Super storm hits Australia caused by 'La Nina'

It did not require complex climatic modelling to predict the “super storm” which unleashed Queensland’s inland killer-tsunami.  Meteorologists and oceanographers did, to some degree, see it coming, warning that after weeks of waterlogging, further deluge could spell disaster.

They blame La Nina, “the Girl Child” – counterpart to the El Nino – a phenomenon which sees a cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, leading to weather turmoil across the globe.

This year, La Nina’s the strongest on record; she has become a meteorological Frankenstein, responsible for torrential rain as far afield as Australia, South East Asia, Pakistan, Venezuela and Colombia and vicious cold snaps in North America.

With suburban Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city, now braced for inundation within the next 48 hours, Queensland’s “Long Dry” – a decade of drought – has been dramatically reversed.  It is now being dubbed “The Big Wet”.

Today the Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman, was quoted as saying that “the situation has demonstrably deteriorated.”

There are signs of panic, with predictions that what’s in store will be worse than the terrible 1974 floods.  Channel 4 News has just spoken to a Brisbane resident who said people are panic-buying, and hoarding supplies, with milk being sold-out across the city today and bread supplies running short.

Flash-flood warnings have gone out to people in 32 low-lying suburbs.  With nearly 80 people reported missing, there are warnings that the death toll – 10, as I write – is likely to rise.

On Monday, 300mm of rain fell on Toowoomba, west of Brisbane within 24 hours; the wall of water which surged eastwards towards the Lokyer Valley and Brisbane, beyond, was as sudden as it was devastating.

Amateur video is compelling and horrifying; cars hurled around, houses smashed and swept away; residents left stranded on rooftops, or clinging to telegraph poles.

Insurance companies are already calculating the damage at billions of dollars; the tourism industry’s been badly hit and the Australian dollar’s sunk on concerns that the mines that produce a third of the country’s coal exports could be paralysed for months.  The coal feeds the steel mills of Asia, so the ramifications will be felt across the region.

In the immediate term, more rain and thunderstorms are forecast for the Sunshine State on Wednesday and there’s a high chance that the rain which has fallen almost incessantly for more than six weeks will continue for several more, with no let-up expected by La Nina for at least another month.

Yet as rain swamps the eastern side of the driest inhabited continent on the planet, bush fires are ironically ravaging western Australia.  Just 100km south of Perth, hundreds have been evacuated as fires blaze out of control, consuming plantations, homes and livestock.  Police there believe the fires have been started deliberately, whereas it’s an Act of God wreaking havoc 3,000km to the east.

Wild weather and calamities like these often lead to speculation that global warming may ultimately be to blame.  Climatologists will be reluctant to opine on this, but out of a growing sense of its vulnerability as a continent on the front line of climate change, Australia is fast emerging as a world leader in dealing with the onslaughts that the 21st century might throw at us.