Talk:1983 Melbourne dust storm

Something Missing?
How come there is no reference in this article to the likelihood or possibility that the environmental circumstances for the Melbourne dust storm were anthropogenic in origin? There was no reference to the 1983 Australian dust storm originating from human land management practices or the lack thereof, either. What gives? Is this just not an option in the Australian mindset? Stevenmitchell (talk) 04:44, 29 September 2009 (UTC)


 * That's a fair question. I was "there". I was standing beside the person who took what are now regularly seen as the official Australian Bureau of Meteorology photos of that storm. Most of the Wikipedia article is extracted directly from the Bureau's web published material. So inevitably it has a weather oriented emphasis. And that weather would seem to be largely independent of human influences. But I guess it's reasonable enough to say that the quantity of dust involved was affected by human activity. The area of dry, cleared land, which provides the dust for such a storm, is primarily a human creation. Hard to write about about it though, apart from in a very general sense. HiLo48 (talk) 00:22, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Naming Problems
Please see a comment I have made in Talk: 2009 Australian dust storm re the name of this and a similar article. (See The Arrogance of the Title.)HiLo48 (talk) 04:43, 13 November 2009 (UTC)