Megalania

More rain falls per head of population in Australia only because the continent is sparcely populated but its still the second driest in the world after Antarctica.

Southern Australia could become even drier and more effort will be required to husband water for an increasingly "thirsty" population.

Drought Vortex

bondipom

I saw the program last night. Permanent sunny skies and bush fires here we go.

Those wanting swimming pools soon won't be allowed to have the water.

podgypossum

That is an interesting point you make about swimming pools. Does Adelaide and surrounding areas already have restritions on water for pools? And are new pools allowed to be installed? We were considering buying a home and installing one, but if the water is restricted, there wouldnt be much point!!

Megalania

SCOPE AND LEVELS OF RESTRICTIONS

welshpom

If you look at the real-estate pages (on the net) you won't see many SA homes with pools. There are some, but not many.

If you have the space you could always throw money at the problem - buy a few giant rainwater tanks and use them to top up a pool. Catch the rain off of the roofing on your propery in the winter and then use it for the pool in the summer.

I might do this when I get around to building a house of my own. It'll be in an area without mains-water, so watertanks will be a must anyway.

Lots of houses use rainwater tanks for their tapwater outside of the metro areas. If the tanks run dry you can buy bore-water to be delivered by truck to top up the tanks.

Being self-sufficient in water and electricity is an option out here.

There's a business opportunity down here at the Murray Mouth for a mad scientist. The lake system at the mouth is supposed to lose 500m gallons of water a day through evaporation. Stick a big greenhouse over a section of the lake and I reckon you could capture enough pure H2O through evaporation and condensation to make a few bucks in the long term.

kaleb777

Due to the drought in QLD, the Gold Coast nearly ran out of water. They stopped people washing cars and watering lawns and even made it compulsory to unhook hoses. They turned off the beach showers. Byron Bay told tourists to bring water with them. Brisbane started paying a rebate for ratepayers who installed rainwater tanks. It's a good idea to get a tank even if it's small because you pay for every drop of water you use in SEQ.

You can get systems installed that purify all the water you use including toilet water and recycles it for use on the yard. A lot of people run a hose from their washing machine out the laudry window to be used on non-native tees and bushes that may struggle in drought. It's not technically permitted but the ground just swallows up the water so there is no fear of runoff. The washing poweder fertilises the trees too.

Wash your car on the lawn if you want to water your lawn. almost no one bothers though because you must water every day for a long time to maintain a green lawn. Green lawns are sort of seen as a sign of a person paying for a lot of water that is wasted. Lawns go green after one good summer storm so why bother? It doesn't ever "die".

The best thing is to think of water as something that you should try to get as much use out of. Wash clothes then use it to water plants. A friend of mine has a tank filled from upstairs shower water that fills the cistern of a downstairs toilet. The overflow goes into the garden.

You should pretty much forget about plants that need constant watering. Once bushes or trees are established with watering, they should not need to be watered all the time. If something dies - too bad. Replace it with a native or exotic (Sth African plants do well) that can survive. Acacias are awesome. They could probably survive on the moon. Leptospernim? (tee trees) do well too. Calistemon (bottle brushes) are slower growing but will not die in drought. Most Aussie plants just stop growing in drought but they never die.

Finally, Channel 9 had a piece on the drought tonight and as usual they had a set of greenie "experts" claiming the drought is a sign of a permanent development (based on a two year trend!) and they blamed it entirely on humans using fossil fuels. The fact that Australia had a drought a few years after the first fleet arrived hundreds of years ago and have suffered regular droughts since then, as well as the fact that Australian plants have evolved for a lack of water over millions of years, as well as the fact that global temperatures have always changed even before humans started sriving cars is meaningless to these green fruitcakes. They never let facts get in the way of their ideology or obsession with preventing people from using energy.

