Queensland Floods. “An area the size of France and Germany Combined”
January 2, 2011
Days of pounding rain last week left much of northeastern Australia swamped by a sea of muddy water, with flooding affecting about 200,000 people in an area larger than France and Germany combined. The rain has stopped, but rivers are still rising and overflowing into low-lying communities as the water moves toward the ocean.
I haven’t been able to find the audio, but the host interviewed a Red Cross operative in the area, resolutely avoided the question of what might have caused this, except to ask, rhetorically, “What might have caused this?..”
Following the massive Nashville event last spring, Joe Romm interviewed Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who had this to say:
I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” Butthere is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.
Climate Progress also had a worthwhile post on North Carolina’s second “500 Year Rainfall in 11 years”.
In Australia, this has been going on for a month, in the area’s wettest spring on record.
The video below comes under the heading – CO2: Great for Crops!