This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor. Jeremy Zakus joins from

Sydney, Australia, New South Wales, watching El Nino and the weather pattern. We don't know whether

this is consistent year after year. We don't

know whether this is climate change. However right now it is cold and wet and

Jeremy tells me there's been no relief for weeks and weeks. Jeremy, did you have a wet weekend

this week and is this unusual to have five or six wet cold weekends in a row in Australian winter. Good evening to you.

Good day, John. Well, I'm proud to announce we only just side-swapped having a cold and wet weekend,

but I can say that the last half of the week here in Sydney was wet it was cold and it was

absolutely miserable it was cold to the point where when you went outside in the

mornings we actually had a sheen of frozen ice all over the ground which here in

southern Sydney is very very unusual but by Friday night all the rain blew out so

Saturday morning we had a beautiful day cold but beautiful and

today being Sunday we're having another clear and cold and crisp but no rain day

so we're expecting rain again maybe in the next couple of days, but enjoying the clear weather nonetheless.

However, it is unusual.

We've had much rain over the last six weeks.

And normally in Australia, what happens with the winter is that you do have rain bans you have rain showers here

especially in Sydney that come in for a couple of days during a week then disappear and

by and large a lot of the winters tend to be mostly rain free they tend to be

cool and a little bit of humidity but not too bad but what we've seen

over the last six weeks is phenomenal we've seen large rain bands which have been

dropping inches and inches of rain creating floods which we traditionally don't get here in Sydney that often during the winter time because our estuaries, our water systems are built to handle the large volumes of rain, and even Warre Gamba Dam, which is our main water

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