Quote:

I see you have resorted to ad hom. Anyone reading the thread 'should' have caught on to the point I was making reading your original post and my subsequent quote of it to make a point of how lacking it was in any substance (which BTW, characterises a lot of your posts)

Either you think that the material here needs to be dumbed down for the majority of readers or you are on a playing field all by yourself.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assign you the former rather than the latter for the moment

Jason Crowther wrote on Jun 6^th, 2011 at 9:20pm:


Seems we have yet another sock.  How can someone make a judgement on all of mozz's posts after being here for what...a day?

Be sure to switch on the ABC for tonight's episode of Q&A - and perhaps to comment upon the show at this dedicated thread: -

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1302552215/15#21

Luke Fowler wrote on Jun 6^th, 2011 at 9:35pm:




Flannery????
LOL an extremist, and really not a very good one.
Scaremongering alarmist of the year when in  2007 he stated that Queensland's dams would be empty in 2 years


Can anyone identify just where the man-made emissions impacted upon Queenslands rainfall?

All three of us are old men now, of differing achievements and views, but none of us would be easily persuaded that the recent floods were a new thing. They come and go in long cycles, spaced apart by droughts. When white explorers first set off to cross the country's vast interior, they didn't have to go very far before they encountered the sort of parched terrain that would eventually convert them into corpses suitably posed for Sidney Nolan. There was nothing wrong with the weather, only with their expectations. As any Aboriginal might have told them had they known how to ask, the Australian climate is simply like that. For Queensland, this has been one of several floods in a hundred years, and not even the worst. Though the fashionable propaganda about the unprecedented nature of the inhospitable weather has been largely the product of inner-city intellectuals who rarely see the inland except when they fly over it on their way to another city, the truth is that even a city-dweller will catch on to the facts if he or she lives long enough. First it never rains, but then it pours. Hence the expression, perhaps; and hence Dorothea Mackellar's poem, certainly.

Younger people can less easily call up the past, and usually younger journalists are the worst people of all to grasp an historical context, but this time the lore handed down by the "the wrinklies" has done its work. Even the most dedicated of warmist journalists — the ones who will go on preaching the doctrine until they expire, all undaunted that a more general doomsday never arrived — are against the Greens on this issue, the Greens having perhaps failed to realise that if they absurdly oversell the forthcoming catastrophe then they threaten the careers of those who fancy themselves to be selling it by the right amount. As to that, the warmist argument should always have looked shaky in Australia — which produces only a tiny percentage of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, and could therefore hope to reduce global warming only by a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage — but there were large reservoirs of credulity to greet it, perhaps because Australia is blessed with an intelligentsia which, almost without a dissenting voice, is united by the conviction that the high standard of living they enjoy is the product of the West's contempt for the world's poor.

We could quarrel forever about whether this display of concern is genuine or feigned. Let it suffice for now to say that the virtual entirety of the country's higher media, with the ABC at the apex, could usually be relied upon to blame Western industrial society if something untoward happened to the weather in, say, Bangladesh. But this time the bad weather was happening at home, and the reality principle suddenly got a look-in, because there were too many people in possession of a folk memory about those droughts and flooding rains. Even by his erstwhile admirers, Green Party Senator Bob Brown was thought to have gone over the top by saying firstly, that man-made global warming had caused the floods, and secondly, that the coal mining industry should pay the bill. This absurdity proved too much. Even the coal miners' union thought he was talking nonsense.

More importantly, the journalists won't wear it either. They have been quoting Dorothea Mackellar's poem in their articles. The famous lines about the droughts and flooding rains get quoted from memory in every television discussion. You can appreciate how unusual this is, only if you realise the completeness of the shut-out that previously obtained. Until the rains came, the voice of Professor Tim Flannery had been loud in the land. More moderate professors, who said that there might indeed be some man-made global warming, but not a lot, were heard only occasionally. Professor Flannery was heard all the time, and always predicting that the major cities would run out of water. The nice thing about him was that he was without guile and therefore ready to say that a certain city would run out of water in some verifiable time: say, two years. Two years later, abundant rain would be falling on that city. But he always had an explanation, and the media always liked his story best, because it was a story about Australia eventually and inevitably running out of water, even though what appeared to be water might currently be seen to be falling out of the sky. Then an awful lot of it fell on his head at once and he was finally seen to be short of credibility.

