Australia: Floods and fires are the new normal
The Australian state of New South Wales was pummeled by torrential rains last week, said Robert Glasser in The Sydney Morning Herald, causing massive floods that swept away houses, roads, and livestock and forced the evacuation of at least 40,000 people. State Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the deluge was a once-in-a-century event and “beyond anyone’s expectations.” She’s “wrong on both counts.” Climate change has made such extreme weather disasters depressingly frequent and grimly predictable in Australia. Only last year, the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires consumed 46 million acres, an area roughly the size of North Dakota. At least 34 people died in those blazes, which were fueled by drought and forest dieback, and an estimated 3 billion wild animals were killed or displaced. Pretending that wildfires and floods are rare, and not “our new normal,” simply “deflects public attention from government failures.” Authorities know what is coming, and they have a responsibility to redesign cities and communities with a view to disaster preparedness.
Instead, we keep putting people “in harm’s way,” said Jamie Pittock in The Age. Some 70,000 people currently live in highflood-risk areas around the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system west of Sydney. New South Wales’ proposed solution is to raise the Warragamba Dam—which is now spilling about 132 billion gallons daily, the same amount of water as in Sydney Harbour— so that it can better hold flood peaks. But the experience of other countries teaches us that “flood-control infrastructure increases danger and losses by encouraging more downstream development.”
The new housing is then inundated when an epic deluge inevitably overwhelms the raised dam. Unbelievably, the state government plans to let 134,000 more people settle on the floodplain by 2050. That’s precisely the wrong tack. The government should help the most flood-prone homes and businesses “resettle on safe land,” so we don’t keep repeating this cycle of tragedy.
The problem with these “climate catastrophists” is that their predictions never pan out, said Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun. Back in 2005, the head of the government’s climate commission predicted that global warming would dry up Sydney’s reservoirs by 2007. It didn’t. Now, “for the second time in two years, Warragamba Dam is full to overflowing.” These hysterics want to scare Australians into giving up our carbon-emitting cars and even our coal-mining industry, but their apocalyptic scenarios change as often as the weather. Why should we listen to any of them?
A majority of Australians tell pollsters they want action on climate change, said David Mills in The West Australian, but that’s not how they vote. Prime ministers who promote policies to cut emissions end up getting ousted. Even now, after a year of wildfires, droughts, and floods, only 56 percent of voters say climate change is a serious problem. The world must look at our views on climate “with the same head-shaking bewilderment with which we look at America and gun control.”