Beautiful one day, perfect the next. Australia鈥檚 famed climate has been a magnet for tourists, but rising greenhouse gas emissions could be turning the weather into a nightmare for the country鈥檚 farmers.
Climate researchers have found that temperatures have risen in the country by 0.174 掳C per decade over the past 50 years. As a result, increased evaporation is intensifying droughts and possibly worsening bushfires in Australia鈥檚 most productive agricultural region, the million-square-kilometre Murray Darling river basin in the south-east of the country (Climatic Change, vol 63, p 323).
Australia has experienced major droughts in 1982, 1994 and 2002, which was the hottest and worst on record, costing the economy US$5 billion in lost production. 鈥淭he apparently inexorable warming from the mid-20th century has meant that each drought was warmer than the previous drought, both during the daytime and at night,鈥� says principal research scientist Neville Nicholls at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne.
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Climate change models have predicted that an increasing greenhouse effect will trigger even more droughts in Australia. If the warming trend continues, and there is less rainfall, 鈥渄roughts will intensify, along with their impacts鈥�, Nicholls says.