Australia's Department of Climate Change

Yes, you read that right. Under the new leadership of a liberal government, Australia has jumped well ahead of the U.S. in establishing a government entity focused on climate change. Perhaps not surprising, given the exceptional drought that has afflicted a large area of the continent, but leaving me wondering, "What about the Southeastern U.S.? What about the Southwest? Don't we deserve such a department at the federal level, too?"

Using the domain "greenhouse.gov.au" the Department of Climate Change provides, through its Web site, consideration of agriculture, business and industry, community and household, emissions monitoring, energy, impacts and adaptation, national resources and science.

Under Impacts and Adaptation, the site includes Projections - Future Climate Changes, which includes a section on how projections are currently done, regional projections for Australia, and an "online projections tool" called Ozclim.net, which allows the user to "generate your own climate change projections using different emissions scenarios and the outputs of various global climate models (GCMs)."