Feature
Pitiless blue skies
by Julie Hare
Is Australia’s “big dry” ever going to break?
There is something ominous happening with the weather in Australia. Even though the sunburnt country has a history of dreadful droughts which are etched into the national psyche, something far more sinister is thought to be happening. While few scientists will call it climate change – there is no conclusive evidence there to date – predictions are dire as previously once-in-a-blue moon events now turn up with increasing frequency.
The big drought has officially been under way in southeastern Australia – New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania – since 1997; further north in south-eastern Queensland it dates back to 2000, says David Jones, from the National Climate Centre with the Bureau of Meteorology. Victoria hasn’t had a wet autumn since 1989. To blame, says Jones, are changes in the dominant weather patterns brought about by surface ocean temperatures – El Niño and La Niña.
“It’s been 20 years since we’ve had a La Niña that has delivered decent rainfall. However, each El Niño has been characterised by severe droughts in 1997, 2002 and 2006. El Niños only last for a year but the frequency is increasing. This drought episode has been very severe.”
The problem is, with no rejuvenating La Niñas, one bad episode just rolls into another, resulting in an epic drought. Furthermore, there is nothing to indicate a return to “average” or “normal” any time in the future. Modelling from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia predicts a clear decline in rainfall by 2070 as well as an increase in severe weather events. Australia, along with Spain, is the most vulnerable of developed countries from increased aridity.
Says Jones, “Cold nights and days are becoming less frequent. At the same time, we have seen an increase in the number of high night-time temperatures, and now hot day-time temperatures are also on the increase.”
Not surprisingly, Australians, used to headlines about water theft and bushfires, are finally changing their ways.
“Climate change first became a public issue in 1988. Australia was one of the first countries to really cotton on to it in a public way, but it was knocked off the agenda by the recession,” says Peter Christoff, a researcher in Resource Management with the University of Melbourne, and deputy president of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
That changed about two or three years ago, he says, when several things happened almost simultaneously. The first was the stark economic truth contained in the United Kingdom’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which said climate change required urgent global action. The second was the International Conference on Climate Change’s forward assessment report. Then the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth captured the popular imagination, and the drought just didn’t break.
That’s not to say the entire country is gripped by drought. Far from it. Now when the tropical rains in northern Australia arrive, it is often as a downpour of almost-Noah’s Ark proportions. This, in turn, is driving what Christoff calls “pipemania” as southern politicians look for radical – perhaps fanciful – ways to even up the mismatch between water supply and population density.
“There is a high level of political concern because public opinion has identified water as a top-ranking issue. There’s not necessarily a clear connection between the current drought and climate change, but there is general anxiety about water availability.”
The political response has mainly been to look at large-scale solutions. Multibillion-dollar desalination plants are under construction in Sydney and Perth, and are proposed for Melbourne and Adelaide.
“State governments have been locked into the idea of big project development and have underestimated the political benefits of going down the path of smaller-scale, diffuse projects like rainwater tanks,” says Christoff.
Is there a ying to the yang? Is there an upside to the downside? “For Australia, no,” says Christoff. “We’ll see a decrease in food production, an increase in problems associated with climate variation, a decline in water availability, an increase in extinctions of species and massive threats to iconic sites like the Great Barrier Reef.”