Leading a productive life that didn't end until 1968, she was still in action when I was standing beside my desk reciting her most celebrated lines in the hope of being given what was then called an "early mark". (I imagine it still is, but I doubt if you have to recite poetry to get one.) Her work added up to several volumes and nobody except scholars has read all of it recently. But the same is true for Wordsworth, and an awful lot of ordinary people have been remembering that chunk from the second stanza of "My Country". Some of them might go on to read the rest of the poem. They will be well rewarded. Listen to this:

   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.  

Ideally, you might say, poetry should never be that relevant to current circumstances. If it is, it's the equivalent of a picture postcard, is it not? Yes, but there are picture postcards that help define an era. Another question: can poetry ever be at its best when evoking something so large as an entire country? Well, if Shakespeare hadn't thought so, he would never have given that speech to John of Gaunt in Richard II, Act II, Scene I, the speech that ends with "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

There might possibly be a Romanian equivalent. But there is no doubt at all that Mackellar's masterwork is in the same ball-park, if not quite in the same league. The more cerebral poets, along with the stricter critics, have always hated the very suggestion that poetry might mainly depend on the catching of a mood. But it almost always does, and patriotism is a mood too. It's a raw emotion and easily perverted, and a nation with too much of it is bound to cause trouble, but a nation entirely without it is lost indeed. This year, at a moment of real crisis, Australia discovered, or rediscovered, that it was in possession of a simple-seeming work of art that could help it to feel proud of itself, even in adversity. Pride comes from facing facts, and in Australia the facts are that the climate will starve you or wash you away, unless you build something. Banning certain categories of light-bulb will never be enough. Such measures imply the desirability of a return to some kind of benevolent natural state. There is a natural state all right, but any benevolence is our idea. The blue sky is pitiless.'

Brisbane January 2011: It never rains...does it.

creep wrote on Jun 6^th, 2011 at 9:53pm:


http://www.derm.qld.gov.au/environmental_management/state_of_the_environment/sta...

Summary of Queensland rainfall patterns since 2003
Extremely dry conditions were developing across eastern Australia as State of the Environment Queensland 2003 was being prepared, and the period 2002-03 turned out to be one of the worst short-term droughts in Australia's history (Nicholls 2004). In the year April 2002 to March 2003, 40% of Queensland received extremely low rainfall (Figure 3.1a). Although the El NiÑo signature was relatively weak during the period, the impact on Australian rainfall was severe (Plummer et al. 2003).

Conditions eased somewhat the following year, near-average rainfall being received across most of the state in 2003-04 (Figure 3.1b). El NiÑo conditions returned in 2004, however, and the first four months of 2005 were extremely dry across southern Queensland (Figure 3.1c).

Although some areas received useful falls during the winter and spring of 2005, December saw a return of below-average rainfall conditions across southern and central Queensland. Although Figure 3.1d shows average conditions across much of the state, in two-thirds of this area rainfalls were closer to below-average than to above-average.

The rainfall pattern for the remainder of the period was mixed. The late-season tropical cyclone Monica brought anomalously high rainfalls to northern Queensland in April 2006, and many inland regions received good falls in January 2007. However, twelve-month rainfall deficits in the south-east were among the worst on record (Figure 3.1e).

The rainfall plots for individual years given in Figure 3.1 show that the recent climate in Queensland has been characterised by low-rainfall years interspersed with average years. Figure 3.2, which shows the rainfall for the five years to March 2007, reveals the full magnitude of the accumulated rainfall deficit in Queensland. Nearly all of the state had below-average or well below-average rainfall, and 36% of the state received extremely low rainfall in this period. The seriousness of the rainfall deficiencies is shown in Figure 3.3: areas in south-west Queensland, the Whitsunday Coast and some areas in the south-east received the lowest five-year totals on record.


Figure 3.3 Rainfall deficiencies for the five years to March 2007
Source: DNRW

astro_surf wrote on Jun 6^th, 2011 at 10:41pm:

What is your point on this. Are you practising becoming a weather person.