Beautiful one day, perfect the next. Australia’s famed climate has been a magnet for tourists, but rising greenhouse gas emissions could be turning the weather into a nightmare for the country’s farmers.
Climate researchers have found that temperatures have risen in the country by 0.174 °C per decade over the past 50 years. As a result, increased evaporation is intensifying droughts and possibly worsening bushfires in Australia’s most productive agricultural region, the million-square-kilometre Murray Darling river basin in the south-east of the country (Climatic Change, vol 63, p 323).
Australia has experienced major droughts in 1982, 1994 and 2002,…
