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Did Australia's obsession with global warming contribute to the Brisbane floods?
The Telegraph ^ | January 14th, 2011 | Brendan O'Neill

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 mankind’s 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 ...


TOPICS: Australia/New Zealand; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: australia; brisbanefloods; floodlibel; globalwarming; queensland

1 posted on 01/15/2011 6:24:18 AM PST by giotto
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To: giotto

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.


2 posted on 01/15/2011 6:30:20 AM PST by agere_contra (The Left has 'expanded its moral imagination' ever since the 1800s - always with horrifying results)
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To: giotto

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.)


3 posted on 01/15/2011 7:20:53 AM PST by yefragetuwrabrumuy
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To: agere_contra
Flood Libel--Very good.

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.

4 posted on 01/15/2011 7:28:39 AM PST by giotto
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy
Interesting. But that was completed 17 years ago. Today, if something like that were proposed, they'd probably take 10 years just to study its impact on the local ecology, then another 10 years to argue about it, then another 10 years to decide which incompetent victim group would do the job. Meanwhile, the environmental wackos would decide that, rather than increase the depth of the river bed, they should just dam up the river altogether.

At least that's what would happen in California. Maybe Arizona could still do something like that.

5 posted on 01/15/2011 7:40:02 AM PST by giotto
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To: giotto

The pix of the guy in the pink panties alone is worth hitting the link.


6 posted on 01/15/2011 8:07:01 AM PST by sportutegrl
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To: giotto

“For the extreme green magazine Grist, the floods expose mankind’s arrogance in believing that he can ...”

control the weather(?)


7 posted on 01/15/2011 8:18:38 AM PST by Optimist
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To: sportutegrl

LOL. I think it’s a Speedo.


8 posted on 01/15/2011 8:58:37 AM PST by giotto
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To: agere_contra

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.


9 posted on 01/15/2011 9:02:43 AM PST by agere_contra (The Left has 'expanded its moral imagination' ever since the 1800s - always with horrifying results)
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To: giotto
in recent weeks, the Wivenhoe dam was running at 150 per cent to 180 per cent capacity, which means that the authorities had to start releasing water from the dam at the same time that the rain-caused flash floods were hitting Brisbane’s river system – effectively contributing to the deluge.

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.

10 posted on 01/15/2011 9:43:37 AM PST by SamuraiScot
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To: giotto

Who put the lunatics in charge?

WE are all victims of a runaway incredibly stupid press&punditry&politico infrastructure.


11 posted on 01/15/2011 10:54:25 AM PST by NormsRevenge (Semper Fi ... Godspeed .. Monthly Donor Onboard .. Obama: Epic Fail or Bust!!!)
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To: giotto
Who, if anyone, is to blame for the terrible flooding in Brisbane?

Sarah Palin ?
12 posted on 01/15/2011 2:03:07 PM PST by stylin19a
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To: giotto; marvlus; Fractal Trader; Whenifhow; scripter; grey_whiskers; proud_yank; markomalley; ...
 




Beam me to Planet Gore !

13 posted on 01/15/2011 3:13:05 PM PST by steelyourfaith (ObamaCare Death Panels: a Final Solution to the looming Social Security crisis ?)
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To: giotto
NASA itself claims the Australian floods were caused by La Nina.

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 Niña’s effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year."

14 posted on 01/15/2011 3:52:29 PM PST by justa-hairyape
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To: giotto

One of the many dangers of global warming...
15 posted on 01/15/2011 4:02:39 PM PST by palmer (Cooperating with Obama = helping him extend the depression and implement socialism.)
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To: giotto; 11B40; A Balrog of Morgoth; A message; ACelt; Aeronaut; AFPhys; AlexW; America_Right; ...
DOOMAGE!

Global Warming PING!

You have been pinged because of your interest in environmentalism, alarmist wackos, mainstream media doomsday hype, and other issues pertaining to global warming.

Freep-mail me to get on or off: Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to all note-worthy threads on global warming.

Global Warming on Free Republic

Latest from Global Warming News

Latest from Real Climate

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Latest from Greenie Watch

16 posted on 01/15/2011 9:44:20 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (up)
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