Essay by Eric Worrall
According to University of Melbourne academics, climate change is disrupting rainfall and affecting farmers. But strangely this alleged disruption isn’t showing up in global food production statistics.
Faster disaster: climate change fuels ‘flash droughts’, intense downpours and storms
Published: September 12, 2023 4.59pm AEST
Andrew King Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne
Andrew Dowdy Principal research scientist, The University of MelbourneThe run of extreme weather events around the world seems to be never-ending. After the northern summer of extreme heat and disastrous fires, we’ve seen more exceptional autumn weather over Europe with record-breaking heat in the UK.
Meanwhile, record-breaking rain and intense flash floods struck Greece before the same storm devastated Libya, with thousands dead.
Almost 20% of Africa is estimated to be in drought, and drought conditions are returning to parts of Australia. To top it off, we’ve seen several hurricanes intensify unusually quickly in the Atlantic.
We know climate change underpins some of the more extreme weather we’re seeing. But is it also pushing these extreme events to happen faster?
The answer? Generally, yes. Here’s how.
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Flash droughts
We usually think of droughts as slowly evolving extreme events which take months to form.
But that’s no longer a given. We’ve seen some recent droughts develop unexpectedly quickly, giving rise to the phrase “flash drought”.
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Flash droughts tend to be short, so they don’t tend to cause the major water shortages or dry river beds we’ve seen during long droughts in parts of Australia and South Africa, for example. But they can cause real problems for farmers. Farmers in parts of eastern Australia are already grappling with the sudden return of drought after three years of rainy La Niña conditions.
As we continue to warm the planet, we’ll see more flash droughts and more intense ones. That’s because dry conditions will more often coincide with higher temperatures as relative humidity falls across many land regions.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/faster-disaster-climate-change-fuels-flash-droughts-intense-downpours-and-storms-213242
The obviously solution to any drought is to pipe in more water.
South Africa is on the brink of being a failed state, and Libya is a militia trouble spot, so it is no mystery why those countries are having trouble managing national water supplies.
But there is no such excuse for Australia’s lack of investment in water.
For example, in 2018 the ABC reported the CSIRO has surveyed 3 major river systems which could provide an enormous increase in available agricultural water. But so far these detailed plans have seen very little action – Aussie state and federal governments are too busy frittering all their spare cash on green fantasies, renewable grid upgrades and pumped hydro schemes.
If the scientists are right, and “flash droughts” become a problem, I would suggest better water infrastructure is a higher priority than green energy fantasies. But I’m not losing any sleep over their prediction, given the complete lack of evidence that adverse growing conditions are impacting yields in the agriculture sector.
“flash drought”. We used to call those “a bit of a dry spell”, and the TV weather report called them “lovely fine weather” or perhaps “beautiful beach weather”.
You can always tell when there’s a Flash Drought round here. The children have paddling pools in the garden and some eccentrics start watering their garden.
Flash droughts usually occur on the second and third of the three hot days just before the thunderstorm of a normal English Summer. Flash droughts are more infrequent in Scotland, but the rain does warm up a bit some years.
Ben, you’re right.
We have a flash drought here – inside London’s M25. Although it’s a bit localised, as it doesn’t extend to my Friday evening glass!
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The weather isn’t any different today than it was in the past.
This is just another scare tactic on the part of alarmists. They make things up.
And the author saying these “scientists” may have a point, is ridiculous. There is no evidence that CO2 is causing changes in the weather. There is no evidence that a “flash drought” is anything unusual.
My State of Oklahoma is usually very dry in the summer and we have droughts. This year, we had abundant rain almost all summer and most of the drought has disappeared. I suppose these “scientists” would describe this as a “flash flood”. But here over the last 30 days or so, we have had no rain and it has been very hot and large areas are going into drought conditions again. Drought conditions don’t come any faster than this. So I guess I am experienceing a “flash drought”. The only thing is we experience this kind of weather all the time, even before CO2 became an issue.
Drought can happen quickly under the right conditions, anywhere in the world. it doesn’t require CO2. All it requires is for a high-pressure system to hover over an area for a certain amount of time, and then drought ensues.
