Australian drought
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to get all the latest news. Thanks for visiting, we really appreciate you checking us out!
The current drought we have in Australia is apparently the worst on record.
David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the drought affecting south-west Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria and northern Tasmania “is now very severe and without historical precedent”.
Dr Jones said Victoria had had “the driest multi-year period on record, but also by far the hottest….”
He said temperatures were running at about one degree “above any previous comparable drought. That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming signal.”
He said the data suggests that for every one degree of warming, there is a 15 per cent decline in run-off, or river flow, in the Murray Darling Basin….
He said a similar drying pattern had been observed in Europe’s Mediterranean, and the south-west in the USA….
He said the current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had predicted.
As ClimateProgress.org says:
he highlighted point is key. Previously, droughts around the world were either cold-whether droughts or warm-weather droughts. In the future, virtually all droughts will be hot weather droughts, which are obviously the worst kind.
What does this mean for winters? Less rain, less snow. Sounds wonderful. The BOM is even saying that “exceptional circumstances” and how they relate to drought (and the social and financial costs), won’t even be exceptional anymore – they’ll be normal.
Meantime, as a result of the drought our Victorian government is (in my opinion stupidly) building a desalinisation plant. Apart from the huge costs, the hugely salty output into the ocean (which we don’t know what will do to local marine life) and the huge carbon footprint from its electricity requirements, we could be making the drought worse by implementing one.
I still don’t know know why the state government is scared of upgrading the Werribee sewerage plant to enable it to output drinking water-grade water for reticulation into Melbourne’s water supplies upstream – i.e. put it in the Thompson and Upper Yarra and let nature filter it more (not that it needs it).
People need to get over this whole “pooh-water” business. Europeans have been drinking reclaimed water for years.
Similar Posts:
- Australian BOM analyses recent heatwave
- Australian heatwave – linked to climate change?
- Climate Change: not so good for anyone (especially for snow seasons and drinking water)
- Why snow guns are bad, and global water shortage = water wars?
- Climate change: here, now – Part II the human toll
