Something to look forward to (sarc)

A story from the ABC:

New climate modelling suggests Australians should be preparing for the possibility of megadroughts lasting more than 20 years.

Research from the Australian National University, published in a special edition of the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, has indicated future droughts in Australia could be far worse than anything experienced in recent times — even without factoring in human impacts.

Climate scientist Georgy Falster said while megadroughts occurred naturally, climate change would make them more severe.

"We have this situation where on the one hand, there's the possibility for naturally occurring megadroughts that can last multiple decades and might come along every maybe 150 to 100 years," Dr Falster said.

I posted in 2012 about about evidence that severe droughts are very much part of the pre-European colonisation history of America:

A 2004 paper by Schubert and others looking at the causes of the drought side of the 1930's starts off by noting that there is long on-going cycle of drought in the mid West:

Drought in the Great Plains is not unique to the last century. A number of proxy climate records indicate that multiyear droughts comparable to those of the 1930s and 1950s are, in fact, a regular feature of the Great Plains climate, having occurred approximately once or twice a century over the last 400 years (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). Looking still further backin time, there is evidence for multidecadal droughts during the late thirteenth and sixteenth centuries that were of much greater severity and duration than those of the twentieth century (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). For example, tree-ring analyses in Nebraska suggest that the drought that began in 1276 lasted 38 years (Bark 1978)!

So, yeah, doesn't surprise me that the same thing may have happened in Australia.