Australian agriculture has operated successfully in one of the world's most hostile environments for two centuries. However, climate change is posing serious challenges to its ongoing success. Determining what might constitute dangerous climate change for Australian agriculture is not an easy task, as most climate-related risks are associated with changes in the highly uncertain hydrological cycle rather than directly to more predictable changes in temperature. In addition, the adaptive capacity of Australian producers is generally high, as they have had to cope with a highly variable climate in which periodic, severe droughts are the norm. As the underlying global trends in climate interact with the continent's patterns of natural variability, producers can generally deal with gradual changes in climate but are most concerned about high rates of change in regional and local climates and with abrupt, unexpected shifts in climate patterns. Perhaps the best indicator of dangerous climate change for Australian agriculture is the persistence, or not, of the drying trends in many of the Country's most productive regions and the strength of the linkage between these trends and global climate change.
A trend toward increasing use in geographical research of methods and concepts developed and tested in other social sciences seems likely to provide new insights into the effects of weather and climate on human behavior. Psychological reactions of a sample of Great Plains wheat farmers to the threat of a sudden storm are examined by means of a variant of the Thematic Apperception Test. The pictured situation is assessed as an unpredictable environmental press potentially in opposition to the inner need to achieve. The primary reaction to the threat is the mobilization of one's own resources towards rational, task-oriented action. However, uncertainty remains and this is reflected in a subsidiary theme in which attempts to alleviate anxiety are made by the essentially religious appeal to transcendental powers to lessen or stay the environmental threat. It is suggested that the TAT could prove useful for measuring many aspects of the man-environment ality.HE effect of environment on human behav-
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