Andrew Bolt is desperate to prove that the floods in Queensland had nothing to do with global warming, even though the science suggests that warming will make floods worse. So has fully embraced an argument advanced by hauntingthelibrary:
If warming caused these floods, why didn't warmists predict them?
Two years ago Queensland's warmist Office of Climate Change issued this report on what the state should expect from global warming, and not once did it mention floods. It did predict a slight increase in "extreme" weather events in the north, but not in the south of the state where the worst floods have occurred. Elsewhere it has warned of a slight increase in rainfall during extreme events, but overall it predicted less rain, and not these months of more.
Report: "drought" mentioned 24 times...
Report: "flood" mentioned zero times.
Someone less gullible than Bolt might have noticed that the report he links to seems to start on page 21. Someone less gullible than Bolt might have noticed that it was actually just chapter 4 of a longer report.
Someone less gullible than Bolt might have checked the website of the Queensland Office of Climate Change. Right on the front page you find:
On 10 November, the Queensland Government released a new report that will help local governments plan for increased risk of flooding from extreme events due to climate change. read more »
The plan states:
This study provides Queensland local governments with a climate change factor for increased rainfall intensity for incorporation into flood studies. It proposes a 5 per cent increase in rainfall intensity per degree of global warming. ...
Using this climate change factor, the Inland Flooding Study developed recommended policy options to incorporate climate change into the flood risk management framework for Gayndah. These options are included in a draft flood constraint code for assessing development applications, which defines four flood hazard areas linked to the 1 per cent (Q100), 0.5 per cent (Q200) and 0.2 per cent (Q500) AEP flood levels. [Q100 means "floods once every hundred years".] ...
This approach is based on the current 0.5 per cent AEP (Q200) approximating the 1 per cent AEP (Q100) level by 2050 and the current 0.2 per cent AEP (Q500) approximating the 1 per cent AEP (Q100) level by 2100.
That is, by 2100 "once every 500 years floods" will happen every 100 years and we need to plan for this. Gayndah, by the way, experienced its worst flood in 50 years the month after the report was published.
Directly after the item about the report on flood risk there's this:
On 28 October, the Queensland Government released a new report highlighting the latest climate change science and the likely impacts of climate change on Queensland. read more »
"flood" appears 125 times in that report, for example:
Climate change is also likely to affect extreme
rainfall in south-east Queensland (Abbs et al.
2007). Projections indicate an increase in two-hour,
24-hour and 72-hour extreme rainfall events for
large areas of south-east Queensland, especially
in the McPherson and Great Dividing ranges, west
of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. For example, Abbs
et al. (2007) found that under the A2 emissions
scenario, extreme rainfall intensity averaged over
the Gold Coast sub-region is projected to increase
by 48 per cent for a two-hour event, 16 per cent for
a 24-hour event and 14 per cent for a 72-hour event
by 2070. Therefore despite a projected decrease in
rainfall across most of Queensland, the projected
increase in rainfall intensity could result in more
flooding events.
So what about the report that Bolt linked to? Well that was just chapter 4 of their climate strategy report, which has stuff like:
There is also predicted to be increased flooding ... The IPCC has assessed south-east Queensland as being a key 'hot spot' for climate vulnerability by 2050, with risks of losses to the built environment from flooding, sea-level rises and storm surges (IPCC, 2007a).
But kudos to hauntingthelibrary for finding a chapter in that report that doesn't have the word "flood" in it. No kudos for fooling Andrew Bolt -- that's like taking candy from a baby.
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Nice one Tim.
On the subject of the floods, I've been seeing (and going up against) a lot of claims that environmentalists made it worse by doing "things" to stop the Wivenhoe Dam flood gates being opened until it was way too late and having ignored the weather warnings. It might be of use for others to bookmark these two news reports, with video, the first showing the flood gates being opened for the first time in a decade... on October 9th/10th, and in response to... the weather warnings. Stops the argument dead in its tracks so far.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/10/10/3034276.htm?site=brisbane
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/wivenhoe-dam-eased-the-br…
But, but, us greenies HATE dams! Surely we would always want the floodgates to be open? Why would dam-hating folk be wanting the dam to be - well, damming? Dammy? Dammed?
