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By Root 1924 0

where I live, one can be virtually certain that whatever rain falls will be concentrated in the winter, and that there will be little or no rain in the summer. In many of those productive overseas agriculture areas, not only rain’s seasonality but also its occurrence is relatively reliable from year to year: major droughts are infrequent, and a farmer can go to the effort and expense of plowing and planting each year with the expectation that there will be enough rain for that crop to mature.

Over most of Australia, however, rainfall depends upon the so-called ENSO (the El Niño Southern Oscillation), which means that rain is unpredictable from year to year within a decade, and is even more unpredictable from decade to decade. The first European farmers and herders to settle in Australia had no way of knowing about Australia’s ENSO-driven climate, because the phenomenon is difficult to detect in Europe, and it is only within recent decades that it has become recognized even by professional climatologists. In many areas of Australia the first farmers and herders had the misfortune to arrive during a string of wet years. Hence they were deceived into misjudging the Australian climate, and they commenced raising crops or sheep in the expectation that the favorable conditions greeting their eyes were the norm. In fact, in most of Australia’s farmlands the rainfall is sufficient to raise crops to maturity in only a fraction of all years: not more than half of all years at most locations, and in some agricultural areas only in two years out of 10. That contributes to making Australian agriculture expensive and uneconomic: the farmer goes to the expense of plowing and sowing, and then in half or more of years there is no resulting crop. An additional unfortunate consequence is that, when the farmer plows the ground and plows underground whatever cover of weeds has sprung up since the last harvest, bare soil becomes exposed. If the crops that the farmer then sows do not mature, the soil is left bare, not even covered by weeds, and thus exposed to erosion. Thus, the unpredictability of Australia’s rainfall makes growing crops more expensive in the short run, and increases erosion in the long run.

The principal exception to Australia’s ENSO-driven pattern of unpredictable rain is the wheat belt of its southwest, where (at least until recently) the winter rains came reliably from year to year, and where a farmer could count on a successful wheat crop almost every year. That reliability propelled wheat within recent decades to overtake both wool and meat as Australia’s most valuable agricultural export. As already mentioned, that wheat belt also happens to be the area with particularly extreme problems of low soil fertility and high salinity. But global climate change in recent years has been undermining even that compensating advantage of predictable winter rains: they have declined dramatically in the wheat belt since 1973, while increasingly frequent summer rains there fall on harvested bare ground and cause increased salinization. Thus, as I mentioned for Montana in Chapter 1, global climate change is producing both winners and losers, and Australia will be a loser even more than will Montana.

Australia lies largely within the temperate zones, but it lies thousands of miles overseas from other temperate-zone countries that are potential export markets for Australian products. Hence Australian historians speak of the “tyranny of distance” as an important factor in Australia’s development. That expression refers to the long overseas ship journeys making transport costs per pound or per unit of volume for Australian exports higher than for exports from the New World to Europe, so that only products with low bulk and high value could be exported economically from Australia. Originally in the 19th century, minerals and wool were the main such exports. Around 1900, when refrigeration of ship cargo became economic, Australia also began to export meat overseas, particularly to England. (I recall an Australian friend who disliked the