A wet Australian summer predicted.

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On Topic:

Tim Flannery:

It's well established that Al Gore and Tim Flannery overestimated the timeline. That doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.

The message Greta Thunberg and probably millions around the world are trying to make to their governments is for them to understand that the earlier we intervene in eliminating carbon emissions the more likely humanity will survive the cataclysm that is to come.

viewtopic.php?t=409456#p9160378

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-ne ... erallPos=6

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-ne ... erallPos=2

Could you maybe splash some of that water up to the Western U.S?

Yahoo!: "Drought in the Great Plains and Midwest is getting more intense, federal report shows"

You are missing the point of this thread.
Specifically:
To show that Tim Flannery didn't know what he was talking about regarding rainfall over Australia.

Really?
I find the topic of weather much more interesting than someone who said something not informed enough.

As the creator of this thread, I do know what my intent was.
Please refer to my original/opening post.

And please tell me how a drought elsewhere in the world is on topic.

Can you tell me a bit more about the broader context in which this man told the sentence you quoted in the OP?
I believe he was talking about global warming. While he wasn't exactly correct in his words (at least in the scope of the few years since he said it - changes in climate usually take at least several decades to happen), the very nature of global warming is that it is global and repeating weather anomalies all over the world are potentially meaningful when discussing it.

He was talking specifically about Australia.
There was a forecast that the entire South East area of Australia would become a dust bowl.
He was in <cough> error.

Our chief scientist relatively recently admitted that there was no evidence that connected Australian droughts to climate change, btw.

Flannery influenced the government policy of the day.
Billions of dollars went into desalination plants that ultimately were not required.
The perceived threat/catastrophe was not decades in the future at that time.

IIRC, Flannery made those comments around 12 years ago.
The prediction turned out to be an Epic Fail.

It's something public speakers rarely understand about science of complex systems: there are plenty of unknowns and as the science develops, the number of unknowns is systematically reduced - but never zero.
That's why weather forecasts for a few days usually work but sometimes turn out wrong - most often timing or scale of weather phenomena are mispredicted.
Climate forecasts are weather forecasts on a larger scale. More factors to examine how they contribute, more time and systematic effort needed to get useful predictions.

What apparently is known is that global warming makes the weather "bigger" - more rain in a single storm, more range of high pressure systems (translated to drought spells), faster winds, etc. That's something we know relatively well and also something we can work on adapting to.

It's unlikely the whole Australia becomes a desert. It's a whole continent with many different climates and ecosystems. Each of them will experience the changes in its own way.

The joke is, if the BOM can't consistently predict the weather a week in advance, how could they in 3 decades' time?



The hilarious thing is that Flannery was not a climate scientist.



https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/chri ... 2847549671

Averages are workable, particular fluctuations are practically impossible.

Then you have the answer to why he speaks uninformed things on climate science.