According to meteorologists, the flooding we’ve witnessed is a symptom of a natural weather phenomenon called La Niña. In a recent Crikey piece, Dr David Jones, head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, said we’re in one of the strongest La Niña periods in modern history. So what exactly is La Niña?

La Niña in a nutshell

La Niña is Spanish for “the girl-child.” The term is used to describe the cyclical cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean.

La Niña is the lesser known sibling of El Niño, which means “the boy-child.” While El Niño often results in strong warm weather in the Pacific — which can trigger drier conditions in eastern Australia — La Niña is associated with wetter than normal conditions. The presence of La Niña often means the east coast of Australia and parts of Southeast Asia will see more rain, flooding, monsoons and possibly cyclones.

La Niña is also known as anti-ENSO (anti-El Niño Southern Oscillation) since it’s the opposite of an El Niño episode.

During a La Niña period, surface temperatures in the western Pacific Ocean are typically warmer than usual, whereas in the east the water is abnormally cool. This cool water pools along the west coast of South America, where it is eventually pulled across the Pacific, towards the west, by strong easterly winds.

This surge of cool water pushes the warm waters in the western Pacific up against Australia’s east coast and the Southeast Asia region. The warm water accumulates, which changes pressure in the atmosphere and usually heavy rainfall occurs as a result.

This year’s La Niña was unexpectedly severe. According to BBC meteorologist Laura Tobin, it’s likely La Niña even had an effect on the recent flooding in Sri Lanka which killed 40 people and displaced over a million. La Niña’s easterly winds don’t normally extend as far west as Sri Lanka, but this year winds wreaked havoc when they converged with the region’s naturally occurring northeast monsoon.

La Niña has visited Australia before, most notably during 1973-74. On Australia Day of 1974 Brisbane and Ipswich were swamped by a catastrophic deluge which took the lives of 14 people and was widely considered as Brisbane’s worst flooding of the 20th century.

Recent La Niña years also include 1988-89 and 1998-2000. On both occasions the country saw high levels of rainfall, with 2000 being our second wettest year on record. According to the Annual Australian Climate Statement 2010 by the Bureau of Meteorology, last year was Australia’s wettest year since 2000, and it was the wettest year for Queensland.

1974 remains Australia’s wettest year on record.

What can we expect from La Niña next?

La Niña cycles typically last up to 12 months and this year’s is expected to dissipate by March or April. Until then it’s expected higher than average rainfall will continue to fall across eastern New South Wales and southeastern Queensland.

La Niña hasn’t been bad news for everyone. The ABC reports that farmers in Western Australia are welcoming the rainy weather. According to weather predictions, WA has a 60 to 75 per cent chance of exceeding its average rainfall over the coming three months.

If forecasts are correct, the extra rain will help WA farmers have a better cropping season in April and May.

But elsewhere in the world people are still recovering from the devastating force of La Niña.  Many thousands in Brazil, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Australia are in the process of rebuilding their lives. There’s no doubt that this year’s La Niña was extreme, and an event which we will hopefully not see the likes of again.

Roselina Press is a freelance journalist and editor of the A Climate for Change website.

What outrages you, or anyone else, depends on which way your moral, political or ideological compass tends to point. Talking about building dams or the role of climate change while people are suffering could enrage some people, while for others it could simply drift by unnoticed.

Greens leader Senator Bob Brown’s assertion that the floods in Queensland were caused in part by the coal industry is a case in point. He made the statement on Sunday, January 16 well after the majority of floodwaters in Queensland had subsided but before the communities of Toowoomba, Grantham and Ipswich had begun to bury their dead. Brown said the coal industry should be picking up some of the clean-up bill for future extreme weather events.

Ralph Hillman, executive director the Australian Coal Association (ACA), responded by saying that, in any case, the emissions from domestically-mined coal in Australia made only a “tiny” contribution to world emissions of greenhouse gases.

Steven Davis, a senior researcher at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy at Stanford, California, is a climate energy specialist. In research currently in peer-review, Davis has been mapping the sources of emissions of different countries around the globe to see how footprints look when you include emissions caused by fossil fuels, regardless of where they’re burned.

