Climate change alarmism has moved firmly into the realms of
science-fiction with a piece
in the Los Angeles Times claiming that Australia is
being ravaged by “drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife
extinction and mosquito-borne illness.” The headline screams:
“What will global warming look like? Scientists point to
Australia.”
Australia is allegedly — because of climate change — a horrible
example of where the whole world is heading: beset by “prolonged
drought and deadly bushfires to the south,” monsoon flooding,
legions of suiciding farmers and other portents of apocalypse.
In rural Victoria alone, it is claimed, one farmer a week commits
suicide, generally by hanging. “But they are not made public,”
one informant says. Funny about that. Inquests are always public
and country newspapers are not backward about attending them when
they occur.
Let’s get a couple of inconvenient truths out of the way before
looking at the rest of this story.
Yes, Australia has had deadly bushfires in the south-east
recently, with more than 170 people killed. While there have been
bushfires every summer, a major reason why the recent ones were
particularly bad seems to have been that political pressure from
city-based green groups prevented undergrowth being cleared by
controlled burning so that it built up. Nothing to do with
climate change, only stupid, ignorant, meddling, and in the event
homicidal, Greens and politically-correct officialdom.
Wildlife extinction? The biggest threats to native wildlife in
recent times apart from these fires have been imported predators
including foxes, cats, and rats and land-clearing for farming and
livestock. While this has been unfortunate, it has had nothing to
do with climate change.
Killer heat waves? It has been estimated by the Earth Policy
Institute (July 26, 2006) that 52,000 people died in Europe in
the summer heat wave of 2003, including about 18,000 in Italy,
15,000 in France and 2,500 in Britain. There has been nothing
remotely like that in Australia, ever. Most Australians live in
the big coastal cities and their response to a heat wave is to
either turn up the air-conditioning or go to the beach. Certainly
the heat can be gross in the outback and in places like Marble
Bar and the mining towns in the north and inland, but it always
has been and those who live there know about it. Mosquitoes have
been around in certain areas for a long time too.
Which leaves us with droughts and floods, or rather “monsoon
flooding” in the L.A. Times’s list of climate-change
doom. Australia has always had floods and droughts. The patriotic
Australian poem “My Country,” written in 1904, begins “I love a
sunburnt country…of droughts and flooding rains…” There is
“monsoonal flooding” because the northern part of Australia
happens to be tropical monsoonal and flooding rains occur
regularly every year. Many of the great rivers marked on the map
are either dry or torrents. Lake Eyre in South Australia varies
between being an inland sea covering hundreds of square miles and
a vast dry salt-flat.
As for drought, much of Australia has always been dry, arid
country. It was a dry, arid country when white settlers arrived
in 1788, which is why, with an area not much less than the
continental United States, it has a population of only about 21
million.
The areas of reliable rainfall have been known since the 19th
century. Farming outside them has always been a gamble. It has
paid off sometimes and sometimes it hasn’t. Drought has been a
constant factor in the background of Australian farming beyond
such limits as Goyder’s Rainfall Line. Australian literature, for
as long as Australia has had a literature, has been full of
references to drought. Thus the poet Will Oglivie, born in 1869,
wrote a long time before anyone spoke of global warming:
My road is fenced with the bleached, white bones
And strewn with the blind, white sand,
Beside me a suffering, dumb world moans
On the breast of a lonely land.
On the rim of the world the lightnings play,
The heat-waves quiver and dance,
And the breath of the wind is a sword to slay
And the sunbeams each a lance.
The New York Times reported, not during the present
climate-change furor but in 1899: “Drought in the inland
districts of New South Wales is causing ruin among farmers. The
rivers in the country are drying up because of the great heat.”
Oh, and the same story reported floods as well. Australia has
always had a variable climate.
The Australian poet and Catholic priest Monsignor P.J. Hartigan
(“John O’Brien”) sent up the preoccupation with drought and
doom-saying in the poem “Said Hanrahan,” published in 1921. It is
relevant enough to the present panic-mongering to be worth
quoting here at some length. A group of farmers are standing
about outside a church on Sunday morning, gloomily discussing the
drought:
And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work
To save one bag of grain;
From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke
They’re singin’ out for rain …
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune …
And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop…”
The Los Angeles Times story also reported breathlessly
that “With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be
coming to an awakening. Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate and
soon …”
Actually, the skeptics are very numerous. One of the principal
scientific authorities quoted in the story, actually a
paleontologist, not a climatologist, has had his predictions
widely questioned — in 2005 he claimed Sydney’s dams could run
out of water in 2007.
The story goes on to claim that “Every Capital in Australia’s
eight States and territories is operating under considerable
water restrictions.” This is simply not true. And where there are
water restrictions, this is not at all unusual at the end of the
southern hemisphere summer. There is a claim that “In some
cities, such as Brisbane, residents drink recycled water, a
process nicknamed ‘toilet to tap’.”
Yeah, sure. Actually such a scheme was considered for Brisbane
and dropped last November without ever being put into operation.
The L.A. Times story appears to have been written, as
one commentator on Tim Blair’s weblog put it, by someone who
thinks Mad Max II is a documentary.
