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The future today
THE DROUGHT afflicting southern Australia has now
been officially declared the worst since records began and global
warming is to blame. Australia has had some terrible droughts in the
last 150 years, but David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the
Bureau of Meteorology, announced that the twelve-year drought "is now
very severe and without historical precedent". (The Australian, 10
October 2008)
The Liberal government of John Howard took delight
in denying climate change. Yet Australia has been hit so hard, so
suddenly by global warming, that Howard ended his political career
pleading with the Australian population – not renowned for religious
sentiment – to pray for rain. "I’m serious", he added. Panic swept
Australia as it swept Howard from office – he was hated by the working
class in any case. "Southeast Queensland has until Easter – just 223
days – before it runs out of water and has to call on emergency
supplies", was the typical run of articles this time last year. (Water
Woes Worsen, Goldcoast.com, 11 August 2007) Such was the panic that a
man killed his elderly neighbour for watering his grass on the wrong
day. (wsbtv.com, 2 November 2007)
How has Australia survived? Brisbane, state capital
of Queensland and a city of nearly two million, was hardest hit last
year. Severe bans were imposed and various projects to recycle water
implemented. Every house had to plumb in rainwater tanks assisted by
grants, although they did not fully cover costs. Water consumption fell
dramatically. Consequently, the total amount of water drawn monthly for
the city from the dangerously low dams fell from a peak of 30,000
megalitres in March 2005 to just 7,500 megalitres in February 2008 and
the dams have recovered. Advanced capitalist countries like Australia
have enormous resources which, by comparison to countries already
weakened by neo-colonialism, such as Sudan, allow them to avoid, at
least for a period, a descent into the Mad Max ‘water wars’ scenario
some feared.
But the drought continues to worsen. Jones says:
"The current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had
predicted". A slow, gradual pace of warming, taking 50 years, was
expected by the incoming Labour government. Instead, a tipping point
seems to have been reached and tipped. The government was, and remains,
completely unprepared. Water levels may have fallen too low to save
South Australia’s vast freshwater lower lakes, which now have four times
the salinity of sea water.
And yet the climate sceptics still ply their trade.
A certain David Purchase recently complained of "intolerance" in The Age
newspaper. (3 October 2008) "It seems as if there can be no debate"
about whether humans caused global warming, he claimed, not noticing,
presumably, that he was given the indulgence to do just that. "I won’t
deny that the Murray-Darling river basin is facing crisis", he admits –
the food bowl of Australia, producing mainly for export, was once the
second largest producer of wheat in the world, but production halved
last year due to drought. "We have performed poorly and short-sightedly
in managing our environment and resources. The evidence is all around us
on land, sea and air". But "my issue, however, is with the Orwellian
‘thought police’ who refuse to countenance real debate on the issue". In
reality, the intolerant, the thought police, those throwing insults
rather than arguments, attacking scientists when they cannot attack the
science, those who have apparently unlimited access to the media yet
claim to have none, are powerful companies whose profits are tied to the
use of fossil fuels – and it happens that Purchase is executive director
of the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce.
2007, the earth’s joint second warmest year in the
century, came at the end of an El Niño warm period, where the Pacific
Ocean turns warm and, on the other side of the planet, the Arctic ice
shrank to a new low. The regular changes in the world’s temperature,
driven over decades by slow movements of warm and cold water in the
Pacific Ocean, is now tending to colder weather. This may slow down or
even pause the headlong descent into a hotter climate. But, although
2008 has been relatively cold, the polar ice shrank to its second lowest
on record.
The cooler temperature of the La Niña event in the
Pacific Ocean over the last year (which passed but is now partly
returning) has not brought the drought to an end in Australia, although
it brought deluges in Brisbane and elsewhere. Jones says temperatures
are running at about one degree "above any previous comparable drought.
That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming
signal".
Pete Mason
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