Intrepid Science Blog

Will 2018 be the year of climate action? Victorian London's 'Great Stink' sewer crisis might tell us Chris Turney , UNSW In the late 19th century, the irrepressible Mark Twain is reputed to have said in a speech : Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. He’s said to have borrowed that quote from a friend, but if Twain were alive today he would no doubt have more to say on the subject. In a time when we are becoming increasingly accustomed to extremes in the climate system, the events of this year have risen above the background noise of political turmoil to dominate the global headlines. While global leadership in dealing with climate change may be depressingly limited, I can’t help but wonder if 2018 will be the year our global tribe feels threatened enough to act. Encouragingly, there may be a historical (and largely unknown) precedent for tackling climate change: Victoria London’s handling of the “Great Stink”, where growth had...

500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history Patrick Baker , University of Melbourne ; Chris Turney , UNSW Australia , and Jonathan Palmer , UNSW Australia Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years. As part of our Australia and New Zealand Drought Atlas we’ve published the most detailed record of drought and wet periods (or “pluvials”) since 1500. The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900. But 2011 was the wettest year in our 513-year record. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. We may get one year of extremely wet conditions (for example in 2011) or we might get six years of extremely dry conditions (such as 2003-2009). North Queensland may be flooded out while Victoria suffers with drought. Or in extreme circumstances, the entir...