Queensland storms "consistent with climate change"

Tenuous Link to Climate Change Alert: Here we have a typical non-story about the rare, but not unheard of, storms in Queensland this week, which some climatologist has hijacked to try to make a link with "climate change". This story is so full of contradictions I had to read it about five times, and it still doesn't make any sense. It reads like a "good news, bad news" joke. First the good news:

University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone and Queensland weather bureau spokesman Gavin Holcombe said that while November in southeast Queensland had generally been a dry month over the past decade, big storms such as the last two were not unusual.

OK, not unusual. However, here's the bad news:

"But this sort of violent weather activity is consistent with climate change predictions. We're coming off a long drought in southeast Queensland, and that has been an extreme weather event. Now we're getting these storms, and they're also extreme weather events."

We'll gloss over the fact that there is no proven link between warming and more extreme weather... But then after getting us all excited, it's all a damp squib, and there's good news again:

He cautioned against reading too much into the storms, saying that a series of events by themselves did not "prove" climate change one way or the other.

But under what headline does the usually sensible Australian run this story?

Wild weather in Queensland 'a sign of climate change'

This is just one of hundreds of examples of appalling journalism about climate change in the mainstream media - articles written by journos who have no understanding of science and are incapable of separating fact from fiction. No wonder the general public don't have a clue what is really going on.

Read it here.