With Murray-Darling Basin In 12th Year Of Drought, Australians Wonder What Future May Hold

[hatrack]

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Adelaide and Melbourne are running out of water. The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s prime food-growing region, is in the 12th year of a devastating drought that is putting the country’s ability to feed itself in question. The 400,000-square-mile basin, larger than France and Germany combined, has been so dry that the 1-million ton-rice crop was decimated last year, and production of wheat, lambs, and cotton are in significant decline. The slowly unfolding drought in the country’s south, coupled with this summer’s heat wave and fires in Victoria, have left many Australians wondering whether these natural disasters are a taste of what life will be like in a warming world. In the aftermath of the Victoria fires, the state’s premier, John Brumby, joined John Connor, the chief executive of the Climate Institute — a respected Australian research group — in describing the disaster as “fires of climate change.”

Concerned that steadily rising temperatures in south Australia and the recent drought signal a permanent climate shift, a majority of the country’s states have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to let the central government play the dominant role in managing local water resources. Growing fears of a lasting change in climate patterns has helped generate support for major public works projects to deal with water scarcity. Australia’s 2007 national election, which saw the Progressive Party come to power, was the first national election in the country’s history in which a scientific issue — climate change — played a decisive role.

“It’s testing our people,” said John Williams, the former chief of Land and Water for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s premier scientific agency. “These new conditions are forcing people to move out of industries. There are many people making decisions to change radically the nature of their business. There are some industries — rice growing, cotton production — that are just failing and falling away.”

To be sure, some of Australia’s climatologists assert that such extreme events are a normal part of the country’s diabolical weather. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth and is accustomed to long periods of dry weather and dangerous fires. “It is fashionable to promote climate change as being a contributor to changing fire frequency and intensity,” William Kininmonth, the former head of Australia's National Climate Centre, said in a recent article in The Age. “The pattern of rainfall over the past century does not point to a trend of reduction in rainfall. Nor has any link been offered between global temperature trends and the meteorology of Victorian heat waves.”

But CSIRO disputes Kininmonth’s conclusions. A study last year by the organization found that as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen, southern Australia has warmed 1.6° F since 1950. On average, 15 percent less rain falls now in the region. If present trends continue, rainfall will continue to diminish, said the study, and the temperature will be 4.4° F warmer by 2050.

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http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2137

[gulfcoastliberal]

1. WTF? Growing rice and cotton in a desert? They allow shit like Cubbie Station, then wonder why

all the water is gone? Idiots - not that we're one bit better.

[izquierdista]

2. They may be a bit worse

The English immigrants who settled in Australia still don't have a clue that they aren't in a high latitude, maritime climate. The clueless bozos think the few years of above average rainfall are 'normal', and average rainfall is a catastrophic drought. Once drought tolerant plants like Opuntia get a foothold there, instead of using it to advantage, like Mexicans have learned to do, they import a biological pest to actively destroy it.

If they really want to know what drought is, they need to camp out in the Sahel for a while, and then they will realize that there is abundant rainfall in Australia if they would just give up their high maintenance water sucking crops and plant appropriately.

[XemaSab]

3. Australian tequila

:9