The trees looked just like matchsticks

More disaster --- a category 5 cyclone struck the coast of north Queensland this week.  With extensive preparation,  effective emergency management and a degree of good luck the consequences were less disastrous than might have been expected.  Nevertheless there has been immense damage to infrastructure and agriculture and many people lost homes and possessions from the terrifying winds that stripped all the foliage from all the trees leaving them standing like matchsticks among the desolation and ruin.
There has been much media cover of the destruction and of the emergency responses.  There has been little consideration of the causes of these repeated exceptional natural disasters.  Ross Garnaut is reported in a recent article as saying that climate change is happening more quickly than he suggested in his first report, while Clive Hamilton goes so far as to say Queensland is being sacrificed to Australia’s and the world’s unwillingness to take global warming seriously.

Afterwards

Now that the Queensland floods have receded from an area as large as France and Germany combined (and Brisbane has begun to send around 200,000 tonnes of resulting rubbish to landfill) water has since covered 25 % of Victoria and will soon reach South Australia.  Only the tail end of the rain reached Tasmania, but even so it was enough to cause considerable damage to northern roads and farms.  Following the long dry these floods have been calamitous personally and nationally.

Yet another cause for reflection on the management of our land of drought and flooding rains this coming Australia Day.