This is the second time that I have agreed with the gist of comments from Germaine Greer. This woman gets it!! The first time that I agreed with Greer was about the causes of the devastating bush fires in Australia two years ago. In that instance Greer took the Greenies and the Globull warmists to task over their attempts to claim that the most devastating fire in Marysville and other areas in Victoria was due to Globull warming. On that occasion Greer made observations that I had also learned in the classroom.
This time Greer is refuting the attempts by Globull warmists to claim that the floods in Queensland have something to do with climate change (it does not).
Here is a part of what Greer had to say in her column:
What’s going on in Australia is rain… The ground is swollen with months of it. The new downpours have nowhere to go but sideways, across the vast floodplains of this ancient continent. We all learned the poem at school, about how ours is “a sunburnt country . . . of droughts and flooding rains"… And yet we still don’t get it. After 10 years of drought, we are having the inevitable flooding rains. The pattern is repeated regularly and yet Australians are still taken by surprise.
The meteorologists will tell you that the current deluge is a product of La Niña. At fairly regular intervals, atmospheric pressure on the western side of the Pacific falls; the trade winds blow from the cooler east side towards the trough, pushing warm surface water westwards towards the bordering land masses. As the water-laden air is driven over the land it cools and drops its load. In June last year the bureau of meteorology issued a warning that La Niña was about “to dump buckets” on Australia. In 1989-90 La Niña brought flooding to New South Wales and Victoria, in 1998 to New South Wales and Queensland… In Brisbane the benchmark was the flood of 1974; most Queenslanders are unaware that the worst flood in Brisbane’s history happened in 1893. Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to “get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer”. So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, “She’ll be right, mate”. She wasn’t.
It takes La Niña to bring rain to the inland, in such quantities that it can hardly be managed. Manage it Australians must. The Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane river was built to protect the city of Brisbane from another flood like the one of 1974. For years it has been at 10% of capacity [er, that’s a gross exaggeration, actually, but, yet, it was alarmingly low for a while], so when it filled this year nobody wanted to let any of the precious water out. It eventually became clear that the dam had filled to 190% of its capacity, and the authorities realised with sinking hearts not only that the floodgates would have to be opened [even wider, actually], but that the opening would coincide with a king tide in Moreton Bay. The question nobody [pardon?] has been heard to ask is whether or not the level of water in the dam should have been reduced gradually, beginning weeks ago…
Hat tip: Andrew Bolt
The poem that Greer mentions is “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar. We all had to learn that poem by rote. We had to recite it perfectly when we were in school. Here is the full poem:
The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
I have changed the colour of the relevant stanzas of the poem because Dorothea Mackellar in her poem has encapsulated the truth about the Australian landscape. The droughts and the floods are a normal part of this country. This is why Governor Lachlan Macquarie designated the five Macquarie towns for settlements. He picked areas on high ground so that people would not be impacted by those floods.
Yet Australians today seem to not understand the very nature of the Australian weather patterns. This is yet another reason why these rains seem to have caught many people unawares. They should have been prepared, but they believed the big lie about Globull warming, and they believed the lie that the days of soaking rain were finished. They failed to understand the nature of La Nina.
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