Following months of ABC articles beating up drought – this ABC/BoM inspired article claims worst drought for over a century in “Southern Australia” which is an academic geographic region that nobody would identify with. Farmers identify with their district and State. But lets play their game and check the “Lowest on Record” dark red area at Albany WA site of rainfall data from 1877. Bad luck for the climate scaremongers – Autumn in Albany was dryer in 1996(108.2mm) than 2018(112.2) – which just demonstrates how dodgy and tenuous BoM maps & stats are. (BTW Albany in Autumn 1898 only saw 93.9mm.)
Putting another torpedo into the BoM/ABC drought propaganda lets look at the Australian map for Autumn 2005 – Oh bugger NSW, Vic and SA are all much dryer than in 2018.
Looking at the ABC article, they say: “The current dry is not as extensive as the long-term droughts of the past.” So my questions to PhD candidate Ms Mandy (‘it looks like ….’) Freund would be; are these droughts cyclic and how do they correlate to the ocean circulatory patterns that surround our continent?
Let us hope she has no ‘it looks like” statements in her thesis submission.
Cheers and thanks for your research, Warwick.
I liked the quote from Dr. Blair Trewin right at the end; “It(if) we were to have significantly below normal rainfall through the winter, which is what the outlook is pointing towards, that would clearly exacerbate the rainfall deficits that we currently have,” Dr Trewin said.
Where do you go to get insights as profound as that?
Even the article admits that autumn 1902 was far worse, and if you check the BoM map for that period you see about two-thirds of Australia coloured red, twice as much as this year.
But the article is still trying really hard to beat up the story. Climate alarmists are always cherry-picking but beat this for an obscure “record”:
“Dr Trewin said the current conditions were the driest on record over a 14-month period for areas of NSW, including the upper Hunter, parts of the Illawarra and Southern Highlands, and an area in the central-west.”
It wouldn’t be too difficult to find a “record” like that every week in Australia, given that you could choose as your variable hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, windiest, calmest, or whatever, then choose any period you liked from, say, one month to five years, and then look around on the map for any district in any State that happened to show an extreme. Such trivial “records” prove nothing about climate trends.
Temperatures have nearly as many records as cricket.
@toorightmate
If they did to cricket records as they do to temperature records Tendulkar would be hotter than Bradman!