I mean, even in the illogical world of the people who hate environmentalists, they can't expect greenies to want - dammy dams?
I get so confused as to what I'm supposed to want. Sigh.
Someone less gullible than Bolt...is there anyone?
If Bolt could 'do' analysis,he might have also asked himself what motivated the ongoing projects to upgrade dam spillways to cope with projected bigger flows. Given that he has such a long standing interest in dams.
"If warming caused these floods, why didn't warmists predict them?"
That would be because the concept of 'warmists' is a product of his imagination.
Some of the scientific resarch on the relationship between ENSO and Australian rainfall:
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/5/1/10.short
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2007JCLI1981.1
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.3370120607/abstract
Perhaps he put it under some ideological rubric: e.g. Governments (especially ALP ones) like wasting money and building white elephants.
More likely though, it never occurred to him. Let's face it: public works are boring if all you want to do is scream at the government. He's more interested in composing screeds than making them conform to observable reality.
I searched the report and found flooding mentioned numerous times in Chapters 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16. Also included was flash flooding.
I mean, this surely is a spectacular own-goal. I never realised the report mentioned so much about flooding consequences until I actually checked it myself.
But Bolt is correct in a sense. Chapter 4 doesn't mention it, and if we can just manage to convince ourselves that is the only chapter out of 424 pages and 17 chapters worth reading, we can remain supremely ignorant about whether or not flooding is mentioned as a probable consequence of climate change.
Bolt:
>Commenting for this article is no longer available
Oh good gravy.
>even the science suggests
even _though_ the science suggests?
Bolt is not gullible, he's a liar.
When it's all boiled down, Bolt is nothing more than an anti-progressive activist.
All his commentary should be viewed in that light and discounted accordingly.
One suddenly develops something approaching respect for Eddie McGuire when Andrew Bolt whines, âEddie McGuire means well, but clearly hasnât listened to a word Iâve said.â
Bolt is a dickhead. He has already been told; by me. I can't stand his brainless comments on the "Today Show". His CV is that he writes for that silly little "Stinkrag" that is printed on the back of the football results "The Herald Sun", one of Rupert's Rags.
Says Andrew:
>In fact, I believe more in climate change than does McGuire or any other warmist.
Bonkers.
I just answered to hauntingthelibrary´s question (now awaiting moderation):
How about 2008 report from Queensland Government: Increasing Queenslandâs Resilience to Inland Flooding in a Changing Climateâ? http://www.climatechange.qld.gov.au/pdf/inlandfloodstudy.pdf
It took me about 2 min. to find this. First paragraph, first sentence:
âFlooding causes significant impacts on Queensland communities and the economyâand with our changing
climate, fl ooding events are likely to become more frequent and more intense. â¦â
Index for further reading: http://www.climatechange.qld.gov.au/downloads/index.html
Keystone climate denialisism.
I'm shocked. If you can't blindly trust the blog of 'hauntingthelibrary', who can you trust for climate science?! Better check with Judith Curry to see what it all means... probably something to do with climate scientists not being open enough.
Andrew Bolt doesn't seem to be allowing comments on any of his posts now. Maybe email is the best way to get in touch with him....
I think that's just while he's away on holiday. Or out to lunch.
Of course, it could be argued that he's always out to lunch...
Re. 2 AmandaS
Yes. Bizarre, isn't it. Oh, no, it wasn't, it was just another day debating with 21st Century Luddites.
Wow. That's such a blatantly massive mistake. Someone should keep at him until he's forced to say, "oh yes, oops. Sorry, I was completely wrong."
I mean, it's OK for him to be wrong. Always weird, that one: people would respect him more for being able to admit errors. But I'm guessing he won't. Ever.
