Environmentalists Screw It Up Down Under

It is not just in the U.S.A. that "environmentalists" and their liberal elitist enablers screw things up in their ignorance of science and basic economics.  I won't even mention their lack of knowledge about human nature.  The utterly absurd and unfounded belief in the myth of man-caused global warming has led and is leading to disasters such as this in Australia, and is being repeated around the world.

Let your politicians know enough is enough.  End the nonsense!
Peter

Dam their flood of mistakes

Written by Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun | June 06 2012

Upstream on the Mitchell Rive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

FLOODS? On Gippsland's Mitchell River? Again? What a surprise to anyone stupid enough to trust the warmist politicians who recently ran this sorry state.
Remember how the Bracks and Brumby governments refused to build a cheap dam on the Mitchell River for a quarter of the price of their $5.7 billion desalination plant?

Remember how Labor even turned the dam reservation on the Mitchell into a national park to stop anyone else from building a dam on Victoria's fastest-flowing river - a dam to harvest cheap water for booming Melbourne and minimise the flooding you're now seeing downstream?

Remember premier John Brumby insisting global warming was drying up our rains, so a new dam would be useless since "we don't lack for storage, we lack for rain"?
Remember Melbourne Water parroting the same warming creed, arguing against a dam on the Mitchell because a "rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky"?

Yeah, right.
Now let's remember what came next.

Let's remember how the undammed Mitchell flooded in 2007, sending a year's worth of drinking water for Melbourne down to the sea.

Let's remember how pigheaded Labor nevertheless ploughed ahead with its desalination plant, now hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.
Read rest…

Surprise! Humans To Blame For Flood Damage....But NOT Because Of Global Warming And CO2 Emissions

Finally, someone is listening to scientists about the real causes of flooding. Dump the myth of man-caused global warming and climate change. Human activity is to blame for the severity of flood damage, but it is not because of carbon dioxide emissions altering the climate, not in Iowa, or New Orleans, or anywhere. We must listen to our scientists, not the United Nations, the IPCC, nor the politically-motivated Jim Hansen, and last of all, Al Gore.
Peter

Man to blame for Iowa flooding?
Where some blame days of rain, others point to an altered landscape
By Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: "What is going on?"
The river would eventually rise six feet higher than any flood on record. Farther downstream, in Cedar Rapids, the river would break the record by more than 11 feet.

Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.
"We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of nature."

Officials are still trying to understand all the factors that contributed to Iowa's flooding, and not everyone has the same suspicions as Enshayan. For them, the cause was obvious: It rained buckets and buckets for days on end. They say the changes in land use were lesser factors in what was really just a case of meteorological bad luck.

Drastic changes to landscape
But some Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding. They know it's a hard case to prove, but they hope to get Iowans thinking about how to reduce the chances of a repeat calamity.

"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."

Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation.

Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.

The basic hydrology of Iowa has been changed since the coming of the plow. By the early 20th century, farmers had installed drainage pipes under the surface to lower the water table and keep water from pooling in what otherwise could be valuable farmland. More of this drainage "tiling" has been added in recent years. The direct effect is that water moves quickly from the farmland to the streams and rivers.
"We've lost 90 percent of our wetlands," said Mary Skopec, who monitors water quality for the Iowa DNR.

Land ill-suited for deluge
Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and soybeans -- annual plants that don't put down deep roots.

Another potential factor: sediment. "We're actually seeing rivers filling up with sediment, so the capacity of the rivers has changed," Asell said. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, Iowa led the nation in flood damage year after year.

This landscape wasn't ready for the kind of deluge that hit Iowa in May and early June. Central and eastern portions of the state received 15 inches of rain. That came on top of previous rains that had left the soil saturated. Worse, the rain came at the tail end of an unusually cool spring. Farmers had delayed planting their crops. The deluge struck a nearly naked landscape of small plants and black dirt.

"With that volume of rain, you're going to have flooding. There's just no way around it," said Donna Dubberke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities. "This is not just because someone put in a parking lot."
The rising Mississippi River is expected to peak this week, threatening towns and farmland north of St. Louis as floodwaters continue to move down the river. So far, flooding and severe weather have killed at least 24 people in three states and injured 106, forced the evacuations of about 40,000, and driven corn prices to record highs.

500-year flood every 15 years?Two levees burst just north of Quincy, Ill., yesterday morning, forcing the evacuation of the small town of Meyer. Yesterday afternoon, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) visited the town after viewing the nearby Sny Island Levee, about 12 miles downstream from Quincy and, at 54 miles long, the second-biggest levee on the Mississippi.
In Iowa, the National Weather Service has reported record flooding at 12 locations on four rivers, including the Cedar, the Iowa, the Wapsipinicon and the Mississippi. The U.S. Geological Survey has preliminary data showing 500-year floods on the Cedar, the Shell Rock, the Upper Iowa and the Nodaway.

The Great Flood of 2008 has, for many inhabitants of sandbagged Iowa, come awfully soon after the Great Flood of 1993. Or, as Elwynn Taylor, a meteorologist at Iowa State University, put it: "Why should we have two 500-year floods within 15 years?"
Taylor attributes the flooding in recent years to cyclical climate change: The entire Midwest, he says, has been in a wet cycle for the past 30 years.
There has also been speculation that global warming could be a factor.
"Something in the system has changed," said Pete Kollasch, a remote-sensing analyst with the Iowa DNR. "The only thing I can point my finger at is global warming, but there's no proof of that."

Jeri Neal, a program leader for ecological systems and research at Iowa State's Leopold Center, said all these things have a cumulative effect on the landscape: "It doesn't have the resilience built into it that you need to withstand disturbances in the system."
The idea of a 500-year flood can be confusing. Hydrologists use the term to indicate a flooding event that they believe has a 0.2 percent chance -- 1 in 500 -- of happening in any given year in a specific location. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 100 chance of happening, and so on. Such estimates are based on many years of data collection, in some cases going back a century or more.

