Saturday, March 05, 2005
Its dry here

Without stating the obvious, climate change is about the climate, not the weather.

But there is an interface between the two. Global warming must be represented in the daily temperatures people experience. Rainfall variances must relate to weather patterns. Climate is what you expect based on long term records; weather is what you get on a day to day basis, so says the Bureau of Meteorology (www.bom.gov.au/lam).

Since Russia was ‘press-ganged’ (say critics) into ratifying the Kyoto Protocol – thus bringing the emissions limitations regime into binding force – climate change sceptics have become more boisterous and have adopted a more offensive media and political posture. No longer is human-induced global climate change merely an annoying unproven scientific theory. It is now a dangerous international conspiracy perpetrated by a pervasive, anti-capitalist, environmentalist elite whose aims are to break corporations and keeping America down.

Despite ice-sheets melting, glaciers retreating, coral bleaching and the oceans becoming more acidic, sceptics cite that the numbers of ‘extreme’ weather events have ‘in fact’ fallen and the acute changes predicted by the pessimists are so riddled with margins of error, they must be wrong.

Climatologists predict it will be outlandishly difficult to definitively say when or if the effects of human-induced climate change will be detected. It is an extraordinary challenge – actually probably impossible – to sort natural fluctuations from anthropogenic change. Climate change is insidious; even in retrospect it is dicey to claim that trend towards hotter weather is not the up-swing of a warm cycle.

This is why sceptics will never be convinced. When does an up-swing become a one-way-ticket? 3 years? 30 years? 3,000 years? In the last three thousand years temperatures and CO2 levels have fluctuated at rates greater than they have since the 1940s.

Most of Australia has continued to get much drier and hotter. The interface between weather and climate is played out everyday in suburban gardens and on rainfall and temperature charts at the Bureau. Again, our wet season has not been wet, the grass in brown in March and the maps available at the Bureau indicate a fairly clear trend.

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