Thread: is the drought caused by..........

What killed the dinosaurs, what was the ice age??

Just a cycle and we're all going to die

and slowly

Originally Posted by rovercare

What killed the dinosaurs, what was the ice age??

No it was when an alien spaceship crashed into the earth and kiltem all.

For this latest global warming that is not caused by dinosaur farts I'm sure is caused by Al Qaeda. Lil Johnny (The mean and tricky one) blames them for most things and I'm inclined to believe him. They're using those weapons of mass distruction (Where ever they have them) to cause the temp to rise. Personally I blame them for the drought as well, either them or Labour. If it's not Al Qaeda it's Keatings fault.

You leftout the third alternative, which for most people is the one they should tick - don't know.

However, there is nothing in the past history of the weather statistics, such as they are, to suggest that this drought is different in nature to any of the droughts over the last two hundred years.

If, in fact, it owes anything to human intervention, it is much more likely to be the result of local intervention such as increased runoff due to land clearing in some places, more uniform runoff due to dam building, increased evaporation due to irrigation, increases in and changes in the nature of tree cover due to the control of fires and rabbits, and the increased runoff and local radiation from the paving over with bitumen or tiles of much of the east coast.

While global effects may eventually cause droughts, there is nothing to associate the current increase in temperatures with the present drought - past droughts have shown no relation to temperatures.

John

its the 200&300TDi's that cause global warming isnt it?

:P

normal cycle.

M

Just clarify my post above - I do "believe in global warming" although there are some serious questions regarding some of the data and the causes, but on the balance of evidence I think that the earth is warming up, and the cause may well be human actions. What I don't believe is that this drought has anything to do with it.

And as I have commented elsewhere, any action by Australia will have no significant effect on global warming - simply because there are so few of us on the world scale. As against that, global effects are likely to have a major effect on Australia.

John

it's actually a misnomer to call it "global warming", This leads people to think the only effect is the whole world is getting "hotter".

it's climate pattern change. ( ie longer droughts, larger floods and more frequent severe weather events )

The more worrying thing now emerging IMHO however is the acidification of the oceans. This has the potential to seriously harm the levels of plankton in the oceans , which is at the bottom level of our food chain.

As far as Australia's actions having little effect on the world situation, that may be true, but should we not be "doing the right thing " anyway ?
We don't have a lot of effect in Iraq either, if you compare our numbers to the number of troops the Americans have there, but our Govt. is still committed to the effort as they believe it is the "right thing" to do.

I sometimes think "yeah it's not proven that it is us causing the climate change, so lets just keep going the way we are, not worry about it and keep spewing stuff into the atmosphere" ". Then I think of my kids and their kid's world, and think, "what if we're wrong and we could have actually done something ?"