If you want to know what the U.S. southwest faces in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends quickly, just look to Australia:

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the drought affecting south-west Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria and northern Tasmania “is now very severe and without historical precedent”.

Dr Jones said Victoria had had “the driest multi-year period on record, but also by far the hottest….”

He said temperatures were running at about one degree “above any previous comparable drought. That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming signal.”

He said the data suggests that for every one degree of warming, there is a 15 per cent decline in run-off, or river flow, in the Murray Darling Basin….

He said a similar drying pattern had been observed in Europe’s Mediterranean, and the south-west in the USA….

The highlighted point is key. Previously, droughts around the world were either cold-whether droughts or warm-weather droughts. In the future, virtually all droughts will be hot weather droughts, which are obviously the worst kind.

He said the current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had predicted.

Most of the major predicted climate impacts the planet is now experiencing are at the extreme end of what the models had predicted (see “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part I“).

Here is more on Australia’s astonishing drought:

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Americans For Prosperity (AFP), a nationwide front group founded and funded by the right-wing polluter Koch Industries, is holding its national summit, “Defending the Dream,” this weekend in Washington, D.C. On display from Friday through Sunday will be the extremist free-market, anti-science, right-wing ideology responsible for the dramatic decline in our nation’s economic and environmental health during the Bush era.

Americans for Prosperity is notorious for its fake grassroots efforts, funneling millions of dollars of oil and coal industry cash across the nation to spread their message of global warming denial. Just in the past month, near-identical op-eds appeared in Georgia and Arizona papers from the respective AFP state directors defending carbon dioxide — “the life-giving gas that makes trees grow tall and flowers bloom.”

The featured speakers at the “Tribute to Ronald Reagan Dinner” and Saturday’s general session include the following rogues’ gallery of conservative ideologues:

George Will and Fred Barnes, who this July called Americans suffering in the Bush economy “the crybabies of the Western world” and “whining all the way through it.”

Dinesh D’Souza, who said in 2007 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was “indirectly” responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who this Tuesday declared, “I think I was right” about his statement in 2003 that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Edwin Meese III, who as Reagan’s Attorney General mentored John Roberts and Samuel Alito in his agenda of “striking down abortion rights, access to justice, and voluntary school desegregation.”

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who palled around with Jack Abramoff and claimed this March that “more people will die” because Bush raised fuel economy standards.

John Stossel, who claimed this July, during record gas prices and big oil profits, “I think these oil companies are heroes.”

David Koch, the Koch Industries billionaire who is the “richest man in New York State” and was the 1980 Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, sits on the board of directors of AFP, Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundation. In July he gave the Lincoln Center $100 million to rename the New York State Theater after himself.

The dream these radical extremists from the American Petroleum Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Business and Media Institute, the Wall Street Journal, and other members of the Exxon-Bush machine are defending has been a nightmare for the United States. It’s time to wake up.

John McCain famously said of his VP pick, “She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” Almost as famously, Palin turns out to know almost nothing about energy, and what she does know is mostly wrong (see “Sarah Palin is the fungible candidate“).

The AP reported Thursday that Palin doesn’t even know “whether the government bans oil exports — especially from her state’s North Slope fields”:

A questioner at a town hall-style meeting in Wisconsin said he had heard that at least 75 percent of the oil drilled in Alaska was being sold to China and said, if true, he would like to know why.

“No. It’s not 75 percent of our oil being exported,” Palin said, suggesting some of Alaska’s oil, in fact, may be going abroad but not that much.

“In fact,” she added, “Congress is pretty strict on, um, export bans of oil and gas especially.”

Uhh, no. As the AP explains:

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A: It certainly looks that way.

When I first posed this question in August, I began my answer:

A: “Who knows?” and “It doesn’t really matter.” Much higher gasoline prices that are sustained for a long, long time are now inevitable. The fundamentals in the oil market are that we are in the beginning stages of peak oil. Supply can no longer keep up with demand, which has kept soaring even in the face of record prices.

In August, I had assumed that things had gotten as grim under President Bush as they could get. My bad. I did, however, point out:

In the short-term, I suppose it is possible that we can go back to $3 gasoline, although that would probably require a deep global recession, and prices would only stay low for the extent of the downturn.

But I didn’t think that would actually happen, as evidenced by my 401K. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of supply and demand mean prices are inevitably headed much higher in the medium term. A figure from a new CIBC report makes that clear:

[Note: This is total world production of crude oil (excluding natural gas liquids).]

Even in the face of the staggering rise in oil prices of the last few years, production has barely budged. What about demand? As I noted in August, despite a sharp drop in US oil consumption, “global consumption rose by roughly 500,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) during the first half of 2008.” And that led me to the obvious conclusion that only much, much greater demand destruction can stop the inexorable rise of oil prices. And that obviously requires much higher prices than what we’ve seen in the first half of this year.

That conclusion remains true for the medium-term, but there is another way to get serious demand destruction in the short term — a major global economic slowdown. Given that people have started to use the D-word to describe where our current mess is headed, oil prices can clearly go lower and stay there awhile. If we assume, optimistically, that we avoid a true depression and only end up with a major recession, then the WSJ Environmental Capital blog has a good summary of new price projections:

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