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AUSTRALIA has been hit by drought in parts of its southern regions that have had no more than 10% of their normal rainfall this year. Only about half of a planned 24 million acres has been planted with wheat; fodder for cattle is so scarce that farmers are slaughtering livestock they can no longer feed. In Victoria, the air echoes with the sound of gunshots as ranchers, who have already shot about 27,000 head of cattle, rid themselves of stock. In South Australia, stockmen are demanding compensation for an estimated 100,000 head of cattle and 2 million sheep they say must be killed to prevent overgrazing of the barren land.
THE UNITED STATES has also been hit by drought. In California, forests and canyons are tinder dry, and the fire danger is high. Reservoirs in Colorado are down. Drought-caused crop losses in Wisconsin are estimated at $400 million. Despite drought in some areas, however, American growers are expected to harvest more than 2 billion bu. of wheat.
In attempting to explain some of the recent worldwide weather aberrations, meteorologists have traced Europe's grueling hot spell to two strong high-pressure zones, one centered over the Azores, the other just northeast of Iceland. For some unknown reason, the two came together to create the "Azores bridge." This in turn formed what weather experts called the "omega block," a high-pressure barricade that prevented the normal clockwise movement of damp air from the Atlantic to Europe, a flow that usually assumes a vast omega (Ω) shape. Australian meteorologists have attributed the drought to the unexplained absence of the rain-bearing westerly winds that usually sweep across the lower part of the continent at this time of year. The dry spells suffered by the U.S. plains states are blamed on blocking by a high pressure center over the upper Midwest.
Cooling Trend. Do all of these abnormalities mean that something is happening to the world's climate? "We know the predictability of weather. We can look at it for two weeks or even 20 days," says Edward S. Epstein, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Environmental Monitoring and Prediction. "But what is the corresponding predictability of climate?"
Climatologists admit that they really do not know. A substantial number believe the earth is undergoing a cooling trend and is returning to the conditions of the "Little Ice Age"—the generally cold, damp weather that prevailed from around 1600 to 1850. British Climatologist Hubert Lamb believes the change is cyclical, occurring every 200 years or so. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin and many others blame the earth's cooling on an increase of dust particles in the atmosphere; the particles act like tiny mirrors, reflecting back some of the sunlight sinking the atmosphere and depriving the earth's surface of solar heat.