wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  PlanetArk 8 Nov 06
Australia's Drought Could be Worst in 1,000 Years
by James Grubel

Yahoo News 7 Nov 06
Expert says Australian drought is 'worst in 1,000 years'
by Lawrence Bartlett

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia, already the world's driest inhabited continent, is in the grip of its worst drought in 1,000 years, a leading expert told the country's political leaders at a crisis summit.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard and premiers of the three worst-hit states were presented with the bleak assessment at the meeting in Canberra by an expert on the country's most significant river system, participants said.

The drought has already been described variously as the worst in living memory, the worst in a century and the worst since white settlement more than two centuries ago.

Howard said he could not verify the latest claim. "You say worst drought in a thousand years. I don't think anybody really knows that," he said, adding that he was not a scientist. "It's a very bad drought," he said Tuesday. The comparison was made by the general manager of River Murray Water, David Dreverman.

Howard had called the summit as statistics showed that the country's most important river system, within the Murray-Darling Basin, could run out of water in six months, after six years of drought.

About 30 rivers and hundreds of tributaries run across the basin, which feeds about 70 per cent of Australia's irrigated farmlands. South Australian Premier Mike Rann said the assessment by Dreverman, who also sits on the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, was worrying.

"We were told at the meeting by the Murray-Darling commissioner that we now face, not a one-in-100-year drought, but a one-in-1,000-year drought," Rann told reporters. "So we are into uncharted territory."

The summit agreed to draw up contingency plans to secure water supplies, with a working group of state and federal public servants to report back by December 15.

The "big dry", as the drought is called here, is likely to cut agricultural output by 20 percent and GDP by around 0.7 percent, government officials say.

With an electorate increasingly ready to blame the drought on global warming, Howard has abandoned his previously sceptical response to the idea that pollution is driving climate change.

An ACNielsen poll published in Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald showed that 91 percent of Australians believe global warming is a problem and 62 percent of voters are unhappy with the government's response.

Howard's conversion to environmental activism has been noticeably sudden, with opposition leaders and political commentators noting that climate change is shaping up as a major issue in elections due next year.

Just two months ago Howard spurned a meeting with former US vice-president Al Gore, who was in Australia to promote his global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", saying he did not take policy advice from films.

Last month, as evidence of the consequences of global warming mounted, he announced that 500 million dollars (385 million US) would be spent on a series of clean energy initiatives.

Howard's apparent conversion coincides with that of a fellow conservative Australian, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who said Monday in Japan that he now believed global action was needed.

PlanetArk 8 Nov 06
Australia's Drought Could be Worst in 1,000 Years
by James Grubel

AUSTRALIA: November 8, 2006 CANBERRA - The drought gripping Australia could be the worst in 1,000 years, government officials said on Tuesday, as Australia started to draw up emergency plans to secure long-term water supplies to towns and cities.

The drought affecting more than half of Australia's farmlands, already lasting more than five years, had previously been regarded as the worst in a century.

But officials from the Murray-Darling river basin commission told a water summit of national and state political leaders on Tuesday that analyses of the current prolonged drought now pointed to the driest period in 1,000 years.

"What we're seeing with this drought is a frightening glimpse of the future with global warming," the leader of the South Australian state government Mike Rann told reporters.

A spokeswoman for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission said the current consecutive years of drought had not been observed in the 114 years since records were first kept.

She said mathematical and probability analyses of the current dry spell found Australia was moving into what was possibly a one-in-1,000-year drought. "We don't have the records to substantiate a one-in-100-year drought any more -- it's beyond that," she told Reuters.

Lack of winter rain has meant record-low inflows into the Murray-Darling river system, which drains an area the size of France and Spain combined and provides water to Australia's major agricultural areas.

The average inflow of water into the Murray River, which flows through three states, is 11,000 gigalitres a year. In the past five months it has received less than 600 gigalitres. One gigalitre is one billion litres.

Green groups have warned that towns and cities along the river system could run out of water if the drought goes into another year.

Prime Minister John Howard used the water summit to announce moves to investigate how to secure log-term water supplies for towns and cities along the Murray River. The summit also approved a new weir across the Murray to provide emergency water, if needed, for the South Australian capital of Adelaide, a city of about one million people, which draws 40 percent of its drinking water from the Murray River.

But Howard, who remains sceptical about the impact of global warming, declined to publicly declare the drought the worst in 1,000 years. "All I know it is a very bad drought. It is the worst in living memory," Howard told reporters.

The Australian Democrats party criticised the summit, saying the meeting had ignored both the need to buy water back from farmers and irrigators, and the need to put a higher price on water use.

"Making water more expensive is not going to be popular, but it needs to be done," Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett told reporters.

The Murray-Darling catchment covers 1.06 million sq km (409,000 sq miles), 15 percent of Australia's landmass, and accounts for 41 percent of Australia's agricultural production and A$22 billion (US$17 billion) worth of the nation's agricultural exports. (US$1 = A$1.30) Story
links
Related articles on Global issues: Climate change
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com