Regarding statistics, floods and the public nuisance that social media can be

The Guardian asks:

“Are eastern Australia’s catastrophic floods really a one-in-1,000 year event?

Scientists say describing floods as ‘one-in-1,000-year’ events can mislead the public about the probability of such disasters recurring”

On Twitter, I had earlier noted that the one in 1000 years comparison was a trick of statistics, and essentially meaningless if people think in strict chronologies. So don’t get too mad with the polies. As the Guardian article points out, statistical ratios like 1/1000 years or 1/100 years or 1/50 years don’t mean you need to wait the prescribed number of years: 1000, 100 or 50 for the next flood of that magnitude. You can have your next one in 100 or 1000 year flood in three years time… Just like you could back the winner of the Melbourne Cup two years in a row and then never again.

The Twitterati took to me a little – they rightly pointed out that NSW leaders like Dominic Perrottet and many in our fossil-fooled federal government have NOT made any link between these events and the existing global climate crisis which Eastern Australia is currently actively demonstrating. The Guardian article above agrees with them; politicians should not throw such dismissive and dangerously naive terms about…

Unfolding events re floods and the neoliberal government response

Climatologists and scientists in related-fields have been warning us for years that Climate Change equals increasingly erratic and unstable weather systems. Those warnings have largely been ignored.

As Greta Thunberg succinctly puts it, the majority of the world’s governments have just “blah-blah-blahed” and done nothing of any significance in response. The Australian federal government is among the worst of offenders in this regard. Fossil fuel companies and other large corporations have far too much say and sway with governments that are busy outsourcing and privatising service and community care.

The writer of this blog

This is apparently our federal government’s response to events:

Are we complicit?

Brigid Delaney might agree with me that the wider population has been complicit in accepting the federal government’s lack of action on climate change: an “I’m okay with the doing of nothing because I’ve accepted that it will be too costly, too difficult and too inconvenient to do anything” position.

But perhaps we have reached a point when the wider populace will no longer accept the neoliberal myths [and inaction] of this government. I am certainly optimistic re the next [Australian federal] election¹ and the shedding by people of some of the old comforts. We live in a very different world now. We do NOT want to maintain governments that play the old and unsafe tunes.

1 Just as dumping Trump and replacing him with Biden offered the prospect of a better, less neoliberal U.S.

https://twitter.com/i/events/1497366202099720192