No link between droughts and climate change in Australia
Ken Stewart finds that rainfall may have fallen in the last 30 years over Southern Australia but it has stayed remarkably constant in the long run.
Fig. 2: Cool season rainfall, Southern Australia, 1900-2017
Oops! Rainfall has in fact increased over southern Australia.
Stewart has also looked at the number of consecutive dry months across Australia. Looking at both 12 month periods and at 36 month periods it’s clear that we had more severe droughts more often from 1900-1970. The only exceptions are in SW WA (which is having a good year for rain this year) and small parts of Victoria and Tasmania.
Fig. 4: Number of consecutive months per calendar year of 12 months severe rain deficiency: Australia
Don’t forget to pop in at Kens Kingdom and say thanks for all the work he does.
Ken Stewart is not paid but can create these graphs. The Australian BoM gets a million dollars a day, and Ken used their definition of a drought, but there are no press releases about this from the BoM.
The ABC gets $3 million dollars a day. If we paid them $4 million a day would they stop parroting the CSIRO, BOM and renewables industry and start investigating? The evidence says “not”. Apparently, the better the funding, the better they spin. To get the ABC to serve the taxpayer instead of Big-Gov, we need to cut the funds to “zero”.
Fig. 5: Periods of 36 months serious rain deficiency: Australia
As Ken says — droughts were more common in all but a few areas:
In the past droughts of all lengths and severity were more widespread across Australia.
Australia wide, and in the regions of Northern and Southern Australia and the Murray Darling Basin, and South Australia as a whole, since 1900 droughts of all lengths have become less frequent, and because these are broad regions, less widespread. There is no evidence that climate change is making droughts more likely to occur, except for smaller areas (Victoria, Tasmania, and SW Australia) which have an increasing frequency of droughts of all lengths.
Alarmists get worked up about,
Climate-change causing more drought,
When, ten decades gone by,
More droughts give the lie,
To fake claims, beyond any doubt.
–Ruairi