Elaine Meinel Supkis
The drought in Australia is getting worse and now they must do water rationing. Western European culture is a very, very water-intensive life-style. People don't like rationing anything but Nature is relentless. Australia's problems are beginning in the USA too. People living in arid climates as if they are in London is part of the problem.
Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought - heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia yields 40 per cent of the country's agricultural produce. But the two rivers that feed the region are so pitifully low that there will soon be only enough water for drinking supplies. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that is only just starting to wake up to the severity of the position.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, a hardened climate-change sceptic, delivered dire tidings to the nation's farmers yesterday. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will die, along with livestock.
Tempers flared Thursday on Parliament Hill as Prime Minister Stephen Harper used a new report that warned of skyrocketing energy prices and a crippling recession to justify his decision to walk away from Canada’s international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.While opposition parties and environmentalists called it bogus and irresponsible fear-mongering, the Conservatives argued the report, paid for by taxpayers and verified by five independent economists, proved Canada would be hard-pressed to close the gap between its current pollution levels and its commitment from the 1997 climate change agreement signed by the previous Liberal government.
“The real issue here is whether any of the opposition parties have the guts to face reality,” Harper said in the Commons.
Facing reality? It seems to me, the more 'power' one has, the less one has to face any sort of reality. The problem with Nature's realities is, She has to be faced or we die. In the case of global warming, we know very little except what we can piece together based on the geological record. What we do know is that the earth goes through some very sudden changes periodically.
The weather can shift much faster than land masses. Australia is the fastest moving plate on earth and it is travelling northwards at a relatively good clip, far faster than North America is moving westards, for example. The climate of Australia has moved from very cold to cool, dampness then temperate zone and now is moving to the equator and unlike the jungle-covered island chains that surround Australia's north and western flanks, Australia is a large landmass and is getting drier and drier as it chugs along, heading towards Alaska.
Of course, all it takes is a small shift in sea water temperatures to radically change rainfall amounts.
From Nebuchanezzar Woolly: Friday, February 09, 2007
The Murray-Darling summit ended yesterday in deadlock with the States failing to agree with the Federal Government's $10 billion plan to take control of Australia’s largest river system. Prime Minister John Howard and the premiers of NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia met in Canberra to discuss the proposal. The parties claimed they had made progress and plan to meet again on 23 February in order to hammer out a compromise.The Prime Minister's water plan includes $3 billion to help farmers in unviable areas get out of the industry. It will also buy back water licences and return that water to the environment. The Government has also allocated $6 billion for improving irrigation technology, with the water saved being shared equally between growers and the environment. A new Murray-Darling basin authority would be created to oversee the river systems and the aquifers that lie beneath it. The authority would have five full-time Government-appointed commissioners who would report to the Federal Environment Minister. But the plan is contingent on the four Murray-Darling basin states (Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia) agreeing to transfer most of their powers to the commonwealth.
The Israelis, when they set out to reproduce European temperate agriculture in Palestine which had, for many centuries, a stable agricultural industry of olive trees, date palms, sheep grazing and other semi-arid species, they irrigated the Holy Lands and claimed they were better stewards.
They also brought in modern plumbing and the average Jewish colonist from the USA and Europe today uses ten times the water the natives use. The land that was irrigated is going bad and water is very scarce and the Jordan is no longer a river but a thin sewage stream and the Dead Sea is dying.
Egypt and the Mesopotamian valleys both were able to grow agricultural wheats and cotton and such due to the regular floods washing the land clean and depositing fresh soil. Now that rivers are dammed, this is no longer true so the minerals in water interact with the dessicated soils to produce caliche which is lime-rock that is nearly impossible to break up except with a steel pickaxe. Or worse, salts leech upwards and infiltrate the topsoils.
Australia has been dominated by people who came from the very wet culture of Ireland and Scotland. This is why there are lots of sheep and cattle in Australia now. The humans who populated the continent since the last Ice Age or about 50,000+ years ago were relatively few and far between unlike the humans that entered North and South America at about the same time frame. Namely, Australia is not a rich biozone like say, the Great Plains of North America with its giant herds of Big Game like Mastadons, grizzly bears, bison and giant sloths, etc. Whatever moderate sized game there was disappeared rapidly due to climate change when things warmed up again and of course, Australia has been moving to the equator for quite a while.
The only large game was the rapid moving, aggressive kangaroos and the technology of the humans pretty much flat-lined during the last 30,000 years there for whatever reason, probably because of no competition from invaders until 1790.
