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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The Causes of Drought
It was interesting to see the article in The Courier-Mail on the background for our present dry period.
Dr Blair Trewin, from the National Climate Centre, said that Queensland’s current run of dry years was not outside historical records and was probably not linked to climate change.
Dr Trewin relied on the well-established relationship between our rainfall and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) that produces El Nino (dry weather) or La Nina (higher rainfall) conditions. During recent years, we have an “El Nino” situation.
This phenomenon depends on water temperatures in the east and west Pacific Ocean. Apparently present figures suggest that La Nina could be on the way.
I well recollect an address to a general meeting of NPAQ a few years ago on this subject by a climate researcher from, I think, the University of Southern Queensland. His figures and charts convinced me of the validity of the relationship between the SOI and rainfall in eastern Australia.
There was also another article in which a “global warming sceptic” challenged the doomsday predictions of Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth. The conclusion was that “the environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists or to Al Gore.”
– Norm Traves, Indooroopilly |