Climate Alarmists are making stuff up to hype their narrative. Like they always do. It’s pathetic. They are pathetic, and criminal for scaring the kids over nothing.
In 1983 I was working in Seattle. My home and family were in Adelaide, South Australia.
The Seattle TV news headline was “Australia Burns”. I immediately called home thinking the worst – A major fire event later known as “Ash Wednesday” was unfolding.
As soon as my wife answered the phone I asked; Are you and the kids safe. She assured me she was and didn’t think the flooding creeks would be a worry. It was difficult to reconcile her news of flooding with the TV news’ fire headline; but there it was a fire one day and flooding the next – both major natural disasters.
We used to call those “a bit of a dry spell”
Won’t be long until they call a week without rain a “flash drought”
“Flash Droughts”
ha ha ha ha. That’s academic speak if ever I heard it.
Andrew D and Andrew K. I see that after staring deeply and lovingly at your navel you have discovered many wonderful things.
”drought conditions are returning to parts of Australia”
The hell you say! Climate change again? 😀
“”drought conditions are returning to parts of Australia””
LOL.. sounds like CLIMATE NORMAL to me !!
The ENSO has shifted, so California is wet, and Australia is dry.
”But is it (climate change) also pushing these extreme events to happen faster?
The answer? Generally, yes. Here’s how.”
So after reading their ”how”, I discovered no explanation whatsoever. None. Zip. Nothing.
The lack of self awareness is breathtaking.
‘Flash drought’ after 3 years of rainy La Nina you say? That would be the short drought you get before it turns into a long drought occasionally would it?
How is China achieving almost twice the production of the rest of the world? Are they lying? Is is maybe all that plant fertiliser they’re putting into the atmosphere? Does anyone really know? If it’s the latter it could be really significant.
It might seem like it, but it’s not really much use most of the time.
Most inland areas have very limited surface water available, and rely on artesian or sub-artesian bores for stock water. These have very long recharge times, and aren’t affected by droughts or a few dry days.
The main effect of drought is on plant growth.
Irrigation is horrendously expensive, especially for pasture.
Even if it wasn’t, excessive irrigation can give rise to salinity problems in many areas.
Another -1.
This place seems to have an infestation of agronomy deniers 🙂
Irrigation eventually caused a lot of issues for civilisations in what is now Iraq. Sumerians, Assyrians and others. Initially and for a about a millenium they did well and then certain cereals couldn’t tolerate the salinity in the soil. I understand that salt is still there,
The Egyptians didn’t have the same problem because the Nile brought new soil every year. Which leads to the question that now the Nile no longer floods annually and the Egyptians still use irrigation are they heading for a similar problem except quicker by using modern irrigation techniques.
Apparently there have been salinity problems in parts of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in less than a century.
We never irrigated, so this as just from what I’ve read and heard.
This is apparently far less of a problem with drip irrigation than spray, and especially flood.
maybe it’s better to give up farming in those areas?
I have been involved with irrigation farming for over 59yrs. My first years were with
a shovel and a canvas dam and still do that on part of my ground. Center pivot systems
are state of the art today. There are a number of outfits that have built there own water
systems as in dams in the mountains and pipelines that gravity feed their fields.
Free water and no power bills so to speak. One of the principals of one of these operations
drives over 100 miles a day on his family place just managing/watching the sprinklers. One a place nearby the power control room has several workers just watching tv screens 24/7 that cover the walls.
China can’t grow alfalfa so they buy it from this area and ship it over
so they can produce milk.. The biggest hay broker in the US is from this area, irrigation turned this
area into a major ag production area from basically a high desert.
“Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting” is still true today.
I get most of my water from the Feds under contract, the pump bill this year due to
price increase is high. I own some senior water rights on a stream that is worth more than
the land.
The Bruce Energy Center, in Canada had a major alfalfa pelleting operation – some 90,000 tonnes of horse feed a year. Cheap energy and the integrated surrounding alfalfa crops made for a very efficient industry. Cheap energy like cheap water, in your case, made them super competitive.
