Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in a sticky, yet dry, situation.
Even though a drought has caused Australia’s agricultural production to fall 25 percent in the last year, Howard may have to ban irrigation so that urban centers can have drinking water.
The targeted river basin, the Murray-Darling, is known as Australia’s ‘food bowl’ because it houses 72 percent of Australia’s farm and pasture land. If insufficient rain continues through the next few weeks, this year’s harvest will be devastated and cities will need to implement water usage restrictions.
Prime Minister Howard doesn’t accept the connection to global warming, but scientists and farmers disagree, saying “this drought has the fingerprints of climate change all over it.” In climate models, Australia is predicted to be one of the first areas seriously impacted by climate change.
Australia is accustomed to drought, but not of this proportion. During the last major drought, agricultural production fell 10 percent, not nearly one quarter. The Prime Minister’s struggle to manage water resources is a testament to just how unprepared for climate change’s impacts even developed countries are.
There is no use denying climate change anymore, not when a drought is sucking three-quarters to one percent of the GDP dry. According to Sir Nicholas Stern’s report, that could be the GDP it takes to prevent future damage by mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
Without any sort of adaptation or mitigation policy, our future is beginning to dry up.
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> but scientists and farmers disagree, saying “this drought has the
> fingerprints of climate change all over it.”
What exactly does that mean? The scientific fact is that no particular weather or climate event can linked to (or used as evidence against) global climate change. Funny how alarmists (like Romm) do this when it suits their purposes and deny it when it does not. It’s a form of intellectual dishonesty.
It means this is a “1000-year” drought and not a single local weather event, but a regionwide climatic event of exactly the kind we expect global warming to make more common!
The article in The Independent you linked to says the Murray Darling Basin accounts for 40% of farm produce. I think that’s right.
There are two views of this “1000-year” drought. One is that it’s not much bigger, as yet, than the Federation drought from 1895-1903 and that the rain will come again.
The second is that this is exactly the kind of climate pattern that is forecast by the climate change models, but it showed up perhaps a half-century early.
Many farmers hold to the former view, many to the latter. But there was a survey last year that showed (from memory) that 87% of the people think we are not doing enough about climate change and that it is a more important foreign policy issue than terrorism.
For a local view of the matter on our blog Larvatus Prodeo go here and here.
A pattern of rainfall deficiency has existed in the SW of Western Australia since the early 1970s and it seems to be spreading. We are told that the mid-latitude storms have moved south, largely missing the continent. It’s the mirror image of a drier southern Europe and floods in the north.
So you’d be brave to say that climate change and GW is not involved.
Joe Says:
> It means this is a “1000-year” drought and not a
> single local weather event, but a regionwide
> climatic event of exactly the kind we expect
> global warming to make more common!
1000-yr droughts occur about every 1000 years, whether climate change is taking place or not. The brutal fact is that you can, or cannot, attribute this particular drought to climate change. The science of climate change makes predictions about statistical long-term climate only, not local and temporary events. You are perverting science to hawk your alarmist view, and it’s no better when you do it or when skeptics do the opposite.
This is alarming situation for Australia and should be tackle as soon as possible. As you said “Without any sort of adaptation or mitigation policy, our future is beginning to dry up”. So let’s create a situation which will lead us to the door through which we could be able to escape from this disastrous situation. Suppose howard will ban irrigation then it will create further problem s regarding to food. A fine survey and action plan is needed here !