Davis tells me that based on 2004 export figures, Australian coal burned overseas emitted about 511 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. The same year, his calculations show Australian domestic coal emissions of about 191 Mt CO2. All together Aussie coal, says Davis, accounted for 696Mt or about 2.5% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels worldwide.

Brown was accused by some, including Resources Minister Stephen Robertson, of using the floods to make a political point. Several mining companies and industry groups including ACA, Macarthur Coal, Xstrata and the Minerals Council of Australia expressed outrage but some could not pass up the chance to make a political point of their own. Macarthur Coal chairman Keith DeLacy branded Brown as “irrelevant to mainstream Australia”.

It was time to pull together, commentators said, rather than point the finger of blame or making political points. Yet in the days preceding Brown’s comments, there had been plenty of wagging fingers.

We heard and read open discussions about the virtues or otherwise of more dams, the ability of the home insurance industry to help flood victims, the wisdom of allowing development on flood plains and discussions of early warning systems.

Before tragedy hit Toowoomba and Grantham (but while residents in areas around Rockhampton and Bundaberg were still underwater) opposition leader Tony Abbott and Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce both took the opportunity to push the idea of building more dams as an answer to future flooding woes. Abbott had also previously suggested the Gillard government should scrap the National Broadband Network and instead use the funds to help the recovery.

Except in the case of Brown, the two “c” words (climate change) had not been taboo to everyone. International news agencies, including Associated Press and Reuters, published stories discussing the link between climate change and the floods. I wrote one too earlier this week. Some climate scientists are willing to apportion some blame for the floods on climate change while others are not. But few are willing to rule it out.

As the Fitzroy River peaked, Rockhampton Mayor Brad Carter told reporters: “The thing that we need to appreciate is that we are starting to see the impact of climate change in this region.”

There was no political outrage over the mayor’s statement. No line-up of resource companies bearing condemnation. This could lead some to believe it’s not what you say about the Queensland floods, but who says it.

And what is the cause of climate change? You could of course go to any source for a summary of this, including the website of the ACA which states: “Human activities such as agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) produce additional greenhouse gases, which are accumulating in the atmosphere.”

Many observers, myself included, feel that Premier Anna Bligh has displayed some great communication skills and leadership over the last two weeks. This, in my view, is what happens when someone stops seeing themselves as the head of a political party and instead decides to be a leader.

Premier Bligh has not mentioned climate change either and her public inquiry hasn’t been asked to consider it. On Thursday, January 13 as flood waters were just receding in Brisbane, Premier Bligh — or her advisors — did decide it was appropriate to thank the backers of a $16 billion coal seam gas project for their decision to go ahead.

“The millions of dollars in state royalties this project will generate will help bolster the state’s economic recovery after the devastating floods. At times like this we need to be able to look to the future with hope and optimism and the LNG industry will play an important part in our State’s recovery from this flood crisis,” she said.

You have to wonder whether Premier Bligh shares the view of Rockhampton Mayor Brad Carter that climate change played some role in the floods. The GLNG gas project, a project being managed by resources companies Santos, PETRONAS, Total and KOGAS, is huge in scale with 2650 exploration wells and more than 2000km of pipeline. According to GLNG, the project will emit between 11 million tonnes and 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year (this also includes the burning of the gas for energy).

Queensland’s annual emissions currently stand at about 160 million tonnes of equivalent CO2 — which doesn’t include emissions from the coal and gas extracted in the state but burned abroad. Australia’s total emissions of 549 million tonnes similarly does not account for what’s dug here but burned overseas.

A “tiny” contribution which seems to add up to quite a lot.

This post first appeared on Graham Readfearn’s blog.

Flooding in Sri Lanka is so dire the UN has sent one of its top relief officials in to coordinate an international appeal. Despite the relatively low death toll of 40, “…in terms of the numbers of people displaced and farmland inundated, the floods have been even more devastating than the tsunami of December 2004,” reports Dominic Ziegler in the Economist. Think over a million people displaced from their homes, over 200,000 in displaced persons camps last week, 137 camps and nearly 4,000 homes destroyed. Cost estimates of the damage stand at US $500 million, with particular concern for huge amounts of damaged crops.

