Scientists See Antarctic Vortex as Drought Maker

Scientists See Antarctic Vortex as Drought Maker
Tue September 23, 2003 05:04 AM ET
By Michael Byrnes

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall, scientists said on Tuesday.

Spinning faster and tighter, the 100 mile an hour jetstream is pulling climate bands south and dragging rain from Australia into the Southern Ocean, they say.

They attribute the phenomenon to global warming and loss of the ozone layer over Antarctica.

"This is a very serious situation that we're probably not confronting as full-on as we should," Dr James Risbey of the Center for Dynamical Meteorology and Oceanography at Melbourne's Monash University told Reuters on Tuesday.

"There has been real added impetus here in Australia to try to study (the wind vortex) because we've been faced with an almost precipitous rainfall decline, particularly in the southwest of Western Australia," Risbey said.

REUTERS

Both last winter and this summer, we've had almost no rain. All the corn is dried out in the fields. We got three inches of rain in the time that we usually get around twelve inches.

I've read reciently that supressed scientific evidence indicates that the space shuttle has been destroying the ozone layer, and that if we send up the shuttle 400 times, we will have destroyed all the ozone, and with that, all life the planet.

The source of the info is that Rupert guy. FTW - "From The Wilderness" is his website.