Posted on 01/15/2011 6:24:15 AM PST by giotto
Who, if anyone, is to blame for the terrible flooding in Brisbane? Commentators are pointing their collective finger at the usual suspects. For the extreme green magazine Grist, the floods expose mankinds arrogance in believing that he can build settlements anywhere he likes, even on floodplains...
But might there be another, so far overlooked, contributing factor to the floods? Might the politics of environmentalism itself the contemporary obsession with global warming as the greatest threat to mankind have exacerbated the impact of the flooding in Brisbane? ...
It is worth looking at a document called ClimateSmart 2050, which was published in 2007 by the Queensland government....The most striking thing about the document is its assumption that the main problem facing this part of Australia, along with most of the rest of the world, is essentially dryness brought about by global warming. I
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Yep. The dam was filled up to 80% - which meant there was no safety margin in case of heavy rain.
The insistence that Anthropogenic Global Warming caused the Brisbane disaster is - forgive me - a Flood Libel. The opposite is true.
After a bad flood in the normally dry Salt River bed in Phoenix, after a 70 year hiatus, local leaders decided to do something not particularly hard or expensive. To channelize the river bottom.
Not much to it, really, just use earth moving equipment to turn a shallow if wide river bed deeper. Just a foot or two deeper is all that is needed to handle a huge amount of water. Then put on some fence held gravel walls to reinforce the levee.
It worked. Just a few years after that, they had a flood with three times as much water, in excess of 250,000 cubic feet per second, and it was no trouble at all.
http://www.tempe.gov/lake/lakehistory/channelization.htm
(Just ignore the town lake part. That happened after the channelization.)
What I want to know is, what happened to common sense? Who put the lunatics in charge? And this article shows that it's not just in the US.
At least that's what would happen in California. Maybe Arizona could still do something like that.
The pix of the guy in the pink panties alone is worth hitting the link.
“For the extreme green magazine Grist, the floods expose mankinds arrogance in believing that he can ...”
control the weather(?)
LOL. I think it’s a Speedo.
Oops, make that 180% of functional capacity.
The dam operators had to - had to - pour water out of the dam right at the same time that the rainwater had saturated the ground run-off.
And the dam was crushingly full because of some idiot’s ingrained belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming.
As with Lake Pontchartrain in N.O., it's not Mother Nature that causes the worst problems, it's human corruption. In the case of Portchartrain, you may remember that funds allocated to repair and maintain its dam went into local politicians' pockets, and possibly some relatives' "stimulus." It wasn't Hurricane Katrina that flooded New Orleans, but the utterly preventable bursting of the dam.
In Brisbane, it sounds as if pols were paying attention to the BBC and Lefty donors, instead of the weathermen and the engineers.
Who put the lunatics in charge?
WE are all victims of a runaway incredibly stupid press&punditry&politico infrastructure.
NASA Satellites Capture a Stronger La Nina
"Although exacerbated by precipitation from a tropical cyclone, rainfalls of historic proportion in eastern Queensland, Australia have led to levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century," said David Adamec, Oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The copious rainfall is a direct result of La Niñas effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year."


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