Australia's Drought Natural, Researcher Says
Date: 29-Dec-06
Country: AUSTRALIA
Australia had experienced around 30 periods of drought over a period of about 10,000 years, said Barrie Hunt, a researcher at the Melbourne-based Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) atmospheric research centre.
"I think it's probably a bit too early yet to say we're having a greenhouse effect on rainfall," Hunt told local radio.
Hunt based his research on three sites scattered from the country's mostly arid west, to the heavily populated east, which is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record.
Eastern Australia has already experienced six consecutive years of below-normal rainfall. Many towns and major cities are enduring tough restrictions on water use as dams shrink to around 20 percent or less of normal levels.
In parts of southern Victoria state the dry period has lasted for 10 years.
Mike Rann, premier of South Australia state, said last month that the country was in the grip of a one-in-1,000 year drought, citing advice from climate experts.
Parts of the Murray-Darling river basin, Australia's food bowl stretching across three southeastern states, have completely dried up as summer temperatures soar.
But Hunt said that while global warming from a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was a reality, crippling droughts of up to 14 years in length had occurred previously in the world's driest populated continent.
"This drought will break," he said. "Everyone says this thing's due to the greenhouse effect and therefore they expect it to go on forever in a way."
Hunt said the effects of climate change would be felt in years to come as global warming edged out natural causes as the basis for Australia's frequent dry spells.
"At the moment I think natural variability dominates. Increasingly over the next few decades you would expect to see the greenhouse effect start to dominate," he said.
A CSIRO study in October said temperatures in many Australian agricultural regions were projected to rise by as much as 1.7 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2030.