Speaking of energy - get solar hot water in Australia for free *boiling* hot water!

mr mover

when you live under these ,conditions fo most of your life you learn to adapt, we have 3 rain water tanks which ,have a capacity of 30,000 litres , our pool holds 60,000litres , we have a cover over the pool which not only keeps the pool clean over winter, but collects rain water ,which we pump into the pool,and maintain the level over winter, the average suburban home in Adelaide, sheds 75,000 litres of water every winter,which generally flows out to sea ,unless you have the intelligence to save it......... MM

Megalania

Lots you can do with native plants, remember to trim them occassionally.

A relatively new notion is that the reduced ozone concentration, a well documented phenomenon, is the cause of the equally well documented reduction of temperature over the Antarctic.

The theory is that the increased temperature difference between the tropics and South Pole results in the southern temperate climate zone shifting south. This causes the rain bringing cold changes on the southern edge of the temperate zone to shift further south. The result being less rain over southern Australia.

The implied mechanism, a colder upper atmosphere due to ozone depletion, is due to artificial chlorine and bromine compounds in the Antarctic upper atmosphere not carbon dioxide.

kaleb777

If that's the case then you would expect the ITCZ to move south too bringing far more rain to northern Australia yet this isn't happening. I don't see how increased UV due to a thinning ozone layer would result in cooling anyway, yet the science does show that ice in Antarctica is certainly thickening in places. I think what's becoming clear is that there are many influences on global weather and temperatures and that blaming weather changes on one cause - human emissions - is nothing but junk science. Blaming global temperature increases (which aren't global anyway) on human emission increases and ignoring all other factors is like blaming the increase in western obesity on the coresponding increase in the production of post cards.

Megalania

So the ozone hole is due entirely to natural causes? I am certain that your non-junk scientific proof would be of enormous interest to many people.

Climate change researchers not aware of weather?

I agree that the strengthened Antarctic Vortex theory is speculative - a hypothesis not proven. Sounds interesting to me and I don't mind supporting the researchers who generated and who will test the hypothesis. Were it fact but neither hypothesized nor measured, would you be satisfied?

kaleb777

Well since most of the CFCs were created in the northern hemisphere, the fact that the hole appeared over the southern hemisphere points to some other or auxilliary cause. There is speculation that the ozone hole is natural and cyclic and has something to do with the chloride in sea spray reacting with sunlight. The hole appears in summer I believe, and disappears when Antarctica is in darkness.

If you ask any climatologist to prove humans have an influence on global temperatures they won't be able to. It's like trying to determine how much carbon taken in by trees comes from human respiration. It's impossible. All they can do is guess based on what they think is happening, but increasingly the "scientists" are ignoring facts that don't fit into what they expected. There are ice core samples from antarctica that show that the planet once had far higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and these core samples corespond to times in history when the planet was teeming with life yet these facts have been ignored and considered to be anomolous since scientists expected pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels to be optimum and therefore the level to which we should be aiming. Any biologist will tell you that higher atmospheric CO2 levels result in more life - more plant life (plants grow faster with less water) and more animal life that results. This fact is also ignored by the global warming "religion". Another fact ignored by the global warming "scientists" is that when graphs of global temperatures are set against solar radiation cycles and CO2 levels it is the solar cycles that most closely corespond with global temperatures, which makes more sense to most people. The global warming theory is junk science because it ignores any possible cause except human emissions. Have you ever wondered why such important factors as solar cycles, Earth orbit and volcanic activity are totally ignored in the theory? The theory doesn't stand up under any scrutiny at all yet it has widespread supprt from green groups and governments who are eager to tax energy based on a lie or at least a theory that ignores all of the possible causes but one.

I don't know about you but I think this so called theory will soon be seen as the biggest scam in world history and proof of how gullible most people are.

Megalania

Healthy skepticism on the effects of carbon dioxide, indeed there do appear to have been times of much higher concentrations. However, skeptisism is not evidence or the lack of evidence.

