As the bushfires continue to smoulder menacingly waiting for the next hot windy day, the north of the country is experiencing a 'once in 1000-year flood'. It's a Nari-type situation - a tropical depression rather than a typhoon - but it stalled over land for a week or more - dumping 1500 mil over the duration. That's still chicken-feed compared to Nari or Morakot, which dropped 4k+ mil - but it's still a lot of rain in any man's language.

I've mentioned the Queensland bushfire situation and what a cock-up that was, so i was automatically suspicious about their response to the flood. The worst of it came when they fully opened the flood-gates a couple of days ago, which resulted in extensive house flooding and two deaths. The reasoning was that they had to open it up coz the dam was dangerously full - which sounds ok - but now people are asking why they didn't react to the weather reports and release it in a more gradual fashion - and why their modelling didn't take the risk of unprecedented flooding more seriously in terms of the trigger levels for releasing water.

The thing about Queenslanders - obviously not all of them - but there is a majority mentality there that has been at the forefront of climate change denial. They carry on about the Queensland farmer like he's some sacred species that embodies the 'real Australia' but in fact, more often than not, he's just some right-wing, climate change denier, high emission dickhead. They're all for cutting welfare to the poor, but meanwhile, they're the first to put their hands out for an endless series of charity drives and government hand-outs to subsidise themselves.

My deal with any subsidy would be - ok, here's the money - now these are the changes you have to introduce to (a) reduce your contribution to climate change, and (b) adapt to a climate changed world

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/05/townsville-floods-dam-management...

This is a good article that discusses the political and societal attitude to climate change in the face of mounting weather disasters.

It includes a quote from the Deputy-Prime Minister denying climate change even as he visited the site of one of the many disasters to hit Australia in the last month.

Ironically, one of the places that is being hardest hit by climate change, Queensland, is also the strong-hold state of those most in denial. Their argument seems to be that as climate change crunches their economy, that's even more reason to ignore it coz they need more coal mines to provide jobs in the area.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/10/floods-fire-and-drought-australi...

If this quote is in any way representative of those in charge, that's quite depressing:

“We are looking at climate, of course, (but) climate has been changing since year dot,” he said, before adding: “We don’t want to go down a path of renewables, which is not going to solve anything apart from de-industrialising Australia and making sure we don’t do manufacturing here and pushing electricity bills into the unaffordable state.”

Coincidentally, I'm doing a module in logical fallacies. This quote is full of them. Maybe I can use it in class. In fact, by golly, I think I will.

Yeah, it's a classic - it would be funny except that idiot is deputy Prime Minister! He's steering the ship!

God help us