The Climate Council in it’s Fact Sheet, Climate Change and drought June 2018 reports on how climate change is contributing to droughts. A key finding is that ‘climate change is likely making drought conditions in southwest and southeastern Australia worse’.
Yet the media,politicians and farmer organisations consistently fail to acknowledge the link between climate change and weather.
The key findings of the Climate Council in June this year were as follows
KEY FINDINGS
› Climate change is likely making drought conditions in southwest and southeast Australia worse.
› Climate change has contributed to a southward shift in weather systems that typically bring cool season rainfall to southern Australia. Since the 1970s late autumn and early winter rainfall has decreased by 15 percent in southeast Australia, and Western Australia’s southwest region has experienced a 15 percent decline in cool season rainfall.
› Climate change is also driving an increase in the intensity and frequency of hot days and heatwaves in Australia, exacerbating drought conditions.
› Queensland and New South Wales are currently in the grip of severe drought, with drought declared for 16.4 percent of New South Wales and 57.6 percent of Queensland.
› Current drought conditions come after a 2016/2017 summer characterised by recordbreaking temperatures, followed by a record dry winter. Rainfall over southern Australia during autumn 2018 was the second lowest on record.
› Time spent in drought is projected to increase in the future across southern Australia. Future drying trends in Australia will be most pronounced over southwest Western Australia, with total reductions in autumn and winter precipitation potentially as high as 50 percent by the late 21st century.
See link to full report
Comments
3 responses to “CLIMATE COUNCIL. Drought and climate change. The elephant in the room we refuse to talk about.”
I think it is called whistling past the graveyard.
The boiling frog has turned out the thermometer.
Denial has won the day, not through scientific arguments (they don’t have any) but by burying the issue, while CO2 emissions are only going up.
Climate change has become a taboo issue: Nowadays it is even difficult to publish news regarding global warming in otherwise progressive news channels and online venues.
People will not believe it till you get a celebrity to promote like Gwyneth Paltrow ! The it will be realised as a problem!