This Drought May Never Break  

The SMH has a gloomy look at climate change in Australia and the possibility that the drought is permanent.

IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation's most senior weather experts warned yesterday. "Perhaps we should call it our new climate," said the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones. He was speaking after the release of statistics showing that last year was the hottest on record in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT.

NSW's mean temperature was 1.13 degrees above average. "That is a very substantial anomaly," Dr Jones said. "It's equivalent to moving NSW 150 kilometres closer to the equator."

It was the 11th year in a row NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin had experienced above normal temperatures. Sydney's nights were its warmest since records were first kept 149 years ago. "There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming," said Dr Jones. "It is very easy to see … it is happening before our eyes."

The only uncertainty now was whether the changing pattern was "85 per cent, 95 per cent or 100 per cent the result of the enhanced greenhouse effect". "There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back. "Last year climate change became very evident in south-eastern Australia, with South Australia, NSW, Victoria, the ACT and the Murray-Darling Basin all setting temperature records by a very large margin," he said. Some areas were "getting closer to 1.5 to 2 degrees above what we were seeing during early parts of the 20th century."

Australia as a whole had a mean temperature 0.67 degrees above average last year, making it the nation's sixth-warmest year. NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin experienced their seventh consecutive year of below-average rain. Dr Jones said the statewide rain statistics would have looked even worse had it not been for heavy falls along the coast.

Sydney had its wettest year since 1998, receiving 1499 millimetres, well above the long-term average of 1215. While much of it was coastal, rain that did fall across the state fell at the wrong time for farmers, soaked into drought-parched soils or evaporated during scorching days.

Widespread falls across NSW in June were followed by very dry spells in August, September and October. "Very good rainfall in December across south-eastern Australia has been followed, since about Boxing Day, by quite extreme heat in Victoria, southern NSW and most of southern Western Australia," Dr Jones said.