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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Despite Record Drought, Aussie Farmers STILL Don't Buy AGW
2009-12-10
Despite a decade of record drought, Australian farmers refuse to buy into climate change

Australians are on the front lines in experiencing the life-altering consequences of climate change, which is the subject of global scrutiny this week at the international climate summit in Copenhagen. Brush fires killed 173 people earlier this year during the most severe heat wave in the history of southeast Australia. Rising temperatures and declining rainfall are, with increasing frequency, transforming the Outback into a crematorium for kangaroos, livestock and farm towns.

In coming decades, the government predicts water shortages, rising seas and catastrophic storms. Climate scientists say a subtropical ridge of high pressure - fortified by a buildup of greenhouse gases - seems to be elbowing rain clouds away from southern Australia and the Murray basin.
I wonder what climate "scientists" would have predicted for the American southwest in 1935, in the middle of our "Dust Bowl"?
As in the United States, partisan politics common sense and vested interests have paralyzed some of this country's response to climate change. Australia is the world's largest coal exporter, and its dependence on cheap coal-fired electricity gives it the world's highest per-capita carbon emissions. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's push to slash those emissions with a carbon trading plan was killed last week in the legislature for the second time in less than six months. The embarrassing defeat will leave Rudd, a prominent player in global environmental politics, empty-handed at the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen.

Yet along the Murray, there is a climate-change conundrum that responsible politicians and smart scientists have yet to solve: Most farmers, the biggest losers as the river shrinks, simply do not buy the notion that southern Australia's climate is changing in a way that is probably in Al Gore's dreams irreversible. Their skepticism has withstood nearly 13 years of unrelenting drought, falling incomes and daily encounters with a river that is dying in front of their eyes.

"I think we are coming to the end of a 10-year cycle of drought," said one of the rubes named Grant, 48, as he drove a visitor out among his apricot trees. He has had to watch many of those trees die, the result of government-imposed limits on the water he can pump out of the Murray. Last year, he was permitted to take just 18 percent of what had been the farm's guaranteed allocation of water; this year, with a slight increase in rainfall, he is getting 46 percent.
So the rainfall is already increasing?
"How long we can continue depends, I guess, on the government," Denise said. "How long can the government continue to keep delivering drought relief?"

Not long. The minister of agriculture, Tony Burke, has said that as climate change makes drought an unexceptional circumstance, government must wean farmers off assistance and push them into self-sustaining livelihoods.
Like government jobs.
"The recent 12-year, 8-month period is the driest in the 110-years-long record," according to a report this year from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, which says the declining rainfall pattern "closely resembles the picture provided by climate model simulations of future changes due to enhanced greenhouse gases."
Well, that's it then! Enough of this anti-science silliness!
But there is no serious disputing that southern Australia must prepare for a much hotter and drier future; the government forecasts that rainfall will decline 22 to 71 percent by 2100.

What all this means for 2 million Australians who live on farms and in towns along the Murray is that communities must die, families must move and a hugely overbuilt irrigation system will have to shrink, experts said.
Sounds like California.
The government is ready and willing to make the exodus happen, with $3.1 billion in the bank to buy out irrigators and $5.8 billion to upgrade infrastructure. New laws have stripped farmers of guaranteed access to water from the Murray, while creating a market for buying and selling water allocations. As a result, the cost of water has soared and waste of water has sharply declined.

"They really do face a bleak future," said Chris Miller, a social scientist and expert climatoligist who teaches at Flinders University in Adelaide and has been interviewing farmers along the Murray for 15 months. "But they do not yet believe the water isn't coming back."
Yesterday's WaPo piece on the front page to shore up O's visit.
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