What the Weather Bureau can do to help this Drought
I’m going to come back to an idea I first floated back in 2004. By and large it is hard to change societal perceptions. Doing so requires on going effort, time and often resources like money to create marketing campaigns of some description. Unless you have a crisis. And right now it might be fair to say that we have a crisis regarding water availability in Australia. It is NOT a new crisis. It is many, many centuries old. Yet for some, lack of water seems to be a shock so it is clear that perception and reality are not in agreement for a lot of people.
So what can the Weather Bureau do to help? Well it is surpringly simple. And that is to get rid of the word ‘fine’ to describe the weather. Fine means ‘okay’ or ‘pretty much the same’ or ‘not much will change’. But in Australia, things are NOT fine and they certainly are NOT ‘okay’!. They are ‘dry’. What I would like the Weather Bureau (along with all of the TV, Newspaper and Radio weather persons) to do is begin to use the word DRY as a replacement for the innocuous sounding ‘Fine’.
DRY is a habit forming word that will help the wider society recognise the seriousness of our predicament in Australia. DRY is a word that talks about the reality of the situation. The day is not so much ’26 degrees with slight north easterly winds and mainly fine’. It IS ‘Dry, 26 degrees with slight north easterly breezes’. Even when there is a sprinkle of water, the day would be “…MAINLY DRY, with…”
You get the picture. It is time the Weather Bureau ditched Fine for a touch of helpful perception creating realism. DRY it is!
The immediate needs of farming families are obvious. Feed to keep stock alive, someway of holding onto their farms under the stand-over tactics of some banks, and Rain. Donations can fix the immediate short term to an extent but they cannot fix the long term trajectory. That requires difficult conversations and an acceptance of the…
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