In his case, no I wouldn't, because the admission would be some sort of appeal for the right to write new equally outrageously reckless and false claims in the service of his own ground within the RWDB culture war.
The Blot is perhaps the most prominent figure in this site's excellent series The Australian's War on Science which is as we see here is up to 56 articles now. He doesn't make innocent mistakes. He lies for his cause and with utter indifference to the harm he authors or how rational people see him. No nonsense is so absurd that he will not utter it if he thinks there is momentary advantage in it for his side. He doesn't merely drink the Kool Aid. He manufactures and distributes it as a licenced franchisee.
No apology could be what it would seem from the lips of a normal person. It would be an insult to everyone who has ever apologised for any wrong and meant it.
Is this 'be nice to Bolt' month? Gullible my foot. He's always had a tendency to cut and paste other people's tripe and when he runs out of pinching lies from others, he tells his own.
Dear Shermer... I spoke with God yesterday.... Do you want to know what he told me?
CLOBBERING TIME
dawkins - got you...
who's the WINGNUT?
richarddawkins.net/videos/579240-the-truth-about-the-lunatic-religious-right-in-america?page=1
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION - JAN 1, 2011
OMENS OF DEATH:
starseedshaman.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/redwing.jpg
an example and warning of the fate of those who try to divide people....
freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24191
Denialist Chumming
http://shewonk.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/denial-chum-curry-style/
Did you mention this for some other context or in direct reference to the Queensland floods?
Tim, Couple of comments on your report. AEP is correctly the Annual Exceedence Probability (AEP) (i.e. a 1%AEP means there is a 1% chance that a flood of this size will occur every year). The Queensland report released in Nov was interim whilst the Australian Rainfall and Runoff is updated. This is expected to be
available in 2014 but with the floods in Vic and Qld, I'l bet there is a lot of reworking being looked at.
The Qld report is based on application of the Clausius-Clapeyron theory suggests for each 1o
C increase in temperature, the amount
of water vapour a parcel of air can hold increases by approximately 7%. However, global experience I think shows there is much more to the major rainfall events that are occurring as the effects of GW take hold. There is a fascinating report on Joe Rumm's site today about where the midpoint of the atmosphereâs massâthe 500-millibar (500 hPa) levelârests and its effects on extreme weather evenets. The comments are on the context of the mind-boggling weather occurring in the north Canada - Greenland area. Whilst London had snow at Xmas, it rained in Greenland (Nuuk)and the Nunavutâs capital, Iqaluit, had to cancel its year-end snowmobile run on Frobisher Bay for the first time because there was no ice.
My personal view on the Aus floods, etc is that we (humans) have forced the climate into the area where as scientists we have no data to predict what happens next. Normally we work from records to interpolate AEP's, etc and plan levy banks and engineering structures. But now we're in the zone outside experience where there are no guides i.e the area of extrapolation where no scientist wants to go. There are no guides now to what could happen next. Our forecasting methods that are based on history begin to breakdown as we've seen now both in Aus and elsewhere as in USA (Georgia), Brazil, Pakistan, etc. This is the news story that our papers and commentators (eg Bolt) just can't come to understand. Greatest story of the decade and they just can't see,
In his case, no I wouldn't, because the admission would be some sort of appeal for the right to write new equally outrageously reckless and false claims in the service of his own ground within the RWDB culture war.
The Blot is perhaps the most prominent figure in this site's excellent series The Australian's War on Science which is as we see here is up to 56 articles
now. He doesn't make innocent mistakes. He lies for his cause and with utter indifference to the harm he authors or how rational people see him. No nonsense is so absurd that he will not utter it if he thinks there is momentary advantage in it for his side. He doesn't merely drink the Kool Aid. He manufactures and distributes it as a licenced franchisee.
