The 1914-15 drought
The drought of 1914-15 became seared in the memory of Australians, primarily due to the disastrous failure of the wheat crop that year.
The first signs of drought became evident in 1913, when rainfall in western Victoria, central areas of Tasmania, and settled areas of South Australia, was well below average in the normally wet April-July period. Timely rain in early spring then saved the wheat crop and gave good pastoral prospects. But there was to be no such respite the following year, a strong El Niño year. 1914 started off very hot, and southern Victoria suffered from widespread bushfires in February and March. Good rains fell over most of eastern Australia in March and April, but thereafter extremely dry conditions set in over most of the southern half of the country.
Except in coastal NSW, drought became widespread and severe from July to October. Across large areas of the southern states the period May through October 1914 remains the driest such period on record. As conditions worsened, stock were transported as fast as the railways could carry them to more favoured locations, where – naturally – prices for agistment rose substantially. From the Deniliquin district alone over half a million sheep, and thousands of horses and cattle, were moved out. Rivers throughout southeastern Australia fell to extremely low levels. The Murray River at Echuca fell to its lowest level ever recorded to that time, to just 2 percent of its normal flow by December. Downstream of Swan Hill the Murray was reduced to a series of stagnant pools.
By the end of October the national wheat crop was a total failure. In southwestern Australia – often spared when drought afflicts the eastern states – less than half the normal rainfall fell during the critical May-October period, leading to complete crop failure in some districts, and easily the lowest Western Australian wheat yield of the century.
http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/drought2.htm
The AGW alarmists would have you believe that we’ve never had heat, drought, hurricanes, floods, etc. But if you take the time to examine past weather records, you will quickly learn that none of these are anything new!
Recommend reviewing Mesopotamia’s “Dark Millennium”, the 1,000-year period of dry cold that affected ancient civilizations of Akkad and Sumer c. BC 4300 – 3300. Paleoclimatology links this horrific episode to a shift in eastern Atlantic Ocean currents, which allowed desiccated and frigid Central Asian air-masses to penetrate far south.
From about BC 3300 onward, in early Bronze Age times, Fertile Crescent cultures began explosive rebounds which changed human history forever. But 1,000 years is a long time… who in the depths of such travail could have foreseen their fabled lands’ rebirth?
Now as Earth enters a 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum similar to that of AD 1645 – 1715, when wolves froze to death in Rhineland forests and Louis XIV’s goblets frosted over in his Palace of Versailles, an overdue end of Gaia’s current 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch seems far-fetched. But for some 2.6-million years this Pleistocene Era has marked recurrent 102,000-year global glaciations interspersed with just such short-term intermissions, and odds favor an imminent return of Ice Time once again.
Let Australia’s early 20th Century drought and Mesopotamia’s Dark Millennium serve warning on six billion human lives. Should benign climate patterns in force from c. BC 12,400 revert to Pleistocene norms, we either move off-planet or perish as death-eating Warmist sociopaths prefer.
Again, we are dealing with the break between sunspot cycles and cooler cycles are marked by drought.
See previous post for my comment and reference.