A return to the good ol' days?

Much of Australia is experiencing a what has been termed a 1-in-a-100 year (or 1000 year, in some cases) drought. Recent rains notwithstanding, the drought continues over most of the country.

Dr Hamish McGowan of University of Queensland has created a reconstruction of the climate for the past 40 000 years from peat samples taken in SE QLD. From these records, the past 5000 years have apparently been drier than the current worst drought on record...

The proxy record also indicates that the Southern Hemisphere is not isolated from past large-scale climate changes in the rest of the world

OK, so the climate of Australia has been worse in the past. It still begs the question of why these changes are happening now.