Not sure of the situation today but at one stage countries didn’t buy Chinese grown fibre because of contamination problems. Foot and mouth decimated Asian pig production in the late nineties. It was thought to have spread into Asia through Chinese sourced stock feed.
IPCC AR4 Chapter 10 page 750 (pdf page 4)
Mean Precipitation
For a future warmer climate…Globally averaged mean water vapour, evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase.
“Meanwhile, record-breaking rain and intense flash floods struck Greece before the same storm devastated Libya, with thousands dead”
According to an exhaustive study by the Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (April 2023):
In Search of Climate Crisis in Greece Using Hydrological Data: 404 Not Found …
… Rainfall extremes are proven to conform with the statistical expectations under stationarity. The only notable climatic events found are the clustering (reflecting HK dynamics) of water abundance in the 1960s and dry years around 1990, followed by a recovery from drought conditions in recent years …
… Climate, renamed climate change, climate emergency, climate crisis etc., has been the post-modern scapegoat on which every disaster is blamed .
Regarding Libya:
“The government has constructed a network of dams in wadis, dry watercourses that become torrents after heavy rains. These dams are used both as water reservoirs and for flood and erosion control. The wadis are heavily settled because soil in their bottoms is often suitable for agriculture (Wiki).
,,,, There were two major dams upstream from Derna that, for one, had not been maintained since 2002, according to Ahmed Madroud, the beleaguered city’s deputy mayor … (Aljazeera 13 Sept).
Wasn’t St Paul shipwrecked on Malta during a terrible storm that lasted 14 days before the ship ran aground? Acts 27:27-28:5
That indicates that would indicate thee’s nothing new or unusual about Mediterranean storms and tempests
And notice in Acts 27:14 the storm had happened often enough in the area to be given a name.
We’ve named our Flash Drought – ‘Michael’.
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Australian Flash Droughts are all named Bruce.
Maybe if NATO & Obama hadn’t bombed Libya back to the Stone Age in 2011, they would of maintained those dams & had a working weather warning system in place?
Instead, by bombing Libya, one of the most prosperous & advanced African nations has been turned into a terrorist enclave with busted up infrastructure.
The run of extreme weather events around the world seems to be never-ending
Well actually it’s the doomsday reporting that’s never ending but some try to swim against the tide with responsibility for truth-telling-
‘Unfortunate abuse of statistics’: Climate data encouraged over disaster analysis (msn.com)
Yes, that first sentence has been true since the dawn of time.
One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to see that modeling the Universe or even the climate is far beyond our capabilities. Heck weather models frequently can’t be depended onto be reasonably accurate the majority of the time beyond three days out!
As for models being useful? Well, just look at the modeling for the track of hurricane Lee. the model consensus several days out was that it would turn north and it did though there was not much precision in when and where that turn would occur. The model consensus varied over time as to where it would make landfall but not that much really. Nearly all of the ensembles I have seen over the last 5 days have consistently been showing landfall somewhere between Cape Cod and the central Nova Scotia.
Though the exact landfall point has shifted east and west between those two points the model forecasts provided were/are still very useful despite the lack of precision.
The same can be said for the tracking of Idalia, but certainly not the forecasting for its strength at landfall.
I would like to see the official meteorological definition of a “flash drought”.
A pleasant weekend?
LoL, that would be fun to read.
https://youtu.be/RrJawaRR3A0
(But without the water.)
for Australia’s lack of investment in water.
Here is a chart of water storage dams added per decade in Australia.
There have been several large dams planned in the last few decades, but the anti-life greenie agenda has stopped them.
Hmm. What is the official definition of a “flash drought”? Can’t seem to find that term anywhere at the WMO.
I can only think the Melbourne academics have forgotten that other word we often use in the English language that covers variation in rainfall, drought, wind etc. Maybe they should can it weather variation rather than climate change?
Just an option.
The warmists claim that rainfall is increasing worldwide at 0,01 inches per decade.
South Africa is in many ways similar to Australia: a land of floods and droughts.
Seven years ago the climate alarmists were predicting temperatures rising and rainfall decreasing and droughts spreading. Cape Town was told it would soon run out of water. Since then there have been 6 good winters and with ten more days before the end of the winter rainfall season the dams are only averaging 101.9%.
