Australia’s devastating drought is far more likely to be part of a natural cycle than a result of the man-made greenhouse effect, an Australian climate scientist has said.
Barrie Hunt, a researcher with government science agency CSIRO, dismissed suggestions that global warming, believed to be caused by carbon emissions, is responsible for the “Big Dry” gripping much of south-eastern Australia.
“It is very, very highly likely that what we are seeing at the moment is natural climatic variability,” Hunt told the Australian newspaper.
After studying a CSIRO model of Australia’s natural climate patterns over the past 10,000 years, Hunt said the current drought, whose severity has led some scientists to label it a once in a millennium event, was by no means unique.
He said historical data — which used air pressure, temperature, wind and rainfall information — put current conditions into perspective, revealing 30 periods of drought lasting longer than eight years in the past ten millenia.
“The longest sequence was 14 years in Queensland-New South Wales, 11 in the south-east and 10 in the south-west.”
He said that each of those significant dry spells occurred at random times and had an unpredictable duration.
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