Australia Must change

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One factor that seems to have received no attention at all in the media’s reporting of the Australian fires is the role of the Indian Ocean Dipole, or IOD.

The IOD is, in very simplistic terms, a similar phenomenon to ENSO. When it is in positive mode, the Indian Ocean is warmer than normal to the west, and cooler in the east.

This effect is driven by easterly winds, as we also see during La Ninas. In both cases, these winds drive the warm surface waters to the west, allowing cold, upwelling water to replace it.

It won’t come as any surprise then that this years Australian drought has coincided with just such a strong positive IOD. In fact, arguable one of the strongest on record:



Indian climatologist, Saji N. Hameed, saw this coming months ago:

“The strength of this IOD is enormous. We were anticipating it to exceed the 2006 event, based on the DMI comparisons.

“The dry spells over Indonesia, Australia and Singapore are strongly tied to the ongoing IOD. In fact, the Australian weather agency has been alerting Australians to adverse climate associated with IOD since early spring of this year [2019]”

As Hameed states, the IOD is a naturally occurring event, which has nothing to do with climate change. Inevitably attempts have been made to link the strength of this event with global warming, but there is simply is not enough data to make such a deduction. What we do know is that Australia has been wetter since 1970 than it was before, which would suggest otherwise.

But there is one other factor to plug into the mix – a sudden stratospheric warming over the Antarctic. This is what the BOM were flagging up last September [2019]:

Record warm temperatures above Antarctica over the coming weeks are likely to bring above-average spring temperatures and below-average rainfall across large parts of New South Wales and southern Queensland.

The warming began in the last week of August, when temperatures in the stratosphere high above the South Pole began rapidly heating in a phenomenon called "sudden stratospheric warming".

In the coming weeks the warming is forecast to intensify, and its effects will extend downward to Earth’s surface, affecting much of eastern Australia over the coming months.

The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting the strongest Antarctic warming on record, likely to exceed the previous record of September 2002.

So, given the conjunction of an unusually strong IOD with an SSW event, is it at all surprising that large areas of Australia have just gone through one of the severest droughts on record?

Source: Australia Drought, The Indian Ocean Dipole & Sudden Stratospheric Warming

Over the years Australia experienced many brush fires. This year was not unusual.







It really presents a very weak case that the fires were due to climate change.

Do you think sanctions could be needed or might be required? Like maybe on the media outlets responsible for stifling truth, the government or just on some very specific people within it in general?

Thanks, Jimmy, for providing exhausting information and graphs.
Indigenous Australians have been controllably burning the bush for millenia.
For some reason, the European settlers are reluctant to learn from them.

I think the media feeds off of sensationalism. If it bleeds it leads mentality. I believe in freedom of the press but I wonder if freedom of the press believes in me. It needs to look at both sides of an issue rather than becoming an arbitrator for the truth.

Over 150 years ago Sir (Joseph) Norman Lockyer, a brilliant astrophysicist, found it very difficult to gain a voice and expand science. He created a new tool; he founded a great scientific journal called Nature and was its editor for a half century from 1869-1919. Nature encouraged controversy and vigorous debate within its pages. This was a tool he developed in gaining a voice.

But now the editors of many of these fine scientific journals have become corrupt and no longer encourage controversy and vigorous debate. They have made themselves the ultimate arbitrators. They have picked sides by deciding what is true and what is false, what to publish and what to censor. And many times they select the wrong side. They have lost their way.

Let the battles be fought out with logical arguments and research findings across the pages of the journal Nature or the many other scientific journals.

An article by the National Association of Scholars titled The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science of April 2018 confirms that the crisis of reproducibility exists and compromises entire disciplines of science. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark”studies in hematology and oncology, but could only replicate six. In that same year the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration estimated that up to three-quarters of published biomarker associations could not be replicated. A 2015 article in Science that presented the results of 100 replication studies of articles published in prominent psychological journals found that only 36% of the replication studies produced statistically significant results, compared with 97% of the original studies. If scientific findings are not reproducible then modern science is being built on a foundation of quicksand.

Governments run by biased politicians tend to down-select slices of funding to confirmational research at the exclusions of all others approaches. They arbitrarily pick winners and losers. As a result, many times the winners of government grants are actually to defective approaches and the funding is totally wasted.

You might even wonder if the Theory of Special Relativity might not have even survived the selection process used by the scientific journal publishers of today. After all Einstein was an obscure government employee working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office.

The case is never closed. There is no such thing as scientific consensus until the fat lady sings.

For Albert Einstein and the other scientist in the Manhattan Project, the fat lady did not sing until they built a prototype of the first atomic bomb and successfully tested it.