Substantial mixing of the atmosphere between the north and south hemispheres occurs. When Mount Pinatubo blew up, in Aus we had many beautiful sunsets, presumably due to dust in the southern hemisphere. CFCs seem to be at similar concentrations in north and south.

Rainfall in S. Aus (Perth, Adelaide, Melb, Hobart) is highly dependent on cool changes which "clip" the south of Aus. A relatively small movement further south of these changes would have a large effect on rainfall. It has been said that makes rainfall in S. Aus one of the most senstive to climate change in the world.

Rainfall has dropped ~30% over S.W. WA over ~30 years, and approx the same over Vic in the last 10 years. Whether it is due to purely natural variation or due to humand activities, knowing more about causes of rainfall should help Aussies plan to cope with variability better.

Could stand swapping the current drought for a good flood at the moment.

welshpom

First off, I'm no expert on the subject. Did you see the dicumentary on UK TV last year about CO2 levels and the effect it is having on the Amazon rainforest ?.

The Amazon is a mature forest, and by definition it should not be growing, however when measured it has been found that the treeline is increasing and that's due to the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Ok, so the rainforest is getting taller, so what ?. The problem is that the Amazon is a giant CO2 storage tank, what humans are producing is getting stored in rainforests. Now if nothing changes then there's a nice balance, but one good drought in the Amazon region will kill off billions of trees and when the trees die, all their CO2 is freed into the atmosphere, either by rotting or burning.

The documentary suggested that this was just a matter of "when" and not "if".

At the moment the extra CO2 is (mostly) getting absorbed, the problems will show themselves once the absorbed CO2 is released in a short timeframe.

Whatever the cause, temperatures are rising and droughts will become more common in places where they haven't been evident for thousands of years. Release the CO2 from the rainforests and the planet will get hotter faster and there will be more droughts and more CO2.

kaleb777

I'm glad at least some people are showing more facts about CO2 rather than simply stating that since CO2 levels are increasing this MUST be the cause of every and all weather anomolies ignoring every other one of thousands of influences.

Another fact about trees and CO2 is that plants grow with less available water under higher CO2 levels. The deserts have been spreading even in places untouched by human influences. PErhaps the gradual removal of atmospheric CO2 has caused much of this and human liberation of trapped CO2 will halt it. Who knows? What I do know is that contrary to green claims, the effects of global warming will not be all bad. In fact it is expected the planet will become more humid and plant life will grow far better and quicker. It's also a mistake to assume that higher temperatures mean more droughts. Evidence suggests that a warmer planet will result in more clouds and more rain, not less. The driest place on the planet is the coldest while the hottest places are also often the wettest. Deserts occur in bands of about equal distances from the equator. The equator is wet and so is Europe and Nth America. The poles are dry and so are the latitudes where the Sahara , Gobi and SW USA/Mexican deserts occur. The Australian mainland lies in the dry band of the Southern Hemisphere between the wet equator and places like New Zealand and Tasmania. There are many factors that cause deserts but a more humid planet isn't one of them.

Another fact about CO2 is that it is the oceans, not forests, that remove most of the atmospheric carbon. A great deal of CO2 is converted to the shells of marine organisms which act as carbon sinks. There is evidence that marine diatoms are experiencing a population explosion possibly due to more available CO2 which they use to create their calcium carbonate shells. Once these organisms die their shells sink to the bottom of the oceans where the trapped carbon will eventually enter the vocanic cycle after the ocean floor is subducted millions of years from now. It's all part of the carbon cycle. I don't understand why green groups see an atmosphere lacking CO2 as being optimal for life on this planet. It's a very short sighted view of a cycle that humans are a part of. It also underestimates the systems in place that have always coped with episodes of increased vulcanism when atmospheric CO2 levels were more than triple what they are now.

tinaj

Some great ideas about recycling the water.

I take it you mustn't use too much soap in the shower if you are going to water your plants with it

Is the rain water clean enough to use in the pool then- I take it the chlorine or salt kills all the lurgies off or do you have to filter it first?