Drought! by gimleteye

Drought is on the front page of The Miami Herald, along with a story about the collapsed hotel tourism industry. Here's a taste of news from Australia, in the grip of the most serious drought in the nation's history. (please click, 'read more')

The following is an excerpt from Environment 360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Click on the link to view the entire article.

"Many of Australia’s citizens, meanwhile, are increasingly convinced that the country’s run of unusually hot and dry weather signals changes that go beyond normal fluctuations in weather and presage a new climate regime.Australians wonder whether the unfolding drought, the heat wave, and fires are a taste of life in a warming world. Just ask Greg Ogle, a 49-year-old conservationist from New South Wales who once farmed the northern banks of the Murray River north of Melbourne. Ogle came of age in the 1970s when regular floods filled the wetlands near his home and the centuries-old red gum trees — a species as iconic to Australians as maples and oaks are to Americans — provided nests for snakes and the small mammals they hunted. It was common then, he said, to see big Goanna monitor lizards — stout as logs and nearly as long as a man is tall — resting on the thick branches of the towering trees.

Today red gums are dying all across southern Australia. Frogs and snakes and small mammals are gone, and Goannas are rarely seen. Ninety percent of the wetlands in the Murray-Darling basin have disappeared or have been seriously damaged, according to reports by the CSIRO. Poisonous bacterial blooms, like one that covered nearly 700 miles of the Darling River in 1990 and 1991, are an ever-present danger. The lengthy drought is behind these changes, disrupting the natural cycle of regular flooding that once sustained thousands of square miles of wetland and floodplain.

“I see vast changes just in my lifetime,” said Ogle, who switched careers and is now a conservationist with Trust for Nature, Australia’s oldest and largest land conservancy. “It’s very alarming. We aren’t a long-lived species, and to see these changes in a lifetime is quite distressing. We can actually see several species that disappeared. We’ve watched wetlands die. The alarming thing about it all is the snowballing effect of those changes. A lot of it is yet to come.”

Such concerns have led to a pronounced change in the way the Australian public views climate change. Perhaps the most visible evidence came in the 2007 national election when Australians voted decisively to replace the 11-year-old conservative government, which resisted the findings of new climate science, with a socially progressive government that promised action to reduce global warming. The election was widely seen as hinging on the progressive party’s ability to successfully communicate their concerns about climate change issues."