No apology could be what it would seem from the lips of a normal person. It would be an insult to everyone who has ever apologised for any wrong and meant it.
bruced @24
Greatest story of the decade century and they just can't see
Yup, the planet is squealing
Thanks deltoid/Tim for doing the research the ABC and other organs can't be bothered to do or publish.It always valuable to have the lies exposed for those like myself without the time to check.It is also reassuring that unlike the media the officials in Queensland have been acting in a responsible manner in getting that climate information out there to the councils.
It seems we will have another Victorian Bush Fires scenario with the recent floods, whereby publicly the role of AGW will be dismissed in regard to severity of event. There have always been floods and fires and for some that is enough. The ABC in particular seem to be phobic to the term Climate Change, its weird to observe.Quite pathological. Maybe a directive has been issued..!? Their discourse is in a strange way like watching a town sandbagging against a flood, that cannot be kept back.
Bruced @24 thanks for those valuable technical details about AEP and the Clasius-Clapeyron theory. I will follow up on your suggestion to look at Joe Rumm. Do post if there is any corroboration of his ideas elsewhere.
Re #25: The 7% figure is correct, but it's important to note that it will be quite uneven.
Did he really refer to the Office of Climate Change as the 'Warmist' Office of Climate Change?
Just how old is this guy? 12?
@30:
a) Yes he did refer to it as the "warmist" Office.....
b) Psychologically at least, 12 seems about right.
I personally kinda like being called a warmist because the scientific evidence suggests the planet is...umm...warming. Bolt can add it to my list of whackaloon leftie traits like: heliocentrist, germ theorist, evolutionist, and even exoplanetist.
Yes the ABC has some kind of institutionalised phobia of both News Ltd and Climate Change. There are some strange personnel in that place.
Important to remember that Queensland is virtually a 'one paper town' belonging to Murdoch, and also that it has no upper house (the government rules without a house of review).
The Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Kate Jones, was silent during all of the floods. When she finally emerged in late January she was introduced in news reports as the "Minister for Sustainability". She only spoke about potential damage to sea-grass in Moreton Bay or about Hairy-Nosed Wombats and the dreaded C-C words went totally unmentioned by either the Minister or the "journalist".
In short, Rupert owns Queensland and "C-C" is off limits for discussion.
Remember, Bolt is just a content provider for an advertising platform.
Jeez, just now I had a thorough look at Bolt's blog for the first time. Yowzah, what a tsunami of bullshit.
Just today (still Monday for me) he had a post endorsing a fraudulent Watts post purporting to demonstrate that the recent globaltemp increase is really just an artifact of ENSO. Conveniently, the serendipitous, nay, seemingly clairvoyant Tamino had demolished that argument in a post several days earlier. Had Bolt cared to look, in the comments a couple of the more sane of Watts' trained lemmings had even pointed out some of the problems.
Not only is Tamino clairvoyant, obviously Tim is a saint for the restraint he shows toward Bolt.
Am I still in moderation for mentioning my "National Andrew Bolt is a D**kh**d Day" t-shirt? Got it from Crikey last year and it keeps improving with age!
Floods we can deal with, not this
.Projections also indicate that the regions of east Australian cyclone genesis could shift southward by two degrees latitude (approximately 200 km) by 2050, Leslie et al (2007), while the average decay location could be up to 300 km south of the current location. Models estimate that the number of strong cyclones reaching the Australian coastline will increase, and âsuper cyclonesâ, with an intensity hitherto unrecorded on the Australian east coast, may develop over the next 50 years Leslie et al(2007).
APPEAL
Time to stand up and be counted, time to start using our real names on blog comments I have managed to get over fifty replies printed answering "septic" letters to the Editor in two regional newspapers, could no longer see the point in remaining incognito,
Already do use my real name and unlike Bolt, I have admitted to errors under my real name. Or perhaps Bolt has, but I would always give him the benefit of no doubt. If it sounds bad he means it; if it troubles someone too important (eg Costello), then he didn't mean it after all. The Modus Operandi is established now. The burden of proof is on him, not us.
