Drought in Australia, sign of a world wide famine to come?

Question

Not sure why someone put thumbs down to Independent's factual answer. The activity of the sun is a key determinant of weather.

Answer 1

Maybe so.. who knows?

More likely to be a sign of global warming

Answer 2

Climate change is a global issue.  There have been droughts in Australia before and will be again.  Climate change is predicted to make the extremes more extreme, but it has to be a global effort for climate change - Australia can't fix it alone.  Farmers and agricultural scientists are pretty clever people and have found ways to improve drought-proofing and adapt production to address climatic constraints, but drought that goes this long one has and as widespread is pretty bad.  If you haven't before, I suggest you do some reading about weather, climate change and  El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  Did you know there are things called teleconnections whereby climatic conditions in one place can be linked to climatic conditions in another remote part of the globe?  From a humanity point of view, I would be worried about the famines in Africa now.

Answer 3

there always been draughts in australia ...  famine is more a symptom of wars than draughts

Answer 4

wierd how in 1970s they so called scientists said we were heading for an iceage, now some say a global warming? answer this why is mars also heating up at same rate as earth??? The Sun is in a transition period at the moment thats why!

Answer 5

No.

Answer 6

Yeah anything that happens from now on is global warming, After all everything used to be constant and never changing.

Answer 7

Australia is no stranger to drought!  It is not unusual.

Answer 8

No, but we're going to have to be more careful.  In prosperous countries we eat too much and throw good food away, just by addressing those two issues we'll deal with most of the problem.  And we are smart enough to have worked out that there is a certain amount of water within the Earth's atmosphere - it's simply not always in the place or form we want it.  The polar ice caps are not "disappearing" they are melting, becoming water and part of the oceans. Some will evaporate and become clouds, which eventually will rain somewhere...

However, we do need to start dealing with it more intelligently - we could start with golf courses !  And Aussies could stop pretending they live in Europe and abandon their lush green lawns.  Brown is the natural colour for the Aussie landscape, and it's beautiful.  Here in London we've had the dryest April on record, and just had an email from Melbourne, where after the first rain in ages, reserves are only 29%.  

There is enough water - we should simply use it more intelligently

Answer 9

Because weather is variable and events like floods, droughts, storms etc are naturaly occuring things any one of them is not a sign of anything.

Only when there is a string of unusual events does it start to make sense to start to look for a common cause.

Droughts are common in Australia, although this is one og the most severe for a very long time. By itself it means nothing. However if they have another severe drought in a year or 2 and then another, I think it would be a safe bet that that is an indication that climate is changing.

That is the problem with the skeptics, climate is all about long term averages. So no one event has meaning by itself. The only way to convince the skeptics is to wait 50 years and take a good average. Tough if it is then a bit late.

GW theory suggests that there will be increased variability in the weather, and increased strength and frequency of extreme weather events. World wide there is a considerable body of evidence that this is starting to occur.

Get some good records and count up extreme weather events for your area for say 1950 to 1960, then do it same basis, for 1995 to 2005. Then repeat for 10 other locations where good records have been kept. (spread the locations out as much as possible (around the world). If the theory is correct then there should be more extreme weather events in the 1995-2005 data. (if you have earlier accurate complete records use them, eg 1896-1906 and 1996 to 2006.

Famine of course depends on how we decide to deal with climate change.