But, as the Economist notes, some of the flood issues facing Sri Lanka aren’t just environmental. There are fears that flood waters will dislodge land mines placed during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Much of the flooding occurred areas populated with Tamils, a minority who already has long-term political issues with the Sri Lankan government.

Over near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the death toll from recent floods and mudslides has reached 655 people, the worst disaster of its kind for 40 years. Over 13,000 are homeless, whole villages remain cut off from supplies and there are fears of disease. The rain has not stopped. A haunting photo shows a dog sitting by the grave of its owner for two consecutive days, after the owner was killed in the flooding.

Despite Brazil being a country accustomed to flood devastation, there has been a swell of local volunteers coming to help, adding to the 1,500 emergency personnel working on flood rescue and clean up. Recovery is expected to cost US$1.2 billion.

Local Brazilian authorities are being blamed for inadequate flood warning and urban planning as well as for mismanaging public funds that were supposed to go towards flood prevention and preparation. And to this that Brazil’s new president Dilma Rousseff only stepped into the job on January 1, and it’s become a political baptism by flood.

Meanwhile, 40 people are either dead or missing in South Africa, following weeks of heavy rain and flooding. One of the dead includes a firefighter whose raft capsized during a rescue attempt. Many of those worst affected by the floods are the poor, with nearly 8,500 shacks swept away.

The government recently declared seven out of the country’s nine provinces as disaster zones, with most of the devastation centred the Northern Cape and the North West, as well as the province around Johannesburg. Expected long term effects from the flood include a rise in unemployment and increased food prices.

In neighbouring Mozambique, floods have left 13,000 affected or homeless from flooding and ten people dead.

Last year’s horrific Pakistan floods — where 1/5 of Pakistan’s land mass was underwater, 20 million were affected or displaced and nearly 2,000 died — had many media commentators questioning why the mainstream media ignored the story. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen again.

That peak has now slowly dropped to 9.15 metres, barely 5 centimetres. It is expected to stay at this 9.15 mark for a day or two, and then start, very very slowly to drop, and it will remain above 8.4 metres for around ten days or so, before slowly dropping even further, so this is as I have always said, a slow motion disaster, and right now, it’s just waiting, waiting, waiting for those people who hope to move back into flooded homes, when the heartbreak will be even further intensified for them.

This image shows a panorama of the flooding (click to enlarge). You can make out the river flowing through the city at around centre screen, and all the inundation is in that area behind the built up area you can see here. The main affected area of flooded homes is close to the city on the left of the image on the far side of the river.

The main TV media all had crews here covering this disaster, from the main national broadcaster, as well as the three commercial ‘majors’. As you might expect, their focal point was the most obvious of all, that flood marker. At one time I visited, I counted 4 outside broadcast vans with all their stuff, leads taped across the ground and along the railing of the metal fencing to where they had set up a small tent without sides. The interview point always had that flood marker in the background, and the announcers talked to camera with the flood waters rushing by behind them.

Early on in the piece, long before the flood peak arrived, there was in fact some international reports about the flood that mainly mentioned the tragic deaths of a couple of people when their cars were washed off flooded roads. One major report mentioned in quite bold type that their was fear of crocodiles being washed into homes during the flood, giving the impression that it might be a fairly common thing.

Now I know full well that there are some ‘salties’ (saltwater crocodiles) that are in fact close to the city here, and one place is near the two meat works on the north side of the river, and off towards the south a bit, and they will feed off the offal from these meat works on Lakes Creek Road. They may become a problem, but few people have mentioned it here locally. There was however one report of one croc being seen on a football oval on the south side.

So, while international media made bold headlines of the crocs, I might suggest that perhaps as few as a dozen people out of the 75,000 population here actually saw this crocodile, or for that fact any crocodiles at all.

The main media outlets here in Australia have also mentioned on more than one occasion the prevalence of snakes being washed down with the flood waters, and moving around near the city, and also in the flood waters as well. Australia has nearly all the top ten of the deadliest and most poisonous snakes on Planet Earth, and some of these are being washed down river with the flood, Black Snakes, and the deadlier Brown Snakes, of which there are many different species of those two main types I have mentioned.