‘An act of City Council’But the database can be spotty. Robert Holmes, national flood coordinator with the U.S. Geological Survey, said a lack of funding since 1999 has forced his agency to discontinue hundreds of stream gauges across the country. "It's not sexy to fund stream flow gauges," he said.

What's certain is that a lot of water had nowhere to go when the sky opened over Iowa this spring. Some rivers did things they'd never done before. The flood stage at Cedar Rapids, for example, is 12 feet. The previous record flood happened in 1929, when the Cedar hit 20 feet. This year the Cedar hit 20 feet and kept rising. Experts predicted it would crest at 22 feet, and then upped the estimate to 24 feet. The river had other ideas. At mid-morning last Friday, it finally crested at 31.3 feet.

The entire downtown was flooded and a railroad bridge collapsed, dumping rail cars filled with rock into the river.
"Cities routinely build in the flood plain," Enshayan said. "That's not an act of God; that's an act of City Council."
Staff writer Kari Lydersen contributed to this report from Quincy, Ill.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25254541/

New Orleans, Subsidence, Flooding and Global Warming

Here is a better solution (see the picture below) for rebuilding New Orleans. The city is built on a major river delta, (The Mississippi). River water slows down as it enters a standing body of water, (The Gulf of Mexico). When the flow of water decreases, the sediment, (clay, sand, and gravel) it is carrying is dropped, and deposited as sediment, forming a delta. Over time the sediment compacts as water is squeezed out. The compaction results in subsidence or settling of the land surface. Thus if you build on a delta, what you put there is going to sink.

New Orleans has been subsiding since the day it was founded. Geologists and engineers have known this for a long, long time. Most of the city is below sea level, and has been for a long time. Water flows downhill. Levees of any kind are only a temporary fix. Is it worth the money to build the levees higher, or the buildings higher, and maintain them forever? That is the question, because the flooding will happen again, and again, and again, global warming, or Al Gore, Democrats or Republicans, or not.

Man has tried to thwart nature, by building levees and straightening the Mississippi. Somehow, man always gets it wrong and nature does what it, (she) wants to. Rivers go where they want to go, (downhill, and to the lowest point), and our climate will change, as it always has. (Build your beachfront homes on stilts). Earthquakes will happen, (don't build on known active fault lines), and hurricanes, local flooding and tornadoes will always happen.

Peter

(satellite photo of the Mississippi River Delta, showing how it's sediments are spread farther out into the Gulf of Mexico, letting New Orleans subside, sink, and flood.........Peter's opinion)

And I love New Orleans, its history, music, cuisine, culture.....

Does Climate Change Threaten International Peace and Security?

Here is an editorial expressing concern about future climate change being a threat to national security. It is mentioned that a group of retired U.S. Generals and Admirals studied the subject and reached the same conlusion. I have a few problems with this rationale. I know it is difficult to argue with a General or United Nations "experts", but here goes anyway.

First, I question their primary assumption. That is they accept the idea that there is going to be catastrophic, disaterous climate change in the near future, more severe than is "normal", whatever normal is. Remember, the climate is alwasy changing.

Second, they apparently accept the simple hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions are creating global warming and climate change. They blindly accept this premise even though many, many independent scientists disagree.

Third, they seem to think mankind can do something about global warming and climate change. Finally they seem to imply that the U.S. can somehow intervene in Africa, Latin America, Asia, or wherever, and alleviate the problems caused by drastic climate change. There are a lot of "ifs", and haven't we learned that "intervening" is not always a smart thing to do?

Does anyone beside me think that just perhaps these experts and Generals and Admirals are using these dire predictions to try to make sure they continue getting massive government spending on the military? Scare tactics have worked before, and now with the Cold War over they must come up with another scary "bogey-man". It seems everyone can use global warming to further their own agenda.
Peter

This editorial is from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/opinion/24homer-dixon.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: April 24, 2007
Toronto
DOES climate change threaten international peace and security? The British government thinks it does. As this month’s head of the United Nations Security Council, Britain convened a debate on the matter last Tuesday. One in four United Nations member countries joined the discussion — a record for this kind of thematic debate.

Countries rich and poor, large and small, and from all continents — Bangladesh, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, much of Europe and, most poignantly, a large number of small island states endangered by rising seas — recognized the security implications of climate change. Some other developing countries — Brazil, Cuba and India and most of the biggest producers of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, including China, Qatar and Russia — either questioned the very idea of such a link or argued that the Security Council is not the right place to talk about it.

But these skeptics are wrong. Evidence is fast accumulating that, within our children’s lifetimes, severe droughts, storms and heat waves caused by climate change could rip apart societies from one side of the planet to the other. Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.

Congress and senior military leaders are taking heed: Legislation under consideration in both the Senate and the House calls for the director of national intelligence to report on the geopolitical implications of climate change. And last week a panel of 11 retired generals and admirals warned that climate change is already a “threat multiplier” in the world’s fragile regions, “exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states — the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.”

Addressing the question of scientific uncertainty about climate change, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff who is now retired, said: “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”

In the future, that battlefield is likely to be complex and hazardous. Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism.

In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries — cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example — and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.

Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of — and extract exorbitant profits from — increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.

Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.

Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.

The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes — zones inhabited by billions of people — will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.

The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.

By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments — and make challenges from violent groups more likely — by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.

We’ve learned in recent years that such failure can have consequences around the world and that great powers can’t always isolate themselves from these consequences. It’s time to put climate change on the world’s security agenda.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”