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Using Aboriginal lore for understanding Australia’s relentless climate

Australia's relentless climate

Relentless droughts, shortage of drinking water, crop failures and agitated farmers have made headlines though out the year. Now the desperate government seems to be looking towards Aboriginal weather knowledge.

Considering Australia has one of the most variable rainfall climates in the world I believe this due recognition comes rather late.

40,000 years of Aboriginal lore based the behavior of animals and the flowering of plants can only help in understanding Australia’s capricious climate.For the countries Aborigines ‘flocks of black cockatoos’ are living, squawking barometers.

Aboriginal understanding of weather patterns is being harnessed by the Bureau of Meteorology’s Indigenous Weather Knowledge project. Firstly, seasons are to be mapped as understood by indigenous people. The northern hemisphere pattern of spring, summer, autumn and winter sits uncomfortably with the reality of Australia’s climate. Aboriginal tribes, in contrast, recognize up to seven distinct seasons.

What are nature’s messages?

In the Simpson Desert of central Australia, the appearance of plovers is associated with the onset of seasonal rains.
In the humid north of the Northern Territory, the arrival of the brolga crane was traditionally seen as heralding the beginning of the monsoon season.
The flowering of rough-barked gum trees indicates that winds will blow from the south-east, bringing in the dry season.

The bureau’s meteorologists have been tapping the expertise of Aborigines in the tropical north of Australia since 2003. But this is the first time they have drawn on the knowledge of indigenous people in the more populated southeast of the country.

Without significant rain in the next few weeks, farmers in the nation’s breadbasket in New South Wales and Victoria will be denied water for irrigation, consigning millions of acres of crops to wither and die.

drought livestock wvi big
Without significant rain in the next few weeks, farmers in the nation’s breadbasket in New South Wales and Victoria will be denied water for irrigation, consigning millions of acres of crops to wither and die. One of the country’s best known environmentalists, Dr Tim Flannery, has warned that Australia confronts “the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now.”

UN’s IPCC report on the threat of global warming to Australia and New Zealand:

As a result of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, water security problems are projected to intensify by 2030 in south and east Australia and, in New Zealand, in Northland and eastern regions.

Significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur by 2020 in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland’s tropics. Other sites at risk include the Kakadu wetlands … and the alpine areas of both countries.

Experts studying the effects of global warming in the Arctic are looking to Inuit expertise, and South American Indians‘ knowledge of weather phenomena such as El Nino has long been recognized.

There is an increasing frequency and severity of drought-causing El Nino weather patterns, blamed on global warming. Australia is also responsible for global warming. Australians are among the world’s biggest per-capita energy consumers, and among the top producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Despite that, the country is one of only two industrialized nations (the United States being the other) that have refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The governments argue that to do so would harm their economies.

Source: The Telegraph

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