They don’t know whether the current deluge in Sydney, Australia is a result of global warming, but they do know that a 20-minute downpour last Thursday pushed Sydney’s rainfall beyond that recorded in any year since records began according to Bernard Lagan writing for The Times newspaper. The record of 86.4 inches (2197 mm) set 72 years ago has been shattered with three months still to go in 2022.
Tom Saunders, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s weather forecaster said: “It’s not like we’ve just scraped in, the record has been obliterated. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The spin-off from months of rain includes the disturbance of many animal species such as the funnel web spider which has moved into dry spaces. This inevitably means conflict between humans and, in this instance, a deadly creature. The funnel web spider is the world’s most lethal spider.
This isn’t the only arachnid species to be entering homes in Sydney. Lagan’s daughter lives in Sydney and she has a regular visitor, Gordon, a bulky huntsman spider the size of his daughter’s palm and she’s 18 years old. It likes to shelter in her bedroom. Fortunately, she likes arachnids but to most people its presence would be disturbing to say the least.
Also, Lagan reports that the smaller but venomous redback spider is moving into dry spaces beneath the sliding doors leading to the garden.
Sydney is a sunny place normally and perhaps they don’t need to maintain their roofs to quite the same standard as we do in the UK, a soggy country. But these extraordinary rains are exposing defects. Leaky roofs are not uncommon resulting in mould and dampness. And the problem is that roofers are over employed and therefore there is a long wait to get one which means more problems.
I don’t know how good the roofers are in Sydney, but they are normally terrible in the UK. It is very difficult to find a good roofer and if you find one you have to hang onto them. The problem is that they are over employed because they’re good and therefore you can never get your hands on them.
Other animals have been affected by the record rains. Ibis birds with their long, curved beaks “colonised backlands in 1970s”. They normally eat garbage, but Lagan says that they know wade around sodden cricket grounds using their long bills in the right way to probe the soil for invertebrates because worms have been forced to the surface.
The Australia-based Irish wildlife ecologist, Dr. Grainne Clear said: “They are starting to use their long bill in the way that it was actually made for, to probe soils for invertebrates. They don’t want to go back to McDonald’s, they don’t want to eat rubbish anymore”.
And Sydney’s native plants have been damaged, apparently. Sixteen species of plant including the prized native guava are at risk of being wiped out by myrtle rust at the city’s Royal Botanic Garden. Staff are racing to save them.
Australia’s weather forecasters say that the rains are due to a series of La Niña events which in turn are due to a warming of ocean temperatures in the Western Pacific. This leads to more rain and floods. However, the underlying reason may be global warming.
Australia has suffered over the past few years with extreme weather conditions including massive fires due to extraordinarily high temperatures followed by floods. It looks like global warming. However, scientists are cautious about attributing the rains to climate change. Although it has been suggested in a University of Washington study that climate change could be “weighing the dice” towards La Niña events.
