nth year when the desert city finally appears?

Today, despite recent forecasts that a negative IOD would lead to good rainfall over eastern Australia, Melbourne, at a mere 5.4 millimetres, is experiencing its driest September on record after another prediciton of rain overnight “high chance of showers” failed yet again to materialise. In fact, on present trends Melbourne is headed for its driest spring month on record, beating out October 1914 by 1.5 millimetres and November 1895 by 0.6 millimetres. Most likely, Melbourne, despite th forecast of Weatherzone, will see less rain still in October and November. Weatherzone, even said “rain” today but already the sky is clearing!

Despite this Weatherzone forces, no rain has fallen in Melbourne. This will almost certainly be Melbourne’s not merely driest September, but driest spring month and driest year ever — but much, much worse is to come

A fortnight ago, a prediction of 10 millimetres — possibly in fact 15 —of rainfall and heavy thunderstorms was followed up by just 0.6 millimetres of rainfall!

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of September 2025. Note the very dry conditions over the inland southeast, and wet conditions over a central band of NSW and southwestern Australia. Courtesy Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Despite the fact that quite good rainfall over the rapidly drying southwest of Australia has weakened my tendency towards violent temper outbursts over climate change and the three-decades overdue call for expropriation of the fossil fuel polluters to the final cent and immediate transfer of every last cent of their accumulated wealth to renewable energy and compensation for the costs of climate change, the contrast between BOM predictions and actual rainfall in Melbourne — and to a lesser extent the rest of Victoria and the settled parts of South Australia — is so great that something must be utterly wrong with their forecast modelling.

Total Victorian rainfall for the first sixteen days of September, 2025

What has been virtually continuous for most of August and the first half of September is a sustained block that has produced extreme rainfall over Sydney — 530 millimetres over 45 days — and good rainfall over the aridifying southwest of Western Australia. This is, it must be noted, utterly opposite to what Weatherzone is predicting in its analysis of the negative IOD. However, given that based on the late-2000s documentation of Diane J. Seidel, Fu Qiang, William J. Randel and Thomas J. Reichler it is known that the tropics have shifted at least six degrees poleward since 1964 — equivalent to Melbourne shifting to the latitude of Bourke or Coober Pedy— it is to be expected that higher-latitude anticyclonic systems would severely dry out southern Australia.

Given that with a normally wet negative IOD Victoria is experiencing record drought, it can be expected that when the IOD turns positive it will be far, far worse — if that be possible. Two years ago, Melbourne saw just 0.2 millimetres in the last three weeks of September. As we are seeing something equally dry under conditions predicted to be wet, it is virtually certain that — as I have been predicting for two decades and counting — Melbourne’s annual rainfall is headed for an extremely steep decline to levels comparable to historical totals in Australia’s driest deserts or probably even less. So far this year, Melbourne is 7 millimetres below its 1967 record low of 332 millimetres. It is virtually certain that Melbourne will not receive 7 millimetres for the rest of 2025, and will definitively exceedingly rarely — like one year out of twenty or thirty — receive 332 millimetres in a year again. Most years, Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be a tiny fraction of its former 1967 record low, and about what was received in northern South Australia back in 2019.

The extremely low annual rainfall for northern South Australia in 2019 is what will be received in most years from 2026 onwards. Since the late 2000s, it has been known that the tropical belt has shifted sufficiently to place Melbourne in the same zone as the driest areas on this map, and runaway global warming will from now on place Melbourne there without doubt

For the world’s rich capitalists, unfortunately, the hot desert is the best possible environment because it gives bosses the smallest possible subsistence wage to pay workers, as noted two decades ago by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Desert states can also typically out-earn states in less ecologically fragile regions, and thus avoid having to rely upon taxes, creating downward pressure on capital taxation at a global scale.

Without mass international worker struggle to globally

1. expropriate the super-polluters
1. socialists have long demonstrated that the only just rate of capital taxation is 100 percent's and the only just profit rate zero,
2. justice demands that workers keep every single cent of what they produce as wages 
2. trailing the corporate polluters under “workers’ courts”
1. these would undoubtedly find them guilty of theft for their entire accumulated wealth and profits
2. the corporate polluters would then be locked up or executed 
3. the entire loot [profit] corporate polluters have stolen from workers, other poor people and the environment as profits would be returned to the people and completely redirected to achieving zero emissions in the absolute minimum possible time
3. completely abolishing profit and private ownership

nothing can be done to limit damage from climate change, let alone to limit its extent. This has long been documented by countless journals and magazines from Red Flag to Socialism Today to Liberation News to Organization Theory.