Floods, Droughts and Locusts in Australia
The Creation Care website folks asked me to do a short piece on the situation in Australia. I’m re-posting it here as well.
Since 2003, Australia has been hit with a series of droughts, floods and locust plagues. A business colleague sent these stunning pictures of agricultural regions in 2010, before the most recent flooding.
The Homeland Security Newswire summarizes the current situation:
“Brisbane, a city of two million and Australia’s third largest, is flooded; roads are inundated, railway lines have been cut, and sewage is spreading into the waters; dozens of suburbs are under three meters of water, with some factories and homes only visible by their roofs; more than 100,000 properties had their power cut as a precaution against flooding of electricity substations; the worst affected area was the town of Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, where residents described an 8-meter “instant inland tsunami” ripping through the streets on Monday; the flood zone in northern Australia now covers area larger than Germany and France combined.”
Here is a short YouTube video that has received four million views:
You may be wondering:
- Is this normal? No, these are extreme events, even for Australia.
- Is this the result of climate change? Probably. More about this in a moment.
- Is this the “new normal” for Australia, long droughts followed by monster storms? Perhaps; this is the fear, a permanently altered climate, a “normal” that anything but normal.
A quick reminder of how the climate is changing. As humans burn oil, coal and wood, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Increasing levels of CO2 trap increasing amounts of the sun’s energy. As the planet warms, droughts get longer, and precipitation becomes more intense. The computer models predict that before the polar ice caps melt and the coastal cities flood, droughts become longer and rainfall becomes more intense. We have seen the future foreshadowed in Australia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia and Africa.
To date, much of the burden of climate change has fallen on the world’s poor, particularly small farmers. Australia may become the most affected rich country. But eventually Australia’s problem will affect all of us.