IMHO Fran Barlow is too nice on this subject. I couldn't care less what this bloke's opinion is over the better leader of the country, but his continuing gob-shite concerning AGW is a threat to people in this country. The thing he doesn't get is that we are in a rather poor situation in so far as AGW goes; other countries may or may not fare quite well if they are both small and well situated. Of course, that depends upon myriad factors including the time frame of interest. But Australia, no, we cop AGW BAD! See just about any CSIRO report, BOM report, etc. This is why Blotter annoys me so much.
And yes, I post under my real name.
Andrew Bolt has got nothing to complain about compared with that shrinking violet James Delingpole. The Guardian is [reporting](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jan/24/james-delingpole…) that James Delingpole is claiming he was 'intellectually raped' by the nobel prize winning scientist Paul Nurse during an interview for the BBC science programme, Horizon. The programme is about why the public doesn't trust scientists and Nurse, who is also president of the Royal Society apparently asked Delingpole some straight questions about scepticism who then went on to make the above complaint to the BBC. The Horizon prog is being shown tonight on the beeb and boy can I hardly wait, lets hope the ABC shows it as well.
Sorry to be OT (well not really when it comes to the Bolt, Delingpole, et al club).
The Modus Operandi is established now. The burden of proof is on him, not us good.
Looks like my comment on hauntingthelibray's blog was moderated into cyber-oblivion.
I suppose he takes offence to it being pointed out that anyone with basic reading skills would've noticed the litany of references to flooding consequences in the bulk of the QLD government report which escaped his notice.
A little blunt, I admit, but quite accurate.
Jeremy:
>Asked if he had called the BBC to say he had been "intellectually raped" afterwards, he said: "I don't think I would have said that, because he is incapable of intellectually raping me."
Good grief.
The chapter they do cite doesn't use the word "flood," but does talk about weather events which would be expected to lead to floods, by meteorologists and geographers. The entire rant is willful misreading of the material.
Who is behind hauntingthelibrary, and is there any chance we could get that person into a library? We used to joke about how government departments in the U.S. got named contrary to their actual policy goals -- Dept. of Defense wages war, in Republican administrations, Dept. of Labor is anti-labor, Dept. of Health and Human Services is anti-health and anti-human services, etc. -- but this misnaming of blogs among the climate cranks and near-cranks shows a nasty trend. "Junk Science" purveys junk science, true, but is there another blog on that side that has an apt name?
The snark quotient at hauntingthelibrary is very, very high, also. I was disturbed when a comment of mine which I had thought rather straightforward was edited to say that I think AGW is a crock. Have others experienced the same?
It's all an in-joke, isn't it? Author and commenters delight in calling James Hansen "Beijing Jim" because he wrote an op-ed for the South China Morning Post. They completely dismiss the merits of the opinion piece, but that's de rigeur there. They also missed the point that SCMP is published in Hong Kong, not Beijing.
Can we trust people who don't know the difference between Beijing and Hong Kong, politically, economically, and geographically?
Did I mention that the author of hauntingthelibrary is a DDT wanker, too?
stopmurdoch:
Yes, starting with the board stacked by the previous conservative government. Rather ironic that that government had a thing about "political correctness". It didn't actually have a problem with political correctness as long as it conformed with its own ideology. In the case of ABC board appointees, that meant it had a preference for appointing climate science denialists such as Albrechtsen who helped impose the "don't mention Climate Change" policy.
"Warmist" is a bit like "evolutionist", or perhaps "tectonicist" (someone who doesn't reject modern geology) - my elaboration on this.
Yes John,
Delingpole has been extremely entertaining re this documentary and as I type this its another few hours before it goes to air on the beeb. I went to his blog on the Telegraph site earlier today and he is already lashing out against the documentary and the perfidity of scientists.
I know talking about Delingpole is OT but what is the difference between Delingpole and Bolt, apart from they don't live in the same city?
