New Scientist: DEFORESTATION by European settlers may be to blame for making Australia’s drought longer, hotter and dryer than it would be otherwise. The “big dry”, Australia’s 11-year drought, has been blamed on greenhouse gases and natural variability. To see if deforestation played a part, Clive McAlpine of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and colleagues used a climate model to simulate Australian conditions from the 1950s to 2003. They then compared the impact of today’s fragmented …