Lest We Forget

Oxymoronic Science

Over the past two years, Queensland and New South Wales have endured extreme climate events that have brought devastation.  Floods.  Last week people were evacuated from Wagga Wagga as they faced the worst flood in 160 years.

Back up the clock.  Two and a half-years ago the world was being warned that Australia was a poster-nation for the calamities that were coming as a result of global warming.  Drought and heat had ravaged the land for so long farmers left, right, and centre were committing suicide.  It was a harbinger of the devastation to come from rising temperatures.

At the time we read the following in the Los Angeles Times and jelly-fish ran up and down our spines.

What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia

Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness -- the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there, they say.

Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done .

"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."

A result of climate change?

"You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise," Eddy said.

Of course we all know that the phrase "global warming" was morphed into "climate change" devolving the cause into an oxymoron.  Infallibly true, but vacuous.  Just as the red barn is red, so a change in the climate  is climate change.  You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise.  We wonder what poor old Eddy is thinking now as water laps around his feet.  Yup.  It's climate change all right--well, anyway, it's the vibe of climate change, to invoke The Castle, Darryl Kerrigan's infamous lawyer, Dennis Denuto.



The LA Times breathtaking piece went on:

Climate scientists say Australia -- beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves -- epitomizes the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

"Australia is the harbinger of change," said paleontologist Tim Flannery, Australia's most vocal climate change prophet. "The problems for us are going to be greater. The cost to Australia from climate change is going to be greater than for any developed country. We are already starting to see it. It's tearing apart the life-support system that gives us this world."

Meanwhile, we are please to record that the Great Aussie Drought--which has already occurred many times in the recorded history of that country--is now officially well and truly over.  It has been replaced by prodigious rainfall--as has been observed many time in the recorded history of that country.

Tim Flannery, most vocal prophet of climate change, is hiding in the bushes.  Not that his sinecure with the Australian government to "sell" Australia on the risks of global warming is under threat.  He will just be told to try harder, and speak more loudly.  Here is a sample piece of mockery of this false prophet that has just hit the web:

Fate can be cruel. When you dare to open your mouth, you can, if you don't watch where you step, put your foot in it.  It is even worse if you had forgotten where your foot was before you put it in your mouth.  Some people never learn.

It's an irony that it is the weather that is hurling laughter at that "expert" on global warming, Tim Flannery.  Tim, you will remember, was chosen by Prime Minister Gillard to sell us on the notion that man (we can safely leave the women out of this) was most certainly causing climate change.  The supposed climatologist told us a number of years ago that the drought we were experiencing then would not come to an end.  Australia was doomed, he told us, to become drier and drier.

He said our dams would never fill again. We would die of thirst. He was talking about the climate and forgot about the weather. For the last two years our news has been filled with floods and threats of floods. The dams over most of Australia, like our own Awoonga Dam, are overflowing.

Where does that leave Mr Flannery? Presumably up the (flooded) creek without a paddle, although he is still being paid by Ms Gillard from an economy suffering its own drought.  For a scientist he made an enormous error.  He believed the science was settled.  He thought that he knew more than he actually did.  If he was more careful with his science he might have avoided all of that.