DETECTING CLIMATE CHANGE IN CURRENT WEATHER IS DUMB

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is generally in favour of the global warming theory. It gets them funding. But they are good enough scientists to point out that current weather proves nothing. Strange weather goes back a lot further than what global warming theory would require. Just a few excerpts:

"Australians don't need to have read Dorothea Mackellar's My Country to know that they live on a continent of drought, flooding rains and many other spectacularly savage climatic events. Now staff at the Bureau of Meteorology have captured it all in Drought, Dust and Deluge: A Century of Climate Extremes in Australia.

"We live today in a time of speculation and concern about the possible impacts of global warming," writes the bureau's director, Geoff Love, in the foreword to the new book. "In particular, there is increasing speculation that some weather and climate extremes are becoming more frequent. In speculating about the future, however, it is instructive to consider the past. In order to fully appreciate the significance of what the future might hold, we should be aware that the climate, particularly its extremes, is neither steady, nor necessarily undergoing a constant trend."

Flooding is, overall, Australia's costliest form of natural disaster with average losses estimated at $400 million a year, the bureau says. In 1972, a thunderstorm dumped a record 78.5 millimetres on Melbourne's CBD in one hour - 100,000 tonnes of water over one square kilometre. The resulting flash flood inundated shops and put the trains out of action.....

The world record for the longest sequence of days with maximum temperatures equal to or above 100 Fahrenheit (37.8C) was set in Western Australia's Marble Bar in 1923-24 - 160 days. The highest temperature recorded in Australia using standard observing techniques was 50.7C at Oodnadatta in South Australia in 1960 and Sydney's CBD record of 45.3C was in 1939.

Heatwaves have accounted for more deaths in Australia than any other climatic event, the bureau notes. The 1939 scorcher killed 438 people in South Australia, Victoria and NSW.

Drought is the most economically costly climatic extreme. The modern nation was born in the midst of the 1895-1902 "Federation Drought". It was so bad that the NSW Government declared February 26, 1902, a day of "humility and prayer", such was the concern about Sydney's water supply.

Many scientists, including the controversial Tim Flannery, are adamant that the warming of the globe has resulted in more extreme weather such as cyclones and heat waves. There is a strongly held view that the "drought" is actually the start of a long-term climatic shift towards hotter, drier conditions....

As for things like storms, more data is needed to determine if they are becoming more destructive or more frequent. "Theoretically, there should be more storms with global warming because the atmosphere can hold more moisture," Collins said. Similarly, the idea that the dry spell is a result of global warming rather than another El Nino cycle is "quite possible", but will require years more data to be sure."

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AND A BRITISH EXPERT AGREES

"Hurricane Charley lashed the coast of Florida over the weekend, causing at least 19 deaths and billions of dollars of damage. The biggest swarm of locusts in a decade is currently devouring crops in West Africa. News reports show us dramatic photos of the village of Boscastle in Cornwall, England, looking like a town swept into the sea after yesterday's floods. The rest of the UK has tropical storm Bonnie, which killed three people in America, to look forward to (though by the time it reaches us it will only be 'high winds and rain'). And there have been 'extreme weather conditions' in Australia, China and Utah over the past week, too.

Bad weather stories have dominated the headlines. Some claim the strange weather systems are a spin-off of global warming, proof, according to one commentator, 'that our overheating planet is going to have ever more "extreme weather" episodes'. Others warn of worse to come. According to John Powell, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, tens of millions of the world's poorest people are threatened by 'an unprecedented wave of freak and extreme weather' . Has Mother Nature lost the plot?

Dr Mark Saunders, a weather expert at University College London (UCL), says we need to cool down. 'I don't think the weather we have seen is particularly unusual, to be honest. Somewhere in the world you will always get extreme weather events - whether it's a storm, a flood, or a drought. There are always people being affected by extreme weather. There is no study to my knowledge which shows that more people are being affected now, or that more people will be affected by freak weather this year than in previous years.'

Indeed, says Saunders, when it comes to the most violent form of extreme weather - hurricanes - there has been a downward shift in recent years. Hurricanes are Saunders' main area of expertise. He is Lead Scientist at the Tropical Storm Risk Centre in the Department of Space and Climate Physics at UCL, a leading authority on predicting and tracking storms. Hurricane Charley may have been one of the most destructive in recent years, killing 19 and leaving 800,000 homes and businesses without electricity - but Charley cannot be seen as evidence of a rise in extreme weather episodes, says Saunders. 'The past four years have been unusually quiet for hurricanes.'

'We knew this would be an "active" year, we predicted that. Around eight hurricanes are predicted to strike America this year. But we have to remember that Charley is really the first main hurricane event for several years. Overall, the losses from hurricanes have been running at about 80 per cent below average since 2000".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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