Tropical cyclone Alfred hit south east Queensland and north east New South Wales for a week across 600 kilometres, with waves, wind and, especially, rain. It then transformed into an inland low pressure weather system.

The week’s rain topped out at more than a metre at Upper Springbrook, in the Gold Coast hinterland, while at Dorrigo in New South Wales, on Alfred’s outskirts, 893 millimetres (mm) came down.

Fortunately, despite persistent rain mainly to Alfred’s south, the rain gauge at Lismore maxed out at just over 200 mm. South east Queensland, however, experienced intense rains after Alfred crossed the coast on March 8.

The next day Hervey Bay, to the north, had its heaviest day’s rain in 70 years as a thunderstorm started off a fall of more than 300mm. The week’s total rain.

Through that day and night, falls also reached up to 433mm at sites around Magan-djin/Brisbane. It was Magan-djin’s wettest day, at 275mm, since January 1974, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Wanda.

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred has turned out to be the latest “rain-bomb”, rolling off fossil-fuel addicted capitalism’s production line of weather disasters.

More than enough rain-bombs have come out of the Coral Sea in the last decade and a half. They caused Magan-djin’s flooding in 2011, Bundaberg’s in 2013 and a metre of rain was dumped on Townsville in 2019, with the flooding centred on Lismore, but it also spread from Sydney to north of Magan-dui in 2022.

Inevitably, these will happen again.

This is for four reasons, all of which are related to climate change.

First, surface sea temperatures have risen and are rising, which feeds energy into cyclones. Secondly, air temperatures have risen and are rising, which puts more water vapour into the atmosphere,........

© Green Left Weekly