Articles Tagged "Queensland Flood"

Alan Jones is Australia's most popular talk back presenter. Alan Jones is a phenomenon. He is described by many as Australia's greatest orator and motivational speaker. Alan has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable to the largest Breakfast audience in Australia.

Alan Jones speaks with The Australian's Hedley Thomas about the Wivenhoe dam report

See also: Anna Bligh says legal action likely over floods in the way of inquiry findings - Sean Parnell - The Australian

Click source for MUST LISTEN interview

Image source: The Australian

COOLER weather in Australia in the past two years due to the rain-inducing La Nina weather pattern does not undermine the collective evidence of climate change, the nation's peak scientific and weather organisations say.

In their second State of the Climate report released today, the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology say evidence shows global warming continued and human activities were mainly responsible.

The report says natural climate variability had affected the global mean temperature and sea levels during the past century but much less than greenhouse gases, which continued to rise.

"It is clear that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will result in significant further global warming," the report says.

(CNN) -- Australia is emerging from the grip of its strongest La Nina weather pattern on record -- a meteorological event that brings either devastating floods or, in the case of its counterpart El Nino, scorching droughts.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the weather pattern that brought dramatic floods to southern Queensland a year ago -- one of the most intense on record -- is waning, but oceans around the eastern seaboard are still warm enough to cause high pressure systems that dump months of rainfall in a matter of a few days.

"There was a very slow moving trough over inland Australia that stretched from the far northwest, through the Northern Territory and on to the southeast including New South Wales and Victoria," said Jenny Sturrock, acting senior meteorologist at the National Metereological Centre.

"When it meets all that nice warm moisture from the Coral and Tasman Seas, we got several days of heavy rainfall that led to flooding," she said.

"This type of broad scale pattern is more conducive to rainfall but it's also exacerbated by short-term meteorological patterns too."

Updated below by Alan Jones and Piers Corbyn

As Brisbane's Wivenhoe Dam begins lowering its water level ahead of the flood season, a Bureau of Meteorology forecaster explains why Queensland's summer will be different from the one that sparked devastating floods in January.

Earlier this month the Queensland Government announced it would lower the water level of the dam supplying Brisbane from 80 per cent to 75 per cent on advice from the weather bureau.

The bureau is predicting Brisbane and parts of south-east Queensland will have a 70 to 75 per cent chance of above-average rainfall between November and January, similar to what was predicted last year.

It also says the La Nina weather event, which brings with it conditions for high levels of rain, is back.

So why is this summer predicted to be different from the conditions which caused January's historic floods?

BOM manager of climate prediction services Dr Andrew Watkins says while people may draw conclusions from this year's rainfall prediction, all the extreme weather factors of last year are not lined up again this year.

With La Nina back for another summer and above average rainfall predicted for much of Australia, the weather is about to become more of a pain than people realise.

The notion of rain pain is often dismissed as a myth, but experts say there is now enough evidence to suggest it exists.

What's more, they say sufferers of conditions like arthritis and chronic pain can actually use their level of discomfort to tell when the weather is about to change.

La Nina was responsible for the Brisbane floods and Cyclone Yasi, and the Bureau of Meteorology says Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria in particular should brace for another wet summer.

Dr Graeme Jones, professor of rheumatology and epidemiology at the Menzies Research Institute, says the days of mythical rain pain are long gone.

He says arthritis sufferers' pain levels are without a doubt affected by the weather.

INSURANCE company chiefs are expected to be grilled over their handling of individual flood claims following last summer's widespread disasters.

As the weather bureau warned this morning of a 60 to 80 per cent chance of higher than average rainfall in this coming La Nina weather year, the floods inquiry resumed in Brisbane this morning.

It heard from electricity and water providers that were inundated during the summer storms.

Energex chief Chris Arnold told the public hearing the electricity utility was seeking the state government to amend the laws to allow the utility greater access to locations for power access.

Mr Arnold said while substations were in areas that were "as flood-proof as possible", some CBD locations were inundated during the floods.

Chance of extreme rainfall doubled

Queensland told to drain the dams

Last summer wild weather claimed 35 lives

A SECRET weather bureau report predicting another summer of wild weather will force the Queensland Government to open the floodgates on major dams.

The dramatic new forecast delivered last Wednesday, but kept under wraps will prompt the Government to reverse measures to keep the dams close to full before the wet season.

The Bureau of Meteorology has provided the federal and Queensland governments with the latest La Nina data, which shows the chances of extreme rainfall have doubled in recent weeks.

Queensland Police has also been briefed by the forecasters. Premier Anna Bligh announced on September 30 that Wivenhoe and North Pine would not be drained hoping that Queensland would not be hit hard again.

Click source to read FULL report from Darrell Giles

A STRING of natural disasters led by the Japanese tsunami and earthquake sent insurance market Lloyd’s of London crashing to its costliest six months on record, as it posted a first-half loss of £697m.

The specialist insurance market’s loss compared with profits of £628m a year earlier, reflecting a total of £6.7bn in claims during the first half, making it the costliest six-month period in Lloyd’s 323-year history.

The unprecedented claims total included £2.7bn in catastrophe-related claims, more than 10 times Lloyd’s average disaster loss during the first six months of the year.

Insurers have been battered by a glut of natural disasters between January and May, resulting in many posting heavy half-year losses.

As well as the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March, insurers have been hit by New Zealand’s earthquake, heavy flooding in Australia and tornadoes in the US.

Lloyd’s said 2011 is already shaping up to be the second most expensive year ever for insurers. However, the insurance market, which is made up of 88 underwriting syndicates, said it is strong enough to cope with a potential further spate of big claims.

Flooding in Queensland in January 2011 Photo: EPA

Chris Huhne's 'carbon saving' measures could double energy bills within nine years - so Australian floods might help to wash down the British voter's bitter pills.

Sir John Beddington may have thought he was earning his £165,000 a year as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser when he was last week reported as proposing that it should “use climate-related disasters overseas to persuade British voters to accept unpopular policies for curbing carbon emissions”.

The sort of disasters Sir John had in mind included last year’s Russian heatwave, the floods in Pakistan and Queensland and the current drought in East Africa, all of which climate zealots have rushed to blame on global warming. But Sir John, who is a professor in “applied population biology”, may not be aware that each of these examples has been shown by scientific studies not to be evidence of “climate change”.

A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters confirms that the parts of Russia affected by last year’s heatwave “show no significant warming trend” over the past 130 years. Similar studies have shown that the 2010 Paikstan floods were no worse than those in 1929.

The flooding in Queensland was lower than that in 1974. It was only turned into a disaster by the sudden release of water from a dam, which had been held back on the orders of state politicians who were obsessed with the need to store water because of their fear that global warming would cause droughts. Even the UN now says that the Horn of Africa’s worst drought for 60 years cannot be ascribed to climate change.

Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn

(TheWeatherSpace.com) -- La Nina has a firm grip on Australia as claiming the second wettest summer on record in 111 years.

You heard that right, Australia's BOM is saying the national average rainfall is 354.7mm, 70 percent above normal and second behind 1973-74 when over 419mm was recorded.

Back in 1973-74 one of the strongest La Nina events on record was the culprit behind the record breaker. This year was a La Nina so it was no wonder the land down under saw so much rainfall.