Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Drought

Dust Storm Hits Central Eastern Australia

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dust car cutAS I look outside the sky is orange with dust.  It irritates the nose and eyes, tickles the throats and sits heavily on the chest.  And I am inside.

According to all the news reports visibility is 10 metres at Broken Hill to the far west and 100 metres in Sydney just 150 kilometres east of where I am.   Australian Bureau of Meteorology spokeswoman Jane Golding says gale force winds have whipped up the dust from Australia’s drought-stricken inland and spread it east.

According to ‘Out of the West: A historical perspective of the Western Division of New South Wales’ by Dick Condon (Published by Rangeland Management Action Plan, 2002) there were severe dust storms in 1902-03, 1937-39, 1983, 1993, but the worst were during the period from 1943-1945.  Some of these storms were often continuous day-in-day-out for several days.  [Read more…] about Dust Storm Hits Central Eastern Australia

The Drought Breaks in Australia

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Australia is a land of “drought and flooding rains”.  

Last week parts of north-eastern Australia received a “year’s rain within a week” and many inland areas are now sea.  There is a photo gallery at the CourierMail website entitled “Queensland Under Water” and the following photograph of the Urandangi Hotel copied from the gallery.

More Drought for Southern Australia?

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Based on the 130 years of data, Baker predicts that the current solar cycle, which reached a minimum in 2007, will continue a bit longer. In fact, he says, “there could be a 100-year minimum in solar activity,” meaning much of Australia could experience a prolonged drought.  Read more here.

Australian Parliamentarian, and Sceptic, Banned Prevented from Tabling Climate Data

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DR Dennis Jensen BAppSc (RMIT), MSc (Melb), PhD (Monash) is the only member of the Australian Parliament with any training in science a PhD in a science discipline. 

[As correctly pointed out in the comments following this posting, my brother Jim Turnour, also a member of the Federal Parliament, has a Batchelor of Agricultural Science.  Other members with science and science-related degrees are listed in a comment in the following thread.]    

Yesterday Dr Jensen suggested in the Australian Parliament that many of the current problems facing the Murray Darling Basin are the result of low runoff as a consequence of changed land management practices (including more plantations in the top of catchments), catchment-wide drainage management plans (place in the 1980s and 1990s to lower water tables) and more efficient water use (resulting in less leakage). 

He explained that it was wrong to blame climate change for the low levels in the dams, because there had been no long term decline in rainfall in the Basin. 

Dr Jensen also explained that many of the climate models used to predict regional rainfall, including the CSIRO models (relied upon by Ross Garnaut in his report on climate change to the Australian government), are unreliable and unduly pessimistic.

When Dr Jensen asked to table supporting information in the Parliament by way of charts and tables, the request was denied. 

Much of the information that Dr Jensen was banned from tabling can be found in a recent publication from the IPA entitled ‘What’s Happening to the Murray River?’.

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The picture of Dr Jensen is from his parliamentary website.

How Melbourne’s Climate Has Changed: A reply to Dr David Jones (Part 3)

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IN an opinion piece entitled ‘Our hot, dry future’ published by Melbourne’s The Age newspaper on October 6, 2008, Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, suggested global warming was responsible for the current long drought in Melbourne and that there was worse to come.  

I don’t think the article was very convincing. I am annoyed that it didn’t include any real data.  While Dr Jones claimed that “We know that over the past 11 years Melbourne’s rainfall has been about 20% below the long-term average”, he didn’t explain what period this “long-term average” covers and what is the relevance of the last 11 years given it is accepted that over this period there has been a dominance of El Nino, and therefore dry conditions.   

Key Australian Institutions have claimed for some time that we have a water crisis because of climate change. 

Indeed in 2005 CSIRO published a “Melbourne Water Climate Change Study” claiming  “…the greater Melbourne Region has had its lowest rainfall on record compared to all other periods of similar length.” 

But as blogger, Warwick Hughes, showed some time ago, the period chosen was just 92 months, from October 1996 to May 2004.

In order to put their statement in some context Mr Hughes graphed high quality rainfall data for the weather station closest to Melbourne, Yan Yean, back to January 1863 – and he has just updated the chart to the end of September 2008. 

A high quality version of this chart can be found at Mr Hughes’ website, click here.

The chart indicates that Melbourne experiences dry periods every so often and that the current drought is similar in magnitude to the droughts of 1896, 1925 and 1945.  The chart showing 145 years of data, does not support the claim, made by Dr Jones in his article in Melbourne’s The Age, that there has been recent unusual climate change in Melbourne.  Indeed periods of drought and flood are a natural hazard.

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Read Part 1 here:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/2008/10/how-melbourne%e2%80%99s-climate-has-changed-a-reply-to-dr-david-jones-part-2/ 
Read Part 2 here:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/2008/10/how-melbourne%e2%80%99s-climate-has-changed-a-reply-to-dr-david-jones-part-1/

Virtual Science for Australian Drought Policy Review

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Australia could experience drought twice as often and the events will be twice as severe within 20 to 30 years, according to a new Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO report.

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke yesterday released the report commissioned by the Rudd Government as part of a review of national drought policy.

According to the media release:

“The overall review, announced in April, will help prepare farmers, rural communities and Australia’s primary industries for the challenges of climate change.

The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO climatic report on future drought events – the first of its kind in Australia – will be considered as part of the drought policy review.

Key findings of the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO report include:

Under a high scenario, droughts could occur twice as often, cover twice the area and be more severe in key agricultural production areas;

The current definition of ‘Exceptional Circumstances’, which defines areas eligible to apply for Federal Government drought assistance, is out-of-date;

Temperatures currently defined as ‘exceptional’ are likely to occur, on average, once in every two years in many key agricultural production areas within the next 20 to 30 years;

We need better ways of getting information about climate change preparedness to farmers.”

So it seems the government is reverting to scenario-modelling to determine its drought policy and will focus on a worst case scenario by way of a high emissions scenario.

There is really nothing new in this approach, indeed in November 2004 then NSW Premier Bob Carr released a report by CSIRO entitled ‘Climate Change in New South Wales’ alerting us to the possiblity of more frequent droughts. Given this report was also based on scenario-modelling I suggested at the time in my The Land column that the CSIRO could have spiced the report up even more by scenario-modelling a war and a volcanic eruption into it.

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The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO report ‘An assessment of the impact of climate change on the nature and frequency of exceptional climatic events’ is available at www.daff.gov.au/droughtpolicyreview.