Hurrah for Trump! say deniers. Let's flood federal buildings.

Port Vincent flood. Photo: NASA

WUWT is scrambling for articles since Anthony Watts went on a holiday a few weeks ago. There have been quite a few re-posts of articles at the Daily Caller, which is one of those dime-a-dozen science-denying libertarian website in the USA. Today Charles the Moderator copied and pasted an article (archived here) about how Donald Trump proposes to undo an executive order designed to reduce environmental harm. Among other things, this will mean that federal agencies no longer have to account for flood risk and climate change when they provide funds for roads, bridges or other structures.

Dirty coal, heat waves and floods - and the last straw for Clive Hamilton

Earlier this week, in an embarrassing childish display, some of Australia's elected representatives pushed to increase carbon emissions more quickly than we already are. This wasn't juvenile backbenchers behaving in an unseemly fashion. This was our Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, and the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, Barnaby Joyce.

Coal plant-ed question

In the video below, Scott Morrison responds to the Dorothy Dixer (planted question) from his backbench colleague, Andrew Hastie, the Member for Canning in Western Australia. Morrison was keen to play the fool in Parliament. He embarrassed Australia in the eyes of the world by portraying everyone who accepts science as idiots or worse.

Extreme December weather

December was not without extreme weather in many parts of the world. This past week has seen floods in South and North America, the UK and Ireland, worsening drought in southern Africa, wildfire in Australia and southern California, and unseasonally warm weather across the USA and Canada.

Worst floods in 50 years in South America

The BBC headline is "Flooding 'worst in 50 years', as 150,000 flee in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay".  Rivers have broken banks after days of heavy rains.

Source: BBC

The worst affected is Paraguay, where more than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many of them poor people living on the banks of the River Paraguay. This underscores the fact that it is the least wealthy who are most vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

Extreme weather denial at WUWT

The weather is not being kind to deniers. Just this week there have been record-breaking rains in the USA, where eleven people have reportedly lost their lives.  And in Europe, where seventeen people are reported to have been killed. Not just record-breaking, but record-smashing rains.  And in the past month there was also the incredible record rain in Japan. And the numerous records being set for tropical cyclones and hurricanes.  It's as if the earth is getting sick of us ignoring the signs and has stepped up the pace of climate change.

All this while last year and this year are the two hottest years on record so far. Put all that together with the UN meeting in Paris and you can understand why deniers are losing it.

Anthony Watts has realised that he cannot ignore the rain in the USA, but he's claiming it's just weather (archived here). Which is very inconsistent of him, because he has a record of lying to his readers that extreme events aren't getting more extreme as global warming kicks in. He's also telling lies about the extremely hot waters that the winds blew over, which is part of the reason for the record-smashing rain events. Anthony's telling quite blatant lies now. He seems to not care that he has not a shred of credibility left. (You'll recall that just a few days ago he was also telling his readers that the greenhouse effect isn't real.)

Hurricanes and floods - USA

As a follow up to my last article, there's one topic you won't read much of at WUWT, and that's extreme weather. So far, there's not been a single mention of Hurricane Joaquin. That system is currently poised to hit the Bahamas, and is making people on the east coast of the USA a tad nervous. Most particularly because it's very difficult to know whether it will go up the coast or veer out to sea.

Source: EarthWindMap

Coincidentally, the hurricane (as a tropical low) appeared about the same time as a new paper in PNAS, about how rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are increasing the risk of flooding in New York City. In the abstract, the authors write how "flood risk has greatly increased for the region; for example, the 500-y return period for a ∼2.25-m flood height during the pre-anthropogenic era has decreased to ∼24.4 y in the anthropogenic era."  500 years to 24.4 years is a huge change. You can read about the paper at The Carbon Brief, where Robert McSweeney writes:

Rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are pushing New York City coastal floods to new heights, says a study published today.

Floods hitting the city are now more than a metre higher than before humans had an influence on the climate, the research shows, increasing the risk of coastal defences being overwhelmed.

Read the full article - it's detailed and well written.

Reference

Andra J. Reed, Michael E. Mann, Kerry A. Emanuel, Ning Lin, Benjamin P. Horton, Andrew C. Kemp, and Jeffrey P. Donnelly (2015) "Increased threat of tropical cyclones and coastal flooding to New York City during the anthropogenic era", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,doi/10.1073/pnas.1513127112

• Climate change is raising the risk of coastal floods in New York City, study finds - article by Robert McSweeney at The Carbon Brief.

Five people died in Queensland floods

The weather in much of eastern Australia has been extreme over the past few weeks. That's only one of the words I can find to describe it. In just the last 24 hours, five people have died as a result. That's in a country where people are not unused to floods.

This is May already. The wet season should be done. In any case, this is south of the tropics. Yet not long after incredible downpours and floods in the Hunter region in NSW, there've been such heavy rains over part of south eastern Queensland that it's taken the lives of five people - in three separate events of cars being washed away by floodwaters.

Please, people - take care out there. Weather can be extremely dangerous.

WUWT strawman: Week 13 of 52 - not much extreme weather? So sez Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, or one of his surrogates, has made a brief appearance at WUWT to write a headline and an opening salvo. Here is what he wrote (archived here):

So far, 2015 seems to be a bad year for the ‘severe weather caused by climate change” meme

Anthony Watts / 21 mins ago March 22, 2015

Looks like another “divergence problem” as tornadoes don’t follow the climatology

That's it. The rest was a copy and paste of an article from NOAA (archived here). The NOAA article was about how there have been no tornadoes reported in the USA this March, so far. This is a record - since 1970 at any rate.

Anthony Watts talked about a "meme", but what he wrote is a logical fallacy known as a strawman, as you'll see below.