moneypenny20

It's not the same effect at all because the water in a fish tank isn't going anywhere whereas the oceans are all connected and there is simply not enough salt going back in to make that much difference. It is truly a drop in the ocean and at the end of the day if it's the difference between people and animals on the land living or a few fish in the ocean dying, I personally see no problem but that is just my opinion and I'm sure others will feel the fish are more important.

spartacus

HAve a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_r...s_in_Australia

RachelH

THanks for that!

leigh&ivan

Sorry, but salt is a heavy mineral, go get a glass, teaspoon of salt in, it sinks.
the salt from the desal plant is highly concentrated, so doesn't disperse as easliy. it settles in the local area,same as the residue you get when you have used mineral salts in your bath, over an extended period of time causing the desal plants to work harder, pulling more energy from the supply to get the same amount of water, it is better to sell off the concentrated salt to other areas of Industry, however its far easier to dump the waste right back into the Local area.

Jensen Healey

So, to put this in perspective, for every ton of freshwater produced by a desalination plant, how much solid residue is there? 1kg? 10kg? Is Oz really so short of land area that they can't find somewhere to put it without all the bleeding hearts ecologist greenies wailing into their organic beer?

nik04

not sure how much salt solid comes from desal, but when i kept tropical marine fish you need 1lb of salt (not table salt) for 10gal of water to get the correct salinty but there were other minerals in it aswell.
But as others have said if you dump the salt straight back into the sea it does not dispearse well, coral,fish and most sea animals are very sensative to changes in salinty. I supose they could always shit it to where the ice caps are melting to keep the old ocea conveyor going and avoid an ice age .
I am no ravin greeny, if i had my way the garden would be green concrete and the trees left in the forest where they should be .

Jensen Healey

Green concrete is soooo last year!

nik04

i'd put a blue rectangle in so i could say i had a pool

NedKelly

I suppose that sort of response is to be expected from a water melon. There have been worse droughts in the past and there will be worse droughts in the future. Kyoto is just an excuse for a bunch of pollies to go and eat lobster and drink fine wine whist negotiating a deal to continue pumping out CO2. Australias annual contribution to CO2 is about 10 days of Chinas output and China is building another 550 coal fired power stations over the next 10 years. Not that CO2 is cause of global warming anyway, it's that big ball of light in the sky and there is nothing you or anyone can do about it. But the idiot bleeding hearts ecologist greenies would have you believe anything that lowered our standard of living and had us eating pulses three times a day.

leigh&ivan

The big ball of light in the sky has always been there, we haven't got closer to it, it hasn't expanded in mass or gotten an hotter, so your point is mute about that.
Dense particles are causing the heat to stay within the atmosphere, the measurements taken on top of mountains state clearly its Co2.
I suppose you believe that there isn't a whole in the ozone layer, or if there is it was caused by magic particles from space, not excessive pumping out of CFc's.
I'm not a water melon, I've just dealt with the industry for a long time, know a bit about the science.
Interestingly if you know anything about the global warming debate, you'll know that the muppet who advised the bush administration, to debunk the GW and call it climate change, has now come out and said he was wrong and his science was wrong. Incidently he was then sacked by the berk in the whitehouse.

China wouldn't be able to build its coal fired stations if Australia stopped selling the coal to them.

I'm not a greenie, I drive a V6, petrol chugger, i could quite happily eat my own body weight in meat, I'm just aware of our environment and doing what I can to help.

JaneandJim

Here's an article I read in the Times a while ago, make of it what you will:

"So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars. "

There was a different article I read a few weeks ago about a university professor who's been mapping solar flare activity with weather patterns. I can't find it now though, but he reckons that if Australia doesn't get heavy rains in the next 6 months, based on current solar activity, then the effects of carbon emissions are much greater than previously thought. If we do get rain, however, that will show how little emissions are affecting us. We'll just have to wait and see if the rains come.

Don't you think the Chinese are clever enough to get their coal elsewhere if they can't get it from Australia?

Jane

Amazulu

The sad thing for Australia ia that the people here are on the verge of voting in a left-wing government who are going to decimate Australian industry if Garrett gets his way.

If they do, prepare for recession.

alicecat

It is coming anyway!!!

NedKelly

Is it?

JaneandJim

I'm not sure that will happen. People tend to vote out old governments rather than vote in new ones, (if that makes sense ) and I don't think Johnny has done anything bad enough to be voted out.

People here haven't forgotten that Kevin Rudd voted down water infrastructure measures years ago.

Jane