THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: The eerie red glare that covered Sydney's sky this morning is a sign of things to come.
As British science fiction writer John Wyndham might have said, when people in Sydney wake up to a sky from Mars, something is seriously wrong somewhere.
All future climate predictions point to a warmer, drier inland and an increase in the unusually strong winds that carried the dust storm from the South Australian border to the east coast.
However, this does not necessarily mean that today's dust storm is a direct product of climate change.
Although weather conditions today are extremely rare, such storms have occasionally hit the east coast before, and any single weather event can be attributed to random factors that could occur with or without the effect of human-induced climate change.
In the nation's interior, dust storms are a daily event.
It is the natural consequence of a very long drought, and the probable onset of another El Nino effect. The storm today is unusual in that particles were carried as far as the coast.
What seems certain is that future dust storms will get more frequent and probably bigger, as the climate warms. Along with other firmly grounded projections such as an increase in bushfires and a drop in rainfall, we can expect more dust storms in the coming decades as a consequence of climate change. >>> Ben Cubby | Wednesday, September 23, 2009
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD:
Photos of Sydney cloaked in red haze: Dust storm swallows Sydney: A dust storm turns Sydney a dramatic red before mellowing to an impermeable golden haze unlike anything ever seen before. Arjun Ramachandran speaks to the Bureau of Meteorology's Barry Hanstrum about the phenomenon and the University of Sydney's Clinical Professor Christine Jenkins about the health risks right now and over the next few days. >>>
