Unloved? Backed up? Toey as a Roman sandal? Find yourself staring wistfully at the lady in the Brand Power commercial?
Believe it or not, it could be because of climate change. And not just because you will never pick up while driving a Prius - and even if you did, it’s the only car on the market which you can’t hear yourself having sex in.
Beyond the question of cars there’s an emerging, inconvenient truth that the subliminated angst we’re all feeling about the warming of the planet is undermining our preparedness to commit, or even engage with the opposite sex.
OK so if you’ve made the arduous journey all the way to this fourth paragraph there’s probably a chance that you believed there would be some vaguely credible link between global warming and sexual behaviour, when it is of course, utter crap.
But as the dust settles on yesterday’s dust storm - when so many non-scientist pundits summoned their inner Al Gore in trying to explain the not entirely inexplicable - it’s worth asking whether the Boy Who Cried Climate Change phenomenon risks compromising the plausibility of what is unarguably the most important scientific challenge of our times.
I am not a scientist and as such I am prepared to be swayed by the majority scientific opinion that the planet is indeed warming up and that if we don’t all agree to do something we could quite literally end up in hot water.
But just as hairy-chested climate change sceptics give me the pip, so too do those who blindly (and even tastelessly) attribute any apparent blip in the weather to climate change, and use it as a device to bully or hector anyone who dares to disagree.
The most perverse example of this, of course, was while the Victorian bushfires were still actually burning, and the likes of Bob Brown almost fell over in their rush to get to the fax machine and declare that there would be more fires, and worse fires, if we didn’t act now to save the planet.
That was tasteless but much of what we heard yesterday was just stupid.
The first point I’d make about the dust storm - coming as I do from Adelaide where they happen a few times a year - is to borrow from that eminent scientist Chopper Read and suggest simply that Sydney should harden the f… up.
A mate sent me an interesting link to a weather site recounting “the great “dust-up” of 1902. It stated: “The year 1902 was one of appalling drought in eastern Australia. Whenever strong winds blew, dessicated soil was whipped into great dust clouds. On the worst day, Wednesday 12 November, northwesterly gales caused exceptional dust-storms to sweep across three states.”
This, and other comparable storms since 1902, shows pretty convincingly that the word “unprecedented” was used a little too often yesterday.
One other factor that jars with the definitive climate change purists is the fact that much of the dust we breathed in yesterday was actually topsoil that had been washed down south by our rivers in what has been a wetter winter than we’ve recently experienced.
A lot of scientists said a lot of interesting things yesterday and to a man, and woman, had their comments turned into 30-second soundbites. In the spirit of letting you see one of the more interesting comments in full I’ll leave you with this unedited analysis from Dr Chris Strong. It’s neither a pro climate change or anti climate change bit of analysis. It just shows that there’s a number of issues at play here that should be considered before we descend into an orgy of dirt-coloured foaming at the mouth.
(Dr Strong has nothing to say on the sex question, but he is the northern coordinator of DustWatch based at Griffith University, Queensland. DustWatch is a community-based project set up to monitor the extent and severity of wind erosion across Australia.)
“What’s interesting about this event is that we’ve got a combination of factors which have been building for 10 months already. Floods, droughts and strong winds. Early on in the year a large flood transported sediment down the Diamantina River and deposited into Lake Eyre region. Big floods bring fresh sediment which is deposited, eventually dries out, and then becomes available for wind erosion.
Combine this new source of available sediment with the passage of cold fronts (and their associated troughs), there is the mechanism for dust movement. Cold fronts commonly occur around this time of year and move across the country, passing over the Lake Eyre region and the Channel Country. Add to these factors the prevailing drought conditions that reduce the vegetation cover and the soil surface is at its most vulnerable to wind erosion.
Because of these circumstances this area is quite rich and quite ripe for wind erosion. Even last weekend there was an event in which the pre-frontal northerly winds picked up the sediment and transported it across the South Australian coastline across the ocean and off to New Zealand. This weekend we’ve had two very close events within 24 hours both picking sediment up from that region. The approach of a cold front brings different winds directions. Before the front actually hits an area, pre-frontal northerly winds prevail, so that’s usually associated with the hot, dry winds coming from the northerly direction. This weekend dust from east of Lake Eyre was entrained and transported in a south easterly direction over Tibboburra and Canberra and off the coast.
As the front moves in, winds change direction from a pre-frontal northerly to a westerly. Now the westerly winds associated with this front were quite strong and vigorous and we actually produced a line of rolling dust storm, which are sometimes known as Bedouries or Haboob’s. Early on Tuesday morning this dust storm front was around 600 - 800km long. So now we have a westerly wind which is picking up this dust material and moving it in a easterly direction. It is this material which has impacted Sydney. The northern part of it is impacting western Queensland at the moment and will continue in an easterly direction.
Depending on how far north the dust front impacts there is the possibility of dust recirculation, in which once the dust is off shore it can sometimes be picked up on the south-east trade winds and then brought back across the northern coastline of Queensland. An event of this magnitude i would probably expect that we would see some sort of dust hazes along the eastern Queensland seaboard over the next couple of days. Essentially that’s material that’s made it into the South Pacific ocean and then picked up and then moved up along the coastline again.
Wind erosion is common to the Australian continent; there is a fine mix between natural rates of wind erosion and accelerated erosion, and accelerated predominantly being removal of vegetation, whether that’s inappropriate land management or just bad luck land management with the prevailing wind conditions. In terms of the cycle of wind erosion, it does follow the el Nino/la Nina cycle. So at the moment, this particular area is quite dry and exacerbated by the fact that we have a whole new load of new sediment down there ready for removal. So over the next couple of years, as this material has been deflated and removed, it will require more wind strength to remove what’s left.”
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