So what's the weather gunna do?

There's been a lot of talk about drought and climate change and whatever. I think that in the bush we're just going to have to get used to it. We've only been in this country for a couple of hundred years (He says, completely ignoring the aboriginal history of the place.) and I think that only now are we starting to get a grip on how the place works. It would seem to me that what we consider to be drought may in fact be the standard weather pattern, if not in the past, then certainly into the foreseeable future.

Although the Canadian alleged climatologist I heard on the steam powered wireless the other day who said that, "Australia is not experiencing a drought; you are just using too much water." seems to have been out in the sun a bit too long. How does using ground water cause below-average rainfall?

I'm not entirely convinced by the doomsayers of climate change, either. Mainly because I don't understand the science. They seem to receive pretty much uncritical acceptance from the purveyors of pop-science, but you only have to look through past issues of Popular Mechanics or New Scientist to see what sort of track record the futurologists have (Remember the millennium bug?). I do not entirely discount the climate-changers, I merely wish to say that I do not take as gospel that which I don't understand. I am not one of those people who say that the accepted forecast in the seventies was climate cooling, therefore we should ignore them now as they obviously don't know what they are talking about.

Opinions change as new information is found and greater understanding is reached. New ways of observing the relationship between disparate pieces of information are utilised and new ways of gathering and interpreting data are created. Complete knowledge and understanding does not spring forth fully formed from an initial observation. If this were the case then we would already know all there is to know about pretty much everything.

Some Famous Guy once said that,"With God, there are four options: If I choose to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose not to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose to believe and there is a God, I go to heaven. If I choose not to believe and there is a God, I go to hell. I choose to believe."

Apart from the fact that if there is a God, He ain't gunna be fooled by the lip-service given to him by some tool 'deciding' to believe and you gunna burn, baby, burn, I think that there is something in that quote for all of us. It seems to me that there is more upside to believing than downside.

If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is a furphy, life goes on unchanged. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is a furphy, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people. If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is an actuality, a lot of people will die, a lot of people will suffer and almost everybody's life will be adversely affected. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is an actuality, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people.

As you may or may not know, I am a farmworker. One thing that I have learned from being a farmworker is that you always make your plans expecting the worst. You never allow yourself to be caught by a series of setbacks; you make your plans with these setbacks in mind. If you do this correctly it allows you to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. In much the same way that this has allowed us to expand and look at maybe putting on an extra man at a time when For Sale signs are going up and people are being laid off, I think that by embracing climate change as a fact (Whether or no.) and behaving accordingly, at the very least Australia will be relatively better off than if we ignore it.

Most of the suggestions put forward by the more rational section of the Church of Greenhouse would seem to be pretty good housekeeping whatever the situation is.