| Submit your comments on this article |
| Down Under |
| Nature Not Humans or Global Warming To Blame For Long Lasting Australian Drought |
| 2007-01-04 |
| Australia's devastating drought is far more likely to be part of a natural cycle than a result of the man-made greenhouse effect, an Australian climate scientist said Thursday. Barrie Hunt, a researcher with government science agency CSIRO, dismissed suggestions that global warming, believed to be caused by carbon emissions, is responsible for the "Big Dry" gripping much of south-eastern Australia. "It is very, very highly likely that what we are seeing at the moment is natural climatic variability," Hunt told the Australian newspaper. After studying a CSIRO model of Australia's natural climate patterns over the past 10,000 years, Hunt said the current drought, whose severity has led some scientists to label it a once in a millennium event, was by no means unique. He said historical data -- which used air pressure, temperature, wind and rainfall information -- put current conditions into perspective, revealing 30 periods of drought lasting longer than eight years in the past ten millenia. "The longest sequence was 14 years in Queensland-New South Wales, 11 in the south-east and 10 in the south-west." He said that each of those significant dry spells occurred at random times and had an unpredictable duration. For example, the Queensland-NSW area went 800 years without a drought longer than eight years, "but there is another period of 462 years where you get five of these", he said. "When people talk about it as a 1,000-year drought, they haven't got the information. They don't understand that according to natural variability we could get another one in 50 years or it might be another 800 years, and there's no way of predicting it," Hunt said. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #5 I blame Al Gore. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-01-04 15:40 |
| #4 The muslims brought this plague upon thier land! Cast them out and the rains will return!!!!! Or something, just don't send them here. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2007-01-04 12:35 |
| #3 They are being punished by The Lawd for doin' ugly with sheeps and 'roos. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-01-04 10:56 |
| #2 Sounds right to me, JosephM. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-01-04 03:40 |
| #1 1000 yarns = 800 +/-, so people are not right, they're just NOT WRONG??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-01-04 01:09 |