Jeremy C #47: :what is the difference between Delingpole and Bolt, apart from they don't live in the same city?
Is one slightly taller than the other?
Letter I sent to the HeraldSun.
I read your paper online from time to time and I have a simple question. Why do you allow columnists such as Andrew Bolt to turn off comments to their columns?
I can understand moderating for profanity, etc., but by turning off comments Mr. Bolton is allowed to disseminate absolute untruths and lies without being challenged.
For example, he recently posted a column wherein he recently attacked proponents of the hypothesis of global warming by citing to a report issued by the Queensland Office of Climate Change as it allegedly relates to an absence to warn about flooding.
However, Mr. Bolton cherrypicks one chapter, Chapter 4, out of 17 chapters and ignores references to flooding in flooding mentioned in Chapters 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16.
This seems to be a recurring pattern for Mr. Bolt, both his deliberate misrepresentation of facts and his turning off comments to avoid being challenged with respect thereto.
Based on Mr. Bolt's behaviour, I can only conclude that he is a hypocritical, lying, mendacious poltroon.
Respectfully yours,
Howard M. Appel
Our ABC goes beyond the "don't mention Climate Change" policy but seems to have adopted a faux news-like policy of cast doubt where possible. As an example, last Friday on the AM program they ran an item about the data release from the WMO and a quick interview with Michel Jarraud the sec-general. The ABC couldn't leave it there could they but had to interview Bob Carter and no kidding the transcript says "Professor Carter says the last 150 years have been among the coolest in the past 10,000 years of the Earth's history." Wow - does he live in an alternative universe. But what is the ABC doing running such rubbish? I sent in 8c worth of protest. Transcript at
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2011/s3117917.htm - read the rest and weep at where the ABC has gone.
I can't believe that any reputable news organization would disallow commenting. I think I've answered my own question on how reputable they really are.
The no-comments thing is not a big conspiracy or anything. If the last few years are any indication, Bolt normally takes time off from his blog mid year, and also from christmas to australia day.
It seems that he mus do this in part because his team of moderators is on holiday. This year, for the first time, it looks as though he has decided to keep posting without his team of moderators, and just disallow comments.
I don't see any reason to get steamed up over this - i expect comments will be available again after australia day, if previous years are any indication.
#47 - the documentary "Science under attack" was broadcast by the BBC last night. Delingpole was extraordinarily floored by a simple explanation of consensus by Sir Paul Nurse - it is really quite remarkable. I have a review of the programme on [my blog](http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2011/01/25/science-under-attack/).
Yes, as Steve says, please don't ask about the curtain.
Thank you for your cooperation, citizen. The computer is your friend.
Bolt has another column which is repeated in the Sydney Daily Telegraph this morning, essentially saying that in a warming world, you can't possibly have both flooding and drought.
The science on why this actually is very possible (even probable) is not that complicated to understand - even for someone of average intellect.
Hmmm.....just realised the irony of what I just wrote above.
Mike, I don't suppose he asks anyone with competence for an explanation?
Perhaps in 'Bolt Land' he just knows it all?
Some IPCC assessments of Australia's hydrological response to global warming:
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/index.php?idp=72
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/index.php?idp=75
And one more:
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/index.php?idp=62
@56
I've never known Bolt to ask anyone with reputable qualifications for an explanation, Janet.
Which is understandable - if you know you're not going to like the answer, don't ask the question. Bolt adheres to this philosophy rigorously.
I do love this blog. For example:
"Did I mention that the author of hauntingthelibrary is a DDT wanker, too?"
Nicely blunt and to the point.
The floods in Queensland were no where near as bad as the one in 74, and I live in Gayndah. The water level was no where near as high as the last one in 74.
One thing though some councils in other country towns have allowed more housing on flood prone areas that should not of been built on.
Are we seeing the decline of bolt, hav'nt read a provocative piece since his court case, has he been done in by a group of Aboriginals