Severity of the Current Drought (Australia)

Over at Jennifer Marohasy's blog, a frequent commentor, "Luke", has an interesting guest post. Jennifer is one of those self proclaimed "climate agnostics" who nevertheless posts on how Al Gore is all wrong, polar bears are going to be fine, there's no consensus, warming stopped in 1998, the temperature rise is UHI effect etc, etc. A recent spate of posts about the drought in Australia have been about how it is in fact nothing exceptional. If that strikes you as contrary to every other indication, well, it is.

But to her credit she has been accepting guest posts from people in very strong disagreement with most of her positions - such as this post on rainfall anomaly patterns in Australia.

It is interesting because it shows how really wet + really dry = average may make for good talking points but does not tell the whole story. It is also interesting because it is a small scale parallel to the IPCC predictions of increased precipitation together with increased droughts in a warming world. Luke's nice work shows very clearly how this is not the contradiction it would seem to be. This scenario is a compelling example of the risks of climate changes for immobile urban centers.