Our climate warming up, says expert. 23 July 1949. “The world as a whole is now moving from a time of severe glaciation to a period of milder conditions. Polar ice is melting.”
Our climate warming up, says expert (1949, July 23). The Mail (Adelaide, SA : 1912 – 1954), p. 40. Retrieved March 4, 2020, from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/56059775?searchTerm=climate%20change%20in%20australia&searchLimits=#
Indications were Australia’s climate was slowly becoming warmer, not colder, Sir Douglas Mawson, noted Antarctic explorer, said in Adelaide today.
HE was commenting on a London report that British climatologists claimed Britain was steadily changing into a temperate country, but were uncertain whether Australia was growing colder as Britain warmed up.
The British climatologists said the unreliability of early Australian records made it impossible to prove the belief Australia would become a cold, wet country with snow sports all the year round.
World trend
Sir Douglas Mawson said: “All broader factors bearing on the subject suggest Australia will slowly become warmer and the arid regions even more arid. The world as a whole is now moving from a time of severe glaciation to a period of milder conditions.
Polar ice is melting.”
“Such changes are exceedingly slow and hardly registerable in a single lifetime.”
“Some climatologists, how- ever, believe within 5,000 or 10,000 years this slow movement
toward warmer conditions will have resulted in a permanent and very marked change of
Australia’s climate.”
Sir Douglas Mawson said the earth’s climate appeared to follow long-term cycles, but the
variation range was not very great. There were, however, certain sensitive regions of the
earth where temporary variations in atmospheric circulation and other meteorological
factors might be critical.
Big change possible
These would result in a very obvious and marked change towards increased or reduced aridity and, in other cases, towards refrigeration or amelioration of the climate.
Sir Douglas Mawson said so much of Australia was on a borderland between useful farming areas and land useless because of low rainfall that what might be a very minor fluctuation in climate could produce far-reaching and disastrous results.
Even though large areas might suffer from flood or drought, meteorologists found the average figures for Australia fluctuated very little.
Sir Douglas Mawson said, “My observations in the far South have impressed me with the important role played by Antarctica in determining the climate of southern Australia.”
“The important meteorological work being done by the Australian Antarctic expedition will help to show to what extent the great ice masses of the South affect climate.”