So, while the Australian media made bold headlines about the snakes, I would suggest that perhaps as few as a hundred or so people out of the 75,000 population may have actually seen this ‘huge influx’ of snakes.

One thing that has barely been mentioned is the prevalence of one form of wildlife that actually is causing a major problem.

They are called sandflies or biting midges, or just midges. They are tiny blood sucking things, around the same size as a flea, and they are in almost plague proportions here now.
Sometimes, local residents who have lived her for long periods build up some sort of resistance to the bites, but others newer to the area or tourists tend to break out in sores following the bites, and I’m new here, only arriving in August just past.

So, while this has hardly garnered any comment in any section of the media at all, I would suggest that many thousands of that city population of 75,000 would actually be affected by this problem with the wildlife, and perhaps even more than that.

They bite on the lower extremities, close to the ground, and in the main, below the knees. You don’t even know you’ve been bitten in the first place, they are so small, and you can’t remember being bitten because you rarely if ever feel it. Then, a couple of hours later, the itching starts, and this is where the real problem sets in. The scratching can cause sores, naturally, and the sores then ulcerate. Children, especially younger ones would be the most affected, because they will just keep scratching. The itching can last for days and even weeks, and the ugly sores can hang around for a long time, and they remain itchy for most of that time.

I visited our local chemist when the problem came to me. It was a little embarrassing at first asking the young chemist about the problem, but she mentioned to me that just at the chemist outlet where she works, they were getting anything up to 15 cases a day being seen to, mainly in the mornings, so this is not an isolated thing, as this has been going on now for almost two weeks, now that the rising flood has stirred them.

Mostly creams and antihistamines are used to ease the itching, but it still comes down to willpower.

Don’t scratch! Don’t scratch! Don’t scratch!

Oddly, my good lady wife recommended to me something for relief that has drifted into the background with modern medicine, when she recommended what is now politelyreferred to as ‘an old wives tale’, the use of peroxide and calamine lotion (yes, that awful looking pink stuff).

I’m taking the antihistamine, but the calamine is soothing for the itching, and I can put up with having pink coloured lower limbs. As well as that, tea tree oil also helps out quite considerably.

What that visit to the chemist led to next was a visit to the supermarket to get some personal insect repellent, the stuff you either just spray on your skin, roll it on, or apply as a cream. Normally, supermarkets would have plenty of them.

However, in the major supermarket I visited, they had two shelves of nearly 2 metres on each shelf with around a 12 to 15 different types of this repellent from a number of manufacturers. There was only one brand left, and of that one brand, only around six or seven bottles were left. As I reached for the bottle, my grand daughter said, “Uh, uh! Poppy, don’t get that one.”

It would seem everyone had the same idea. Sold out completely. They were even sold out of that ‘old wives tale’ stuff, Peroxide, so obviously that was still working as it always had, and in the space alongside that, even the Calamine Lotion was in short supply as well, with only a couple of bottles of that left.

Now to remember that “don’t scratch” mantra.

An edited reprinted of a post from PA Pundits – International

Journalist Graham Readfearn writes

For television, the floods are the epitome of the story that has everything. Dramatic footage, a constantly evolving story with several drawn-out climaxes and a literally captive group of people with genuine against-all-odds tales of sadness, stoicism and bravery in the face of adversity. In towns including Rockhampton, Emerald and Bundaberg hundreds of homes and businesses have been inundated with water. The Queensland Treasurer, Andrew Fraser, believes the clean-up bill could top $1 billion, saying the disaster has now taken on “biblical proportions”.

But back to Channel Seven’s Sunrise show, which earlier this week decided it was time for a segment which asked whether or not all this “crazy weather” has anything to do with climate change. A fair and important question to ask but, unfortunately for the few hundred thousand viewers of this flagship show, Sunrise instead served-up an overcooked and unappetising “Greenie vs Sceptic” breakfast TV segment which was well beyond its best before date. Watch it here.

