As The Talk Goes On In Canberra, Oz Farmers Watch Dust Blow, Future Water Supplies Vanish

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When Lachie Graham was 12, a dust storm in his Harden homeland was rare enough for the family to rush outside with cameras clicking. ''I am 32 years old and I have seen more dust storms in the past five years than in my entire life,'' says Graham. ''For the last five summers it has been a weekly event, so bad you have to take the clothes off the line.'' Graham has transformed his south-west slopes beef farm to cope with the change since an unprecedented crop failure three years ago. His Argyle Meats now runs 1000 cows and 6000 ewes free range on grass where thousands more were once grain fed. About 12,000 trees have been planted over 12 years. Two of the six bores are solar powered.

As the Government's emissions trading scheme hit a brick wall this week, the everyday experiences of Australia's farmers with climate change gave the bickering in Canberra a hollow ring. Farmers already are forced to do more with less. The Murray-Darling basin - the immense, braided swirl of river and farmland supplying 40 per cent of Australia's food - is getting hotter; more importantly, it's getting drier. While politicians are the most visible form of the argument over whether climate change is coming, farmers are living with the reality of it.

Extensive research by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, backed by dozens of independent studies, establishes that global climate change is extending and intensifying the drought. Water resources are strained now and will decline by 9 per cent to 13 per cent over the next 20 years, according to a CSIRO report, the most detailed yet on the river system. And this forecast is predicated on world leaders agreeing to measures that limit global warming to 2 degrees - an outcome seen as ambitious.

The CSIRO analysis tests many scenarios and combinations, and few of them look good. The drought across southern NSW and Victoria - equivalent to the once-in-a-lifetime events that hit Australia in the 1890s and 1930s - may never really ''break'' in the traditional sense.

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http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/farmers-face-hardship-as-climate-changes-20090814-el72.html