Mereja Forum

[Messele Zewdie Ejeta]

Many people might agree that the recent wildfires in Australia are unprecedented. Watching and hearing about the environmental disaster they have been causing is very much saddening.

Some scientists suggest that climate change is likely to have contributed to these catastrophic wildfires. Evidently, managing this level of unprecedented disasters, which are caused at least partly by climate crisis, is a big challenge.

Both meteorology and climate science are relatively complex fields of study.

Observed long term trends in climate variables, primarily temperature and precipitation, are used to study climate change. However, the trends in these climate variables are not predisposed to the attribution of climate change to natural variability and elevated greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Keeping in mind the complexity of climate science, I tried to do some preliminary studies toward the attribution of climate change to natural variability and elevated greenhouse gas emissions. A peer-reviewed journal paper out of these preliminary studies was published several years ago (Validation of predicted meteorological drought in California using analogous orbital geometries.)

So far, this new frontier of research has not got a traction by academic institutions. I am positive that it will in the future.

My effort as an individual scientist to advance this new frontier of research using crowdfunding also has not been successful so far (Predicting Global climate and meteorological variability.) I am continuing this effort at: Predictability of Meteorological Variability.

I am not sure if there are Ethiopian scientists in Australia, or scientists of Ethiopian origin, or any scientist for that matter, who might be interested to study wildfires in the region based on the predictability of meteorological variability as presented in the paper linked above. If there are, it may be a worthwhile academic exercise that has a potential to be translated into practice in the future.