, there were some very wet years in the late 50s and early 70s, and over all the trend was one of linear increase slight for the release of that report back in 2006. Since then, it has made more and more absurdity to claim ever-decreasing rainfall.
Although it is not faithful to the available data, the Stern Report has received rave reviews and a large audience around the world, and is still cited.
I wrote a few rebuttals regarding rainfall – explaining that it would probably rain again, and then flood. My article was published as a local opinion Mail courier Newspaper made my daughter embarrassed by the Principal at school.
The principal came from reading my article in the newspaper to confront her about my opinions on climate change in front of her friends at lunchtime at the playground. She made good sense when she told the school principal that his behavior was ‘inappropriate’.
It’s like that: it’s not politically correct to assume that the drought will end one day. It makes people upset, and want to fix you, or turn away because they know the dams will never be filled again. To suggest that we are going through another cycle, as I did back then, is heresy.
And now Brisbane is flooding again. And water is being released from the Wivenhoe Dam which was built to mitigate flooding after the terrible flood of 1974. After the floods of 1968, 1951, 1947, 1931, 1927, 1926, after the floods of 1908, 1907 , 1893, followed by the floods of 1887, 1864, 1863, 1857 and by some of the worst floods of 1841.
Featured image is from January 2011, from Sandford Street near University, St Lucia, Brisbane.
Lowood is one of the locations John Abbot and I used to test our ability to predict monthly rainfall, detailed in a research paper titled ‘Using a Lagged Climate Index’ and artificial intelligence forecasting to predict monthly rainfall in Brisbane Catchment, Queensland, Australia’ was published in the Journal of Planning and Sustainable Development, Volume 10 in 2015.
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