Monday 23rd of December 2024
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pity about record heat and record floods, again...

upstaged by his own bullshit...

This is the Tony Abbott who thinks climate change is crap, or at other times that it might be happening, but that Australia has always had extreme weather events, so relax people — it’ll all be cool. No worries!

Of course, Australia has always had severe weather events, but they are quite obviously becoming more frequent and they are empirically becoming more extreme. Just in the last month, we’ve had searing record temperatures, raging bushfires and devastating floods on the Eastern seaboard. Right at this minute, while bushfires rage in Victoria, floods are destroying and taking lives in Bundaberg, Rockhampton and Brisbane (yet again) and other parts of Queensland.

And yet, even as this happens, Tony Abbott has the audacity to stand up on a Western Sydney basketball court – like some third-rate Obama – with 300 handpicked suburban Liberal Party groupies, to declare he is going to axe Australia’s carbon tax — about the only decent thing Australia is doing right now to try to help mitigate global warming.

As I sit here in my leaking house in Surfers Paradise, where part of the ceiling has collapsed and buckets and towels line our living room; as the winds howl and rage outside and threaten to take off our roof; and as the sand from the beach threatens to inundate our street — Tony Abbott has never looked – like his stunt – more “mini”, nor more absurd.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/tony-abbotts-mini-campaign-upstaged-by-heavenly-irony/

oswald dethrones tony...

Hundreds of Brisbane residents have begun moving their possessions to higher ground ahead of tomorrow's peak in the Brisbane River.

In scenes reminiscent of 2011, residents of low-lying Brisbane suburbs are preparing their properties for a flood.

Catherine Esler from Milton in the inner west lost almost everything when the first floor of her home went under two years ago.

She has been told the floodwaters will inundate the ground floor of her house this time around.

"It's pretty devastating, it happened two years ago and we're just reliving a nightmare," she said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-28/brisbane-logan-prepare-for-flood/4487584

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Hopefully Oswald will take Tony Abbott and his mini-nightmare with it...

When cyclone Evan hit Samoa

When cyclone Evan hit Samoa in mid December, then moved onto Fiji, I predicted in my "journal" another cyclone (or a re-formed residue of Evan) would hit the coast of Queensland just about when Cyclone Oswald hit Cape York... What makes Oswald "interesting" is a long trough running North/South that is presently inland slowly moving along the east coast of the country —  a trough in which Oswald is being drawn like a ball into a ditch, a bit like hurricane Sandy was drawn back into the mainland by a massive front... But the next weather that follows in Victoria is a cold front that is pushing cold moist air from the south northward, while Oswald is pushing warm moist air from the north southward... These two systems may (or may not) meet say tomorrow — but they're most likely going to bring a double whammy of humidity in a low pressure situation... 

The 20/twenty cricket match has been stopped by a shower for while in Melbourne... play about to resume when the empires are satisfied the grass has grown... 

More bad weather on the way?... Most likely... More heat? Sure... Soon.

tony's tangle wires while kite flying...

 

Don't worry, the federal Coalition's dream of moving a lot of Australia's population north of the Tropic of Capricorn ain't gonna happen. It's a crazy idea practically, politically and economically.

Presumably, it's a kite Tony Abbott is allowing to fly for a day or two to show how positive he is in his vision of our future. It's an idea some in the National Party would dearly love, but most in the Liberal Party will be appalled by.

For federal public servants, however, there would be an element of compulsion: some government departments and agencies would move to Darwin, Cairns, Townsville or Karratha, so you could move or find yourself a new job.

Northern Development is not a new idea, it's an old, discredited one, brought to us by the same people who wanted to turn back the rivers and who wasted millions on the Ord River dam in the Kimberleys, then built an unneeded railway from Alice Springs to Darwin that has always run at a large loss.It's a close relative of the dreams of building a multifunctionpolis in South Australia and establishing ''growth centres'' at places like Bathurst-Orange. It's the 1950s dream of ''decentralisation''.

It would be very hard to organise, facing constitutional and other legal barriers, active resistance from public servants and the need for huge monetary incentives to induce people to take part. On the experience of all previous such exercises, it would be a grand failure.

It would win the Nationals a few votes in parts of northern Australia where they don't need them, but lose the Liberals a lot of votes in the rest of the country. It would give Labor huge scope for scaremongering.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/tropical-tax-zone-plan-destined-to-be-a-grand-failure-20130207-2e03z.html#ixzz2KB9Cvn4L


Yep... Abbott is a crazy kite flying populist idiot...

