DROUGHT is cruel. The farmer doesn’t know when it is going to end, how much longer they will need to keep feeding their livestock, and how much longer they must wait until they can plant a crop. If the Australian Bureau of Meteorology were useful, they would provide a reliable long-term rainfall forecast. But they […]
THROUGH the Millennium drought of 2001 to 2009, I was optimistic that it would rain again, that the drought would end and probably with flooding rains. The drought did break, and the aggregated average annual rainfall for the Murray Darling Basin as calculated by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) shows 2010 was the wettest year […]
In announcing yesterday’s $320 million drought assistance package for farmers there was some mention of the situation out west being akin to a natural disaster. A more accurate description would be that its part of a natural cycle - not a natural disaster. There are many reasons why landholders may be particularly vulnerable to this […]
"POETRY, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Usually it doesn't, but sometimes a poem gets quoted in a national argument because everybody knows it, or at least part of it, and for the occasion a few lines of familiar poetry suddenly seem the best way of summing up a viewpoint… "Before the floods, proponents of the […]
The market researchers/analysts tell me that you wont win a "counter-intuitive" argument. Because people have been conditioned by repetitive claims of a particular point of view, to forthrightly state the opposite is likely to be dismissed out of hand. So they advise coming at the issue in a more subtle or different way. Sorry,but I […]
The release of a new Murray Darling Basin plan on October 8, 2010, is likely to reignite debate over how best to solve the problems of the Murray River. It will further pit some environmentalists and some South Australians against upstream irrigators as a debate over how to fix the two very large freshwater lakes […]
AS I look outside the sky is orange with dust. It irritates the nose and eyes, tickles the throats and sits heavily on the chest. And I am inside. According to all the news reports visibility is 10 metres at Broken Hill to the far west and 100 metres in Sydney just 150 kilometres east […]
Australia is a land of “drought and flooding rains”. Last week parts of north-eastern Australia received a “year's rain within a week” and many inland areas are now sea. There is a photo gallery at the CourierMail website entitled "Queensland Under Water" and the following photograph of the Urandangi Hotel copied from the gallery.
Based on the 130 years of data, Baker predicts that the current solar cycle, which reached a minimum in 2007, will continue a bit longer. In fact, he says, "there could be a 100-year minimum in solar activity," meaning much of Australia could experience a prolonged drought. Read more here.
