Believing warmists could drown your town What's really hurting Australians and drowning their towns is not global warming but warming alarmism. Nick Cater on the grave danger of believing warming activists such as Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery, who in 2007 famously predicted "even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems": When southeast Queensland's reservoirs began to run dry in the middle of the long drought, the obvious solution seemed to be to build another one... [But] in late 2009 [federal Environment Minister] Peter Garrett called in the Centre of International Economics in Canberra to look at it... The independent advisers" report ... [knew] that climate change alters everything, not just a little, but a lot... Nowadays, they have "rain events," too infrequent and too violent to flow obediently downhill from Mount Mee in an orderly fashion, meander north along the Mary River and fill a newly built dam. The Traveston Dam would just be another white elephant... [The Queensland Government's] calculations [had assumed] that Queensland's precipitation would fall by 10 per cent in the long term. The independent advisers, however, found that it was "simplistic" to look merely at rainfall totals. It ignored the risk of bush fires ripping through water catchments; ditto the polluted storm run-off that would be washed into dams by what the report calls "extreme rainfall events." The bottom line was that the "traditional approaches" (let's call them dams) should be abandoned for "portfolios that rely to a lesser extent on rain-fed sources of supply" (let's call them desalination plants). So there you have it; the then environment minister had no option but to knock the Queensland government's reckless plans on the head... Within weeks of Garrett's decision, the drought broke in Queensland, rain fell heavily and the Mary River was in flood. Gympie was flooded in March 2010, January 2011, March 2012 and again last month... Had the Traveston Crossing Dam gone ahead, it would have reduced the flood risk considerably, according to Queensland Water Infrastructure. Meanwhile Queensland desalination plant remains mothballed.