Recent scientific advice to the Queensland Government warned that the state would be threatened by higher flood levels from intense torrential downpours brought on by climate change.

Ref: Climate change the new flood risk for Qld, Sydney Morning Herald website, 10 November 2010

What the scientists say

While scientists are quick to emphasise that individual extreme weather events should not be attributed to climate change alone, the floods in Queensland are consistent with climate scientists' forecasts.

Professor David Karoly, University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences:

"Australia has been known for more than a hundred years as a land of droughts and flooding rains, but what climate change means is Australia becomes a land of more droughts and worse flooding rains... On some measures, it's the strongest La Nina in recorded history... we also have record-high ocean temperatures in northern Australia, which means more moisture evaporating into the air. And that means lots of heavy rain."

Ref: ‘Fates conspire to concoct a recipe for disaster', The Age, 12 January 2011

Professor Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Science and Technology, Griffith University, and president of ACF:

"The Queensland floods are another reminder of what climate science has been telling us for 25 years. As well as a general warming and increasing sea levels, it predicted more frequent extreme events: floods, droughts, heatwaves and severe bushfires. The decline in rainfall in south-western WA and the increasing rainfall in the tropics are exactly what the science has been telling us to expect. It is still too early to say with certainty that climate change is responsible for the strong El Nino event which brought devastating drought to eastern Australia and the equally strong La Nina event which has produced the terrible floods. But they are exactly what climate science has been warning us about. If we don't want to see more events like the 2009 Victorian bushfires and the floods now happening, we need a concerted program of action to reduce greenhouse pollution."

Ref: Australian Conservation Foundation website, 12 January 2011

Climate change is expected to result in more intense rainfall events. In 2007 the UN's International Panel on Climate Change concluded that:

"Observations are consistent with the physical understanding regarding the expected linkage between water vapour and temperature, and with intensification of precipitation events in a warmer world... consistent with rising amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere, there are widespread increases in the numbers of heavy precipitation events and increased likelihood of flooding events in many land regions, even those where there has been a reduction in total precipitation."

Ref: IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

More recently the National Academy of Sciences found that:

"Extreme precipitation is likely to increase as the atmospheric moisture content increases in a warming climate. Typical magnitudes are 3-10 per cent per degree C warming, with potentially larger values in the tropics, and in the most extreme events globally."

Ref: National Academy of Sciences, (2010), Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia, Committee on Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations, National Academy of Sciences, National Academies Press, Washington, USA