 

not flying a kite...

Tony Abbott has moved to distance himself from a draft Coalition discussion paper which proposes offering relocation incentives and different tax rates to encourage people to move to northern Australia.

The document, called "Developing Northern Australia - a 2030 vision", describes the northern parts of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia as the "last frontier" and argues there is "tremendous potential" in the region for economic growth.

It suggests developing "key urban zones" around Darwin, Cairns/Townsville and Karratha, with the aim of boosting populations in those areas through immigration policies, relocation allowances, and personal income tax incentives.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-07/northern-tax-zones-not-coalition-policy-says-abbott/4505760?WT.svl=news4

see story above and toon at top...

salt is in the air...

Indonesia is banking on an unusual strategy to prevent further flooding in its inundated capital Jakarta, and officials claim that they are already seeing positive results.

 

They are using 'cloud seeding' — a weather modification technology often resorted to during drought. The method involves injecting clouds with substances that encourage the formation of ice crystals heavy enough to fall, thereby speeding up the production of rain.

Rain is the last thing that Indonesia needs now, as it has been experiencing heavy rainfall since mid-January.

But Indonesian scientists believe that inducing rains to fall over the ocean before the rainclouds reach the city will help prevent further flooding in Jakarta.

"We are mimicking nature. It is easy to make rain in most clouds above the sea. We found out that salt from sea water, which evaporates from the sea, accelerates the rain process because it encourages the cloud particles to adsorb water," Tri Handoko Seto, a top official of the Weather Modification Technical Unit of the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology, tells SciDev.Net.

Last month (26 January), military planes carrying tonnes of salt started the cloud seeding operation scattering salt onto rainclouds across the ocean. The operation is expected to last two months.

The operation has come into the national spotlight recently because of the Indonesian government's claims that it had succeeded in decreasing Jakarta's rainfall rate, particularly from 26 -29 January when local meteorologists had predicted heavier rains and flooding.

"We have conducted an evaluation using the data in our radar device, which records cloud development and movement. From our analysis, cloud seeding contributed to the decrease of rainfall in Jakarta during this period," says Seto.

But Zev Levin, chair in atmospheric physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel, says that it is difficult to prove how much rain would have fallen before reaching the city had the clouds not been seeded.

To prove the effectiveness of cloud seeding, Levin says, well designed experiments must be conducted based on robust statistical design with an unseeded control area and random allocation of seeding.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/19/cloud-seeding-flooding-indonesia

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Interestingly, some of our own Aussie meteorologists, described the pocket of heat that cooked this continent bringing in record temperatures in Sydney (45.8 degree C) and everywhere (46.5 at the airport) on 18 january 2013 was due to the monsoon being "held up" near Indonesia...  

The Australian monsoon, simply called "the Wet", usually starts around late November till April and brings regular tropical rains (storms) to the northern part of the country... Did the cloud seeding have an onflow effect on the "wet El Nino" that Australia is experiencing now on the eastern side, especially Sydney?... Good question... As more CO2 reaches the atmosphere, water vapour becomes "more abundant and more erratic" with less ability to saturate (reach dew point and form clouds) due to "higher temperatures" but this is complexed by more water vapour being absorbed by warmer air. Thus when the dew point is reached and "the heavens open" the downpours become more catastrophic because there is more water  "up there"... Simple, yet very complex dynamics in which a fluttering butterfly in the New Guinea rain forests can affect the weather in Melbourne...

As well one as to consider the importance of jet streams, above Australia, that a few days ago seemed "absent" above the continent while South west of the country, in mid Antartcic ocean, they were raging at near 250 kms/h... 

Note: Tony Abbott's idea of building dams to collect all this water may sound okay on paper but it's gigantic lunacy, especially on the scale he's talking about... First one needs to have collecting reservoirs and most of the country north is flat as a pancake. Most reservoirs would be 'expansive"... Second, the rate of evaporation is far superior to that of rainfall (the man in the street sarcastically called Tony's dams "evaporation ponds"). Third, most of the soils are poor and below their thin red crust, they are salty. Most of the times, the temperature is overbearing... Noisy air conditioning units run 24 hours daily in the dongas...