- JoNova - https://www.joannenova.com.au -

Witchdoctors blaming climate change for storms again

Collaroy Beach 1967

Collaroy Beach, 1967, erosion. Storm damage.

Seas Pound Beachfront, Collaroy and Manly.  Weds 6th Sept 1967

“…at Collaroy, heavy earth-moving equipment is standing by to prevent the huge seas from further undermining home units and a house which has been in danger for several days.”

Roger Franklin at Quadrant, wrote about a time  When weather was just weather, and a Collaroy Storm of 1945.

Houses washed away, Collaroy Beach, 1945

Collaroy Houses, washed out to sea, 1945. storm damage. newspaper.

Weds June 13, 1945.

..

Collaroy, NSW, Storm erosion. 1945

Weds, June 13, 1945

14 Deaths in NSW Storms

Source: Houses Washed Out to Sea.

Blame climate change, without blaming climate change

The climate scientists are telling us that there will be less of this type of winter storm. But all the other experts, planners, engineers  — get their moment of glory in the media to tell us that climate change will make this worse. In such a way does a media marketing team (like, say, the ABC) convey the sense of alarm, even when their favourite experts are actually saying the opposite.

Here’s Karl Braganza, head of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology, in the SMH, saying that this is a common East Coast Low, and we’ll get less of them:

Such storms are typical at this time of year, with as many as eight such lows a year.    … climate models estimate the number of such lows may decrease by 25 per cent or more by the end of the century, particularly in winter.

ABC 7:30 report didn’t have to ask if climate change caused this storm or flood, it just needed to find an expert of something to say “we get more of them”:

ASHISH SHARMA, SCHOOL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING, UNSW: The type of flooding that you’re seeing from this big East Coast low event is something you can expect to see much more of in a more localised, more regional type of setting, especially in the urban centres of the world.

TRACY BOWDEN: After analysing rainfall and temperature data across Australia’s East Coast, engineer Ashish Sharma and his team predict more frequent and dramatic flash flooding, but stormwater systems aren’t designed to cope with these changing rainfall patterns.

ASHISH SHARMA: If global temperatures continue to increase, then a warmer atmosphere will store more moisture and the storms will get more intense and they will get more concentrated in time and in space.
Sharma’s a rainfall and waterflow expert, and he may think he’s talking about town planning and stormwater drains, but he has the “right” quote, and it all meshes neatly for viewers. More floods, more storms, global warming. It’s a package.
Likewise, Conrad Wasko is a civil and environmental engineer saying Floods will become the new normal? (Sydney Morning Herald).

Flash floods such as those experienced across the state will increasingly become the new normal as global warming continues, according to research published by the University of NSW in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The study finds a link between changing air temperatures and intensified storms occurring across more localised spaces.

“As [global] warming proceeds, storms are shrinking in space and in time,” says the study’s co-author Conrad Wasko. “They are becoming more concentrated over a smaller area, and the rainfall is coming down more plentifully and with more intensity over a shorter period of time.”

Because so much of academia is trained to be politically correct it’s not hard for an activist journalist to seek out a secondary expert and get the quote they seek.

Roger Franklin  points out that Sharma has his name on about $2.5m worth of climate grants. He is probably very genuine, surrounded by a groupthink bubble of 100%-like-minds at UNSW (with Andy Pitman, Steven Sherwood, Chris Turney etc). But while the ABC won’t invite any skeptic outside of a “peer reviewed” climate scientist to talk, they aren’t so fussy about getting engineers, or even a coastal planning professor (below) to add to the blur of “experts”.

Not long ago, when the land was parched, droughts were going to become the new normal. Apparently, whatever is is “going to be” the new normal already is the new normal by the time we hear about it on the ABC and Fairfax. Bravo the modeling-prophets.

Source: Evening News, Fierce Storm Sweeps Collaroy. May 1925

 

Don’t forget to ask for money

There will apparently be less storms if the climate warms, and there’s no evidence that this is due to man-made climate change anyway, or that climate models have any ability to predict these storms. What we need are more climate modelers.

Hence the plea on big-government-media for more big-government-science makes perfect sense:

East coast erosion should stop CSIRO from cutting climate jobs: planning expert (ABC)

BARBARA NORMAN: …I might as well add to this, the pending sacking of CSIRO scientists who are providing the data to local councils who cannot afford that data in their own right.

If that data disappears with those scientists disappearing then councils will again be having to make decisions in an even greater vacuum.

Should this be a wake-up call to the CSIRO itself to stop some of those sackings of the climate scientists?

BARBARA NORMAN: Absolutely it should be a wake-up call. This is where we need the science…

The councils have been ignoring their own history for a hundred years (see photos above).

 Reporters can spin ‘expert’ views,
Or some ‘warming’ effect that they choose,
To claim that a storm,
Is a new man-made norm,
Which then becomes M.S.M. news.

               — Ruairi

9.5 out of 10 based on 75 ratings