A friend who lives in the Tinderries, in the Upper Murrumbidgee Valley catchment, tells me the district's good snowfalls and snow storms of recent weeks are reminiscent of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Of course, 1956 was a flood year in much of eastern Australia, with the 1956 River Murray flood described downstream as the greatest catastrophe in South Australia's modern history.
A year ago, Macquarie Generation -- the largest producer of electricity in Australia -- warned that with half of its water for the cooling at its generators coming from the Hunter River during "high flow events", the continuing drought meant "electricity output may be affected from late 2008".
A year later the Lower Hunter has flooded, devastating some farm businesses, and shoring up water supplies available for electricity generation.
Indeed we live in a land of drought or flooding rains.
The Bureau of Meteorology says there are signs of a La Nina being declared in the coming months bringing truly drought-breaking rains.
So, let us keep our fingers crossed that there is more snow and rain to improve the grim outlook for the next irrigation season in the Murray-Darling Basin.
"Global warming" is the biggest issue on the national agenda and, interestingly, both sides of federal politics, Labor and Coalition, are forming their climate change policies on advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Their general circulation models (GCM) cannot account for, or explain, the La Nina and El Nino cycles which have so much influence on rainfall and snowfall in Australia.
Furthermore, there is no agreement among the IPCC scientists how global warming may affect the El Nino cycle, with some climate models suggesting there may be a more "general El Nino-type average state".
Head of the US Centre for Atmospheric Research, and a key advisor to the IPCC, Kevin Trenberth, recently cautioned against using any of the models from the IPCC for predicting climate.
He emphasised the IPCC models were all "what if" projections of future climate that correspond to certain greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
They aren't forecasts.
It is interesting to ponder such an admission while listening to many experts claim the "science is settled".
Indeed, many politicians and environmentalists give the impression that climate change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover, just the knowledge that the earth will warm and there will be more droughts.
These days you are a brave person if you publicly declares any scepticism of the projections.
I am sure there will be both more droughts and also more floods in the future -- but nobody, least of all the IPCC, seems to be able to tell me when or where they will occur.
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