In the rest of South Africa where the summer rainfall season has not begun the dams are averaging 91% and last year were also 91% at this stage.
The weather in South Africa has been horrible because it does not want to co-operate with the climate alarmists and upending their narrative.
South Africans have been having water shortages in some of the big cities and many towns – not because of climate but because of the failure to properly maintain and expand the purification and water delivery system. Engineers have warned about this decades ago but their voices are drowned out by the climate alarmists.
Africa and 20% drought sound very bad, until realizing, The Sahara Desert is located in the northern portion of Africa and covers over 3,500,000 square miles (9,000,000 sq km) or roughly 10% of the continent.
Just a different prospective. Bet Saudi is in +80% drought right now.
‘Flash Drought’?–that’s the new ‘be very afwaid’ term for ‘it stopped raining’? Why, we must be having a ‘flash drought’ in the Cariboo right now as I’m able to bale my hay today after it getting two light showers since I cut it last Saturday.
These guys can’t be serious, this must be a joke to see just how dumbed down the public really is, to see how many will pick up and run with it. Now we wait to see a News Flooz pick up on it and start using the term in breathless ways to describe the horror every time the rain stops. I’m even predicting a Flash Drought in the region of that playa in the Black Rock Desert any day now, making it worthy of a thesis figuring out why there are so many deep ruts out there.
If they’re at all serious I stop admitting I went to university, they’re making ‘education’ an embarrassment. Why has it become impossible to understand that ‘normal weather’ includes everything under the normal distribution curve of weather?
OMG!!!, it stopped raining ten minutes ago…we’re in a FLASH DROUGHT!!!!!.
Oh…the rain started again, flash drought is over.
That was scary.
Ohhh, Sailorcurt – did you survive your Flash Inundation?
Did you name it??
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“The run of extreme weather events around the world seems to be never-ending.”
That is and always was never-ending! When these climate clones actually used to believe in crisis global warming, their efforts to measure cumulative warming was at least the right way to check it out even if it couldn’t yet be attributed to a cause.
When Nature falsified the meme, and their anomaly forecasts for the first decade of the 2000s proved to be 300% too high, they took to moving goalposts and wholesale adjusting of the past. When that failed (the18yr Dreaded Pause nightmare), Kevin Trenberth came up with the Whack-a-Moley idea that it’s warming, but it’s hiding somewhere deep in the sea.
That type of idea was a lifesaver for a deeply demoralized “Team”. In their minds: “We know that there is a climate disaster somewhere every day in this world. We can renovate Kevin’s idea and find global warming in the global, never-ending cornucopia of normal climate disasters. Let’s switch the meme to Climate Change”
“Flash Drought” my arse!
Long term climate forecasters have been pointing out that after three years of La Nina conditions in the Pacific, a rapid reversal into El Nino was highly probable….. which generally means drought in Eastern Australia.
The BOM has been banging the El Nino drum for the last twelve months. Here in southern NSW , government agencies have been sending me drought-survival strategies even while I’ve been pulling bogged machinery out of still-saturated paddocks.
The level of unreality in academia is STUNNING!
Drought is coming. Drought is always coming, if not this year, then the next or the one after that. This is Australia, so it’s a given . Only an academic in an ivory tower would think otherwise.
There seems to have been a good bit of rain south of the Murrumbidgee, but it’s been a dry autumn and winter north of that.
Last year was a different matter…
Notice the flood pictures are urban ateas? Maybe roads and buildings not engineered with sufficient drainage?
“After the northern summer of extreme heat and disastrous fires… ”
Arson is not climate change. The deliberately set fires in Canada is the work of fanatics, trying to bully the planet into adopting radical fixes to problems THEY are creating. Over 1,000 fires are/were burning in Canada, that is the result of arsonists, not climate change.
The WEF ghouls want to push humanity into the Dark Ages, so the rich elitists can live like royalty while we eat bugs, live in pods & drive bicycles.
Trees sequester CO2 & return it as Oxygen. They also help cool the planet, so burning down trees, or cutting down 70 million acres, like Covid killer Gates is doing, is insane & helping to make the planet warmer.