Australia's Continuing Drought Raises Doubts On Farms' Survival - Reuters

[hatrack]

EDIT

"Drought conditions in southeastern Australia this year have once again reached a critical point for winter crops, with the first to be planted, oilseed canola, now all but written off. After years of drought, the big question is being asked: has Australia become just too dry to run a A$30 billion a year farm export industry, one of the largest in the world?


Climatologist Roger Stone raises the frightening prospect of eastern Australia having to live with drought as the normal state. Australia seemed headed toward a near-permanent El Nino weather condition, Stone, science manager for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries, told Reuters.

Triggered by abnormal sea temperatures, El Nino is blamed for Australia's severe 2002 drought, which slashed crops and caused a liquidation of the nation's livestock. In the late 1990s another El Nino caused famine and deaths among Papua New Guinea highlanders and choked Southeast Asia with forest fires. "It's an insidious downward trend," Stone said of rainfall in Australia's farming heartland, in eastern and southern regions. "We're worried that the trend might continue ... Many climate models suggest a near-El Nino mean state ... could be the norm for the future," he said.

Big tropical depressions which in past decades regularly formed off Australia's eastern coast to bring good rainfall to farmland had been reduced to one or two a year as near-El Nino conditions steered rain to Australia's northwest, he said. This year, Australia's northern summer monsoons also failed. Stone blames long-term climate change and global warming for sending rain from eastern and southern growing fields to the Northern Territory and northwest Western Australia. "We can't muck around too long on this. Some of the trends taking place, even by themselves, are alarming," he said."

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30915/story.htm

[phantom power]

1. "we can't muck around"

Now that it's happening, what can anybody do?