Garnaut the snake oil salesman, is telling people in Perth that the drought is their fault and that his tax can fix it. There is zero evidence to support either assertion. There is no evidence that drought has increased in Australia – it is and always has been part of the climate.
Area of Australia experiencing drought
The history of Australian droughts also shows that when one side of the country is wet, the other side is dry.
First, is the obvious comment that drought is a frequent event, occurring somewhere in the continent every three out of four years and having the size to create potential societal damage on average every one in three years. On the past record we do not expect the whole of the continent to be drought-affected in any one year and thus the impact of regional droughts can be somewhat muted by ‘normal’ seasons elsewhere in the continent. However, for individual states or territories, six of the eight of which have had over three-quarters of the state or territory’s area in drought in past years, individual droughts may have extensive adverse impacts.
What is unusual now is that so little of the country is dry.
What is unusual is that a scandal of such massive proportions has been foisted on the Australian people by their own government.
The drought in SW Autstralia is a direct result of warmcold rains that have fallen in the rest of Australia. Those warmcold rains have been shown to be entirely consistent with a warming planet. We need additional funding to determine what long term effects the warmcold rains will have on the habitats of snakes and snails in SW Australia.
Tell me about it.. I live here