While the Australian government plays down any link between the current severe drought and global warming, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is "reasonably confident" climate change is taking place.
Climatologist with the Bureau, Dr. Blair Trewin, told The Epoch Times that climate change is drying some parts of the country, while bringing increased rainfall to others.
"In [the] southwest [Western Australia, WA] and southern Victoria, we are reasonably confident that long-term climate change is playing at least some role," Dr. Trewin said.
However, he said that while the above regions had become hotter and drier, the most significant effect of climate change was happening in Australia’s northwest, where rainfall levels had increased.
"The public focus has been on Eastern and Southern Australia because that is where the bulk of the population is,” Dr. Trewin explained, "but in fact the most dramatic trend that we are seeing over the last 50 years is the increasing rainfall in north Western Australia."
“There are parts of northern WA where rainfall has gone close to doubling over the last 50 years.”
Dr. Trewin said the Bureau of Meteorology used a number of different methods, such as tree rings, lake deposits, and coral records to determine the existence of long-term climate change.
“Victoria and Western Australia have the most obvious long-term signals,” he said.
“In some parts of the country, we have been able to get a general estimate of what has happened to rainfall periods of hundreds or a couple of thousand years.”
Natural or Man-Made?
While cyclone activity was an important contributor to rainfall, Dr. Trewin said there appeared to be more significant changes happening as there was no evidence of an increase in cyclones in the region.
Prime Minister John Howard has acknowledged Australia’s grim drought situation, warning irrigators in the Murray Basin that their allocations of water would be cut if there was no rain in the region within the next eight weeks.
However, he has drawn the line on linking the drought conditions to global warming.
"We've had droughts before. We’ve had very severe droughts before, but we had smaller populations and we had lesser demand," Mr. Howard said at a joint press conference with Minister for the Environment Malcolm Turnbull last week.
"I recognize the ongoing debate about the link between the two things and I don’t vary from that. I don’t think this dramatically alters it."
Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull said government scientists had yet to confirm the link.
"The CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization], if you look at their most recent papers, acknowledge that it is difficult to say whether any particular drought is a result of natural climate variability or a climate change—the global warming phenomenon," Mr. Turnbull told reporters.
Meanwhile the National Farmers Federation has spoken up for irrigators in the Murray Darling, with Chief Executive Ben Fargher warning of massive upheavals for farmers in the region.
"For high security users and those irrigators with tree crops, crops like almonds, citrus, olives, to name a few, if those crops actually die because there’s no water," Mr. Fargher told the Australian Broadcasting corporation (ABC), “then that has a significant impact for many, many years to come because it takes so much time to establish new crops and so much money to do so."
Dr. Trewin said the Bureau of Meteorology had been advising local communities in climate change regions about what the likely weather conditions will be.
"We are quite up-front about what has been happening there and what the long-term implications are," he said. "Some areas may have to change depending on how extreme the changes are."
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