January 1974 Global Cooling Brought 34 Inches Of Rain To Brisbane

6 Responses to January 1974 Global Cooling Brought 34 Inches Of Rain To Brisbane

1. Olaf Koenders says:

   January 22, 2014 at 9:45 pm

   If only they had newspapers over the last 12,000 years. I would posit some 150 similar floods occurred in the same area.

   Reply
2. Rosco says:

   January 22, 2014 at 11:40 pm

   The 1893 Brisbane flooding reached higher levels.

   The 2011 flood was lower than either.

   The rainfall over the last 24 hours was simply astonishing. It just rained heavily for most of Friday at about an inch an hour – I couldn’t get home from work on the Friday night because of localised flooding in normally small creeks turned into raging torrents washing houses off their foundations.

   Saturday the rain eased and Sunday dawned fine revealing significant parts of Brisbane’s centre and suburbs under water.

   1977 – 3 years after the turbulent 1974 which saw the Brisbane floods in January and cyclone Tracy in Darwin in December – began hot and dry and was a year of much reduced rainfall in South East Queensland.

   2014 – 3 years after the turbulent 2011 is beginning to look a lot like 1977 – dry and hot.

   2013 saw Oswald here dumping a lot of rain – don’t remember 1976 being similar.

   Still it has all happened before and doubtless will happen again – there is nothing special about the modern weather.

   Reply
   • TonyO says:

     January 23, 2014 at 12:08 pm

     I was working in Brisbane in 1974 and just made it out along Ipswich Road about 10-15 minutes before the road was cut by the rising flood waters on the Friday night.

     With the 1893 flood, I think north of Brisbane (Nambour area?) got 900+mm (36″) rain in one day.

     The 2011 floods were made worse by all the extra runoff from the previous 40 years of suburban development in the catchment area.

     Reply
3. Dave N says:

   January 23, 2014 at 3:12 am

   1974 was a year of extremes in Australia.. oh wait, extremes never happened before AGW, right?

   Reply
4. Chewer says:

   January 23, 2014 at 3:42 am

   The ocean circulation changes happening are slapping the eminent scientists quite nicely across the chops.
   These changes include the NAO, AMOC, PDO (MEI), Indian Ocean Dipole, Arctic Oscillation and Antarctic Stream. The slowly surfacing changes we’ve seen in the past nine years are fully turning the page:
   http://www.bermudasun.bm/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Atlantic-currents-are-slowing-down–Should-Bermuda-care-/24/270/74145

   Reply
5. Anto says:

   January 23, 2014 at 12:13 pm

   Here’s an extra irony regarding Brisbane. In 2007 leading Australian climate “expert”, Tim Flannery (who’s only qualifications are actually in zoology and mamalian paleontology), advised as follows: cities such as Brisbane would never again have dam-filling rains, as global warming had caused “a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas” and made the soil too hot, “so even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems … “.

   As a result, our gullible Labor Government of the time (Democrat equivalent) spent over $1bn on a desalination plant. When the plant was about 70% complete, what do you reckon happened?

   Well, in 2008 Brisbane rainfall was above average and has been above average for every year since then. [http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=040913&p_nccObsCode=139&p_month=13] In fact, there were major floods in 2011.

   The result is that the desalination plant has never operated and sits rusting away and unused. [http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/tanks-still-rusting-at-tugun-desalination-plant/story-e6freoof-1225858506567]

   Everything green fingers touches turns to excrement.

   Reply