Australian drought due to climate change

Originally posted by madamswer: ↑

I happened to check The Australian Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM) website this afternoon to inform my expectations for tomorrow's golf game.

While I was on the website I noticed that the BoM provides some interesting graphical representations of rainfall patterns for each year over the past 118 years, information that I had not previously encountered

The red areas represent less than average rainfall; the blue areas greater than average rainfall.

While I usually consider the BoM's data to be reliable, I think they must have switched their blues and reds around in this schematic of theirs, because to this beady - but untrained - eye, it looks like there is a greater overall amount of blue shading in the years making up the current decade, than the 2000 -2009 period which, in turn, has more blue shading than the preceding decade (1990-1999) and which, in turn, has significantly more blue than the 1980-1989 period.

The mid-1907s had 3 nice wet years (1973, 1974 and 1975), but boy, there's not much blue to be seen in the 1960 decade.

And, if the BoM's shading is indeed accurate, then the periods from 1922 to 1929 and 1932 to 1938 were shockers, representing below-average rainfalls for extended periods the like of which have not been seen for the past 50 years.

And the 1900s were not that flash, either, when it comes to rainfall. Ditto for the 1910-1919 period, which was barely any better.

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So, unless BoM has got its colours mixed up, or I'm colour-blind, it appears to me that there is decidedly more blueshading in the bottom third of that graphic than there is in the top half.

But if the BoM data is indeed sound, and if I am, in fact, not colour-blind, then I'm confused: because I keep hearing people saying that global warming is either causing more drought, or is predicted to cause more drought in Australia.

And, boy, if the current two-year drought is being cited as a result of global warming, climate activists must have been having absolute conniptions during the even worse historical drought periods of:

1900 to 1902 (3 years, 1902 was particularly bad),
1911 to 1915 (5 years),
1922 to 1929 (8 years),
1932-1938 (9 years),
1943-1948 (6 years, 1940 was a scorcher),
1951 - 1954 (4 years),
1964 - 1967 (4 years),
1969 - 1972 (4 years),
1982 was pretty brutal across the eastern half of the country)
1985 - 1987 (3 years)

.

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Clearly you have no understanding of drought at all.

Intensity of drought is what matters. You can have

a) (for instance) 4 years of below average rain, (let's say 60 inches when the average is 80), and you can have

b) (for instance) 2 years of no rain to speak of (let's say 10 inches).

B is worse than A.

Only an out of touch ideologue would say the current drought is not the worst drought on record in the Murray-Darling Basin.