"Research into hurricanes in the North Atlantic indirectly suggests that the last 100 years in Australia have been relatively wet. Forget about Greenhouse. Just the normal swings and roundabouts of the climate have the potential to be devastating...
Graham Young writing at his blog Ambit Gambit goes onto suggest that based on a recent paper in Nature entitled 'Intense hurricane activity over the past 5,000 years controlled by El Nino and the West African monsoon' governments might consider "spending more taxpayer monies reconstructing paleo-climate, and less modelling future climate scenarios."
He also comments, "What's more, in a challenge to vulgar Greenhouse assumptions, there appear to have been more severe hurricanes in the past than the ones we've seen recently, even though the sea was colder then."
The paper in Nature is worth a read: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20070525/20070525_02.pdf
Still on tealeaves. GFS 7 days out - the projections for a significant rain event for SEQ are firming - and a lot of it's now over land:
http://forecasts.bsch.au.com/apf.html?region=qld&days=7.5
cheers
Arnost
Another sidestep Luke.
Oh for heavens sake Motty - it's the bloody SSTs in critical areas that determine the climate. Read again with eyes wide open and dogma subroutine deactivated. And they've been on the SST warming stuff for some time - even buggered up some seasonal forecasting research due to the emergence of Indian Ocean trends.
Wait till you get the start of year national and global temperature reports. It's gonna be more more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX1lC-cIpek
Once again we have gross misreporting in the links to the ABC on-line provided by Luke above and some very sloppy drafting of abstracts.
The Indian Ocean has not warmed by 2C. The tropical surface temperature has increased by up to 2C and the thermocline in the area between 40S and 50S has extended down to 800m depth. This does not mean that the entire 800m of thermocline has undergone a 2C warming. The rest of the Indian Ocean thermocline has apparently undergone some disturbance, including sub-surface cooling (a reduction in depth of thermocline) in the tropics.
The goegraphically challenged may need to be informed that the Indian Ocean actually extends from 20N to almost 70S (90 degrees in total) and a zone representing 11% of that arc has apparently experienced some warming. It should also be noted that at 45 degrees S the distance between 10 degrees of longitude is only 70.7% of 10 degrees at the equator.
So even allowing for the wider expanse of Indian Ocean south of Africa and Australia, it appears that less than 10% of the Indian Ocean has exhibited a deepening of thermocline. This zone of deeper thermocline is 0.5 degrees (about 500km) further south than it has been in the recent past.
This is a lot different to the story as reported.
Arnost
IGES has a very good track record around here. Maybe I should go back to desilting the dam in which I've just bogged the dozer.
Arnost - always good to see some rain. Rain in Brissy in last few days but no catchment runoff yet depsite some falls in the dam area.