Friday, March 7

 The expected cyclone in Brisbane has certainly caused some consternation.  Madeleine's flight has been cancelled and she's not sure when she'll be able to get home.  Her main worry concerns her work; she is involved in property management and one of her buildings is a high-rise with lifts.  Too much rain can get into the lift shaft and cause al sorts of problems, and Madi won't be there to sort it out.

They came over to visit yesterday morning and I had arranged a Treasure Hunt for them: nothing too complicated, just simple clues to find where I had hidden chocolates.  They worked as a team and worked through the twenty clues efficiently.  I remember I had to always provide some game like that when Madeleine came to visit us when she was young, making them progressively harder as she got older.

I have found something I wrote during a previous cyclone which seems appropriate today.  I called it Floods:

I remember one day in about 1954, sitting in my classroom at Gwynneville Primary School, watching the teacher, probably Mr Fuller, drawing a diagram on the blackboard. On the left-hand side was a blue line, representing the sea, above was a bright yellow sun; on the right was a green representation of fields with a brown mountain looming over them.  Mr Fuller used white chalk to draw arrows showing how the sun draws water from the sea to form clouds, how the wind pushes the clouds across the land and how the water from the clouds drops as rain on the fields below and eventually makes its way back to the sea.  A very simple representation of the water cycle. I used a similar diagram many times when I was teaching.

Last week, one newspaper tried to describe the amount of rain which fell on NSW by saying there was the equivalent of several thousand swimming pools of water in the clouds which gathered over the flooded areas and dumped their load, causing all the damage. 

A clumsy description, I think, but essentially accurate.  I remember Mr Fuller also telling us that floods are more prevalent in tropical areas because the sun is hotter and draws up more water.  I’m not sure the interaction is as simple as he made out but, of course, he was talking to naïve 10 year-olds.  No doubt there are climate scientists trying to get the reality of the water cycle into the heads of decision makers in every country in the world.  They’ll be trying to make the same point that Mr Fuller was trying to impart to us all those years ago.

As the climate gets hotter, more water will be drawn from the oceans and more will fall on the land.  If more water falls on the land, there will be more ‘flood events’ (as modern nomenclature has it).  It’s not rocket science: it’s much more important than that.