Floods, fire and drought: Australia, a country in the grip of extreme weather bingo

Global warming has caused an increase in the moisture content of the atmosphere, and also more stalling of weather patterns, which is leading to more events of extreme flooding.

The denialism noted in the article ties back to my previous post, on moral decision making.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/10/floods-fire-and-drought-australia-a-country-in-the-grip-of-extreme-weather-bingo

Adam Morton and Ben Smee in Townsville
Sat 9 Feb 2019 16.09 EST

The people of Townsville know about heavy rain, but this was new. Over the past fortnight, the northern Queensland city’s 180,000 residents have been hit by a monsoon strengthened by a low-pressure front that dragged moist air south from the equator to Australia’s top end.

It dumped an unprecedented 1.4 metres [4.6 feet] of rain in less than two weeks – roughly double what falls on London in a year.

The ensuing chaos has wrecked homes and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to property. Two men have drowned and videos posted to social media have shown crocodiles climbing trees and taking to elevated highways in search of shelter.

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Asked if he was concerned that climate change was making floods more extreme, he was clear: “If anyone mentions that, I’ll punch ‘em.”

“The weather events seem to be getting more extreme. Whether it’s manmade or natural or who knows.

“These people crying about climate change, they’ve got to look at how they live themselves. They’re still driving around in cars, they’re still wearing nice clothes. They’re using mobile phones. So give that up, I’ll start listening to you.

“City people are stalling us. We need the economy here to be boosted.”

In a city with nearly one in ten unemployed his view holds purchase. And so goes some of the public debate in Australia about the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

See the previous post on how money affects moral decision making.

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The north Queensland flooding is far from the only punishing event in what has been, even by the standards of the continent, a historically hostile summer.

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Australia is, of course, no stranger to extreme weather - bushfire, flooding, rains and skin-peeling heat are central to its history and mythology - but the contrasts this southern summer have been particularly stark. Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University and councillor with publicly funded communication body the Climate Council, says few parts of the continent have not experienced an extreme weather event in recent months.

More than 3000 kilometres to Townsville’s south, Tasmania is burning. For the second time in four years, dry lightning strikes sparked a series of blazes on the usually cool, temperate island, many of them in the vast world heritage wilderness area that covers nearly half its territory. In one 30-hour period in mid-January, an extended electrical storm danced across the summer sky, sending down more than 2400 lightning strikes without rain.

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Elsewhere, communities in the sparsely populated Australian outback continue to deal with the fallout from a long-term drought. On social media, a Greens MP in New South Wales, David Shoebridge, highlighted a constituent forced to pay $70 a week on drinking water for her and her son after the raw water supply in the town of Walgett was turned off.

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For most, the most obvious extreme weather shift has been the heat. January was Australia’s hottest month on record by a wide margin, with average national temperatures nearly a degree [nearly 2F] beyond the previous benchmark and 2.9 degrees [5.2F] warmer than the long-term mean. In New South Wales, the average temperature was nearly 6 degrees [10.8F] hotter than what has been considered normal for the past century.

Blair Trewin, senior climatologist with the Bureau of Meteorology, says: “Even taking into account the sustained long-term warming trend of a degree or so over a century, this is certainly at the far end of expectations.”

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“For those people, work’s been hard to come by for a while and that’s been a real issue for people in Townsville,” she said.

“There’s not really been much put forward, and this region is really dependent on mining. People want to see jobs in mining, they want to see Adani go ahead. That’s the priority for people at the moment. Whether they agree with climate change, care about it or whatever, that’s a secondary priority to making ends meet now.

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Lesley Hughes, who helped launch a Climate Council report called Weather Gone Wild, says emissions are effectively loading the dice to increase the likelihood of an extreme weather event. “What we are now observing is consistent with the climate science – as the Earth warms up, more extreme weather is inevitable,” she says.

In the case of the floods, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which in the event of a storm can mean heavier rain in a shorter space of time.

In the case of the Tasmanian fires, not only has the state become warmer (2.5 degrees above average in January) but low-pressure weather patterns that used to produce rain over the state have also moved further south as the climate has warmed, and evaporation rates have increased. Both increase the risk of dry lightning strike causing a blaze. Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, recorded just 0.4 millimetres of rain in January, the lowest on record.

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tags: extreme weather, severe weather