The first mistake was to make no genuine attempt to answer the question they posed. Rather than speak to experts in climate science to answer the question, they chose two people who were predisposed to present two sides of an argument — something the producers must have known. Predictably and almost instantly the segment came down to two opposing sides arguing that climate change was, or wasn’t, real. False balance in all its unedifying glory.

On one side was Nick Rowley, a climate policy consultant and one of a number of former climate change advisors to Tony Blair. There’s no doubt Rowley knows a lot about the subject, but why not ask a scientist? But the real error was in their selection of New Zealand “weather expert” Ken Ring who has no formal training either in meteorology or climate. I suspect had they known what I’m about to tell you about Ken Ring they would have pawsed for thought before booking him.

Ken Ring was a new name to me, so I thought I should find out a little more about him. That’s when things started to get a little surreal. A chance web-hit coughed-up this little hairball. In 1998, a book was published by Penguin Books New Zealand with the title Pawmistry: How To Read Your Cat’s Paws and Ken Ring was listed as the co-author. On the back of the book, it says”

Ken Ring is a mathematician and a long-time magician, mind-reader and public speaker with a passion for the ancient discipline of palmistry. Ken stumbled upon his peculiar calling at a psychic party several years ago, where he was able to deliver a reading of a cat’s paw that proved to be uncannily accurate.

Now surely this couldn’t be the same guy Sunrise chose as a weather expert, could it? To be sure, I called Ken Ring in New Zealand to ask him and he confirmed he had indeed written that book. He claimed, however, that he had written the book “as a joke” and it had “nothing to do with my work in weather” which is comforting to learn.

You can still buy the book on several online stores and there’s nothing which immediately would suggest that it was in any way a joke. The book has been re-printed at least once. Among other things, the book reveals that cats have seven different types of paw and those bearing the “Earth Paw” are courageous, spontaneous and should not be cornered because they become “disorientated and confused”, the latter part of which brings us neatly back to my conversation with Ken Ring. He went on:

“I’m not sorry I wrote it. I am willing to discuss it with people and people still ring me up and I’m happy to help them where I can. I’m pleased that they have found something in life to give them pleasure. If the book works then that’s fine. It’s a part of my life that’s finished… just like my clowning and school magicianing.”

No, that’s not a misquote. Ken Ring also revealed that before being a “weather expert” he was a school teacher and also a clown and a magician. He was a school magician at the time of writing Pawmistry. I asked on what basis was he now a weather expert? How do you go from being a school magician to being an “expert” on the weather with several dozen books behind him? He explained he was making a living fishing when he “started to realise” that tides seemed to coincide with storms. He constructed a theory from that point.

Ken Ring uses moon and solar cycles to try and predict the weather and his predictions carry little to no respect among serious forecasters or climate scientists. On Sunrise, he dismissed the notion of anthropogenic climate change as having “no proof” and claimed that a solar minimum was to blame for “the cold” that we’ve been seeing in the last two years. Neither of the Sunrise hosts bothered to point out that 2010 is likely to be among our planet’s top three warmest years on the instrumental record, adding a big full-stop to the warmest ever decade.

I asked why he hadn’t bothered to mention that it’s widely known that the current flooding in Queensland has been caused primarily by the La Niña weather pattern in the southern Pacific Ocean. He said he only had a couple of minutes on Sunrise, but added “It’s got nothing to do with La Niña. That’s a name that they dreamt-up in order to identify a new anomaly in the weather to get research funding for, and to issue reports on.”

Back to the Sunrise segment, where host Natalie Barr made the observation that both sides of the argument seemed compelling and “I think this is why people are confused… ” about climate change. Well yes, Natalie. But the reason people are confused is because your treatment of the issues has just confused them.

One of the most serious challenges facing world leaders and currently facing thousands of flood victims has been handed over to a man who once wrote a book about how to read cats’ paws. One for the litter tray, wouldn’t you think?

For a simple and reliable explanation of La Niña in the context of the floods, watch the video on this link produced by the BBC. As far as understanding the link between single extreme weather events and climate change, that will have to wait for another post.

This post first appeared on Graham Readfearn’s blog. You can even read Ken Ring’s numerous responses over there.