Calling all Australians, including those of us in the west: you are invited to take part in an online survey about the cultural significance of snow and snowy environments in Australia in light of the effects of climate change.

Not a survey topic you would have seen before, I bet! Maybe the refreshing uniqueness is one reason I took part in the survey, which is being conducted by Dr Andrew Gorman-Murray at the University of Wollongong, down the coast from Sydney.

A Thredbo ski slope in
a very poor season.
In the future, this could
be as good as it gets!

Dr Gorman-Murray says that although we have plenty of scientific projections about the damage climate change will do to snow in Australia (and it’s not pretty), we have little data on cultural or personal responses to this. Information about people’s memories and experiences of snow in Australia, and what snow means to the Australian identity, is not well documented. Neither is the extent of people’s awareness of the history and geography of snow in Australia.

By completing the survey, you can contribute to the understanding of the cultural dimensions of climate change relating to snow. This is becoming more relevant as governments form climate change policies. Australians not living near snow are encouraged to contribute, to ensure there isn’t an south-eastern states bias.

If you found my website when searching for anything to do with West Australian snow, then you might well have some interest or feeling on the subject … and Dr Gorman-Murray would value your input.

The survey, and more information about it, can be found at:
www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=zU33zSv8O90j9xmzwNuS6w_3d_3d
Info about Dr Gorman-Murray:
www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/eesgenstaff/UOW003012.html

I went for a walk recently at Lake Monger and was saddened to find that it’s drying up. It’s normal for Perth’s smaller lakes and wetlands to dry up over summer, but not Lake Monger - it’s one of the largest lakes in the area, and although the water levels rise and fall with the seasons I’ve never seen the levels as low as they are now.

The first photo shows the shallower western side (the wooden posts are normally under water), and the second shows what is normally a channel of water surrounding a small island. The sign advising not to enter the water looks a little out of place! While most of the lake still has water in it, much of this is alarmingly shallow - one bird I saw standing in the middle of the lake had water only up to its knees (or the part of its legs where the knees would be if it had them).

Why is it so? The lake occurs in a low-lying area where groundwater reaches the surface, and so groundwater levels affect the lake depth. A percentage of Perth’s water supply is pumped out of the ground, and this percentage has increased over the last 30 years. Combined with a doubling of the population in this period, and a decrease in rainfall, it’s not surprising that the lake level should be abnormally low. It wouldn’t have helped that last year was our driest on record.

With still another two months of warm weather to get through before the brief rainy season, Lake Monger will undoubtedly get even drier - hopefully not too dry for all the bird life that depend on it when other lakes have dried up.

One of the things that intrigues me about weather and climate is no matter how much we learn about it, nature keeps throwing spanners in the works to remind us how much we don’t really know. Global warming is a prime example - as more evidence for warming piles up, more contradictions keep surfacing.

A story in Science Daily the other day reported a familiar sounding scenario: a warming trend over the last few decades in the Antarctic Peninsula has diminished sea ice, and forced penguin populations to migrate south. It says “all the global climate models predict a warming in the Antarctic and a decrease in sea ice along its margins”, and a reduction in sea ice appears to be fulfilling the predictions.

Something you’re less likely to hear about on the evening news is this story from NASA Observatory News. It states that between 1982 and 2004, Antarctica grew warmer around the edges (which includes the peninsula) but became colder over its massive interior. Another story from CO2 Science reveals that 72% of the grounded ice sheet is growing at a rate of 5mm per year. It concludes with:

“Contrary to all the horror stories one hears about global warming-induced mass wastage of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to rising sea levels that gobble up coastal lowlands worldwide, the most recent decade of pertinent real-world data suggest that forces leading to just the opposite effect are apparently prevailing.”

So, Antarctica is experiencing both warming and cooling. We humans are a clever bunch, but the complexities and contradictions of the world we live in remind us that we are not in charge, and that even understanding what’s going on around us is a challenge.

The idea that an ice age could be caused by global warming, not cooling, seems counter-intuitive … but its an idea being taken more seriously by many scientists.

This article states “if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset …”. The article explains how this could happen, as does this one.

The above mainly affects the northern hemisphere, but some scientists (such as Dr Joachim Scheven) claim that warmer oceans may have triggered an ice age globally - due to higher evaporation being balanced by higher precipitation which leads to more snow in cooler areas.

Global average temperatures may have risen, but a lot of weather events are breaking records in the other direction. This extensive list of record cold weather and unusual snowfalls suggests warming is not exactly global.

So where is it all heading? I’ve no idea; as a weather enthusiast I just find it interesting.