It most emphatically is not the British Isles. Yet, humans being what they are, the invaders decided to use hook and crook to remold the environment to suit their cultural prejudices. And this is now causing a catastrophe.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has just released a report entitled ‘World’s Top 10 River’s at Risk’.Australia’s Murray-Darling is included in the top 10. But it's two rivers, so maybe the title should be 'World's Top 11 River's at Risk'?
The report goes onto state that, “The Murray and Darling Rivers have great variability in year to year flows, and their ecology is driven by large floods covering their extensive flood plains and intervening dry periods.”
This may be the case for stretches of the Darling River, but the Murray is now a completely regulated system which, has even during this worst drought, been mostly full of water.
Anyway, this new report which has generated much publicity for WWF has identified the “key threat” to the Murray-Darling as “invasive species, especially from aquarium trade”.
There are some Aussies who genuinely think they can continue with their inappropriate use of water because, well, because they are used to their culture and don't want to live differently! This clashes with Nature who knows better. The choice is, to abuse the water until everything and everyone dies or to foresee the future and take sane measures to avoid this terrible impass.
Knowing people, changing so the future will be different is near impossible. We would much rather do as we will forever or until the sword of death chops our heads off.
The causes of the current drought, which began in 2002 but has been felt most acutely over the past six months, are complex. But few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier.Environmentalists point to the increasing frequency and severity of drought-causing El Niño weather patterns, blamed on global warming. They also note Australia's role in poisoning the Earth's atmosphere. Australians are among the world's biggest per-capita energy consumers, and among the top producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Despite that, the country is one of only two industrialised nations - the United States being the other - that have refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The governments argue that to do so would harm their economies.
No one wants to stop the party. We wish to do anything we want and get unruly when asked to stop. So it is with Australia, not that America, the world's WORST polluters of CO2 and abusers of water, can point any fingers! The oddity of global warming is, as the ice melts in the far north and south, this adds moisture to the atmosphere but instead of sprinkling rain everywhere, it CONCENTRATES it thanks to the higher temperatures and the dynamics of heat exchanging between the oceans and the lands!
This means we can get tons of rain and snow in the Northeast and Canada while the Western half of the continent is bone dry. And I farm so I have noticed over the years how it is either all rain, non-stop, each storm bigger than the one before and then bang! No rain for half a year. This is terrible out here which is supposed to be temperate.
We just had over 7" of rain last week! Half of it was on and off snow. If it was all snow, and it nearly was, I would have had 7 FEET of snow here in April. This is too bizarre but is on par with global warming. Last year, there were zero hurricanes in the Gulf and Atlantic but this merely meant that in the fall and until last week, the moisture and warmth stored in the Gulf and Atlantic fed one mega-storm after another. I ran out of places to push snow and my snow plow broke while trying to save a neighbor whose wife had to go to the hospital.
What a nightmare it was. Meanwhile, no rain for Australia. Not so much as a drop. In Asia, they had huge floods even this last week and we expect epic typhoons this fall. So why do the people of Australia and the USA refuse to sign the Kyoto Accords? Industry? Pray tell, how are we going to have biofuels or industries if we have deserts instead of green fields?
A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue.Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West's quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.
In Yuma, Arizona, U.S. officials have restarted an idled desalination plant, long seen as a white elephant from a bygone era, partly in the hope of purifying salty underground water for neighboring towns.
The scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had.
I lived my childhood in the Tucson desert. There was this terrible drought that lasted for over a century back about 800 years ago. The Southwest was filled with Anazai communities which practiced farming and irrigation.
As the drought worsened, they had a total collapse of their culture and population. Huge numbers of them died in terrible ways, even cannibalism. I used to wander in the desert and found traces of these poor people: abandoned grinding stones, broken pottery with beautiful artwork. The rings of stone marking their hogans. It filled me with sadness, seeing all the tools and treasures they dropped or lost.
The survivors lived with the desert. They ate catus fruit, seeds and beans as well as squash and other things, even corn. But they never had anything approaching the pre-drought populations that built cities which were abandoned in the bitter end.
This is why we must learn from history. We can't make a climate out of thin air especially since we changed the chemistry of the air. We have to look into the future and understand, the oceans can and will rise suddenly if Greenland and Antarctica both suddenly drop their ice sheets during a solar flare event or we could tip into an ice age if my neck of the woods gets one 7' snow storm after another during May. A very real possibility.
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