Serious question now : do you really believe/agree with what Bob Brown is saying? Or are you going along with the support just because you support his political party? He has no facts or even scientific support for his statement. To state that the Australian coal industry has somehow caused major flooding is to indulge in bald-faced lying of the type that only agenda-driven politicians can manage. The one data point of worse flooding in 1893 before the coal industry even existed is case closed for most rational people. Not even the most activist climate scientist is prepared to definitively link the floods to warming temperature, let along the percentage of warming attributed to co2 emissions, let alone the 1% of global co2 emissions that Australia accounts for. About the best you'll get is 'global warming may have contributed to the flooding'. And that's hardly a smoking gun of the type Brown is fantasizing about.
If I was a supporter of Bob Brown I would be embarassed by this particular outburst.
I wouldn't be. Bob Brown has form on this sort of thing. He blamed the ACT and Victoria bushfires on global warming also. Basically his major supporters at this point must be the forgetful and the shameless.
Here's my question on climate change: it is by now widely accepted that climate change is responsible both for droughts and for flooding rains. That is, climate change can give us more rain at some times and less rain at others.
I'm willing to accept that. But then how do we know that it wasn't acting to give us less rain on this particular occasion? How do we know that climate change didn't save us from an even worse flood?
Well, anthropogenic (as in human caused, via greenhouse gas emissions) global warming is a scientific theory.
A scientific theory has to have a hypothesis (human caused emissions of gases cause the globe to warm in a significant way) and a null hypothesis (human caused emissiosn of gases do not cause the globe to warm in a significant way). No arguments there, that's not controversial.
However, for a theory to be scientific, they have to be falsifiable. That is, there has to be a way of proving them false. But nowadays Anthropogenic Global Warming, now packaged into the catch-all Climate Change, and has been linked with these following items: more droughts, more rain, less snow, more snow, higher temperatures and lower temperatures. As every single type of weather pattern or climate outcome is now predicted by the theory, and as such it cannot be falsified. It's not a scientific theory anymore in that case. It's morphed from a scientific theory (more GHG makes the global temperature go up) into a belief system (any type of human-caused emissions causes bad weather somewhere). It's commonplace for media and activists to now link any weather outside of normal benign conditions with 'climate change'.
Normal or pleasant weather (such as pleasant summers or mild winters) are never linked with climate change - only adverse weather.
Hence Bob Brown has linked both heatwaves and bushfires and cool temperatures and flooding with climate change. Because every type of weather related event now proves the theory, there are none that disprove it.
The current weather conditions in Australia are well within historic recorded variability, and Australia's climate record is pretty short. Climate change is meant to have started either in 1850 or 1940, depending on who you listen to. But in many cases, more extreme weather was recorded prior to these dates than is found now.
But climate change has stopped being a scientific theory and now is a politicised quasi religion for some. That's a shame because researching and undestanding the climate is very important for the resource dependent world we live in. But research cannot go forwards when it is viewed through the prism of a bad theory, in the same way the luminifurous ether had to be discarded to understand light.
And for anyone who doesn't agree with me, I ask this question : what would it take for you to believe the theory has been falsified?
If I was a supporter of Bob Brown I would be embarassed by this particular outburst.