DROUGHT NOT A RESULT OF GLOBAL WARMING

True believers are sure Australia's drought is a result of global warming:

Australia, the only major industrialized country other than the U.S. to reject the Kyoto Protocol, is facing its worst drought in 1000 years. As ClimateProgress notes, global warming “has also taken its toll on the economy, significantly slowing Australia’s growth since so much of the country’s GDP relies on agriculture.”

An atmosphere specialist isn't so sure there's a connection:

Barrie Hunt, an honorary research fellow at the CSIRO's atmospheric research centre in Melbourne, has studied 10,000 years of climate variability in Australia.

Mr Hunt says this drought is not caused by the greenhouse effect.

"This drought will break and it's important for people to say well I understand that when the drought breaks it's not the greenhouse effect is a load of rubbish, of course it's rained again, everyone says this thing's due to the greenhouse effect and therefore they expect it to go on forever in a way, the naive people do."

There could be a science fight a brewin'.

Update: Professor Peter Cullen sees the rain situation as pretty much normal:

The last 10 to 15 years have been substantially drier. In fact, when you look at the long-term records, the period 1950s and 1990 turned out to be unusually wet, and we've now gone back to a period which is more like the 1900 to 1950. In fact, we're a bit below that.

For rainfall history graphs go here.

Update: A mere fight isn't enough for Cate Faehrmann from the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales:

"We need to treat this as a war-like scenario."