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  • From: Rob Wilson <robwilson5095@yahoo.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Climate Change, Fire and Drought in Australia
  • Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:29:27 -0800 (PST)

 
The debate about climate change is far from over.
 
 
 
 
 
There are two major immediate climate change related catastrophes that area happening here in Australia right now.
 
Northern Queensland experiences monsoonal weather in summer. This summer the cyclonic activity has been extreme.Two thirds of Queensland area under unprecedented floods. There has been massive damage to infrastructure, housing  and business. Thankfully there has been little loss of human life.
 
The worst fires in history are underway in Victoria (where I live).  The body count exceeds 200 at the moment but more charred remains are being found. Over two thousand people have become homeless.
 
It is quite normal for fires to erupt in summer. Most Australian flora and fires coexist in harmony. In fact many Australian plants need fire to regenerate. However the fires are becoming more frequent and more intense. Massive fires usually start when we get very high temperatures and northerly winds. These fires erupted on exceptionally hot days two weeks ago. The Australian Weather Bureau announced on the day before the main blazes started that the temperature at 1500 meters above sea level was 30 degrees C (86 F). This is highly unusual.
 
Some of these fires are still out of control. A cool change in the weather and an unusual change in the weather has pushed the fires towards other towns and is devastating a National Park. The cool change has give firefighters some respite. But there is fear that the weather will heat up and cause more devastation. We're not out of the burning woods yet.
 
Most fires in Australia are started by lighting strikes. I understand that some of the fires were caused in this way. Some by arsonists. But most damage was caused by faulty power lines not being able to stand the extreme temperatures and wind.
 
There has been much finger pointing about the cause and severity of these fires. Undoubtedly the severity of the fires and floods has been caused by climate change.
 
Both the government and opposition have been reluctant to accept climate change as reality. The main bugbear is coal. Huge amounts of black coal are exported and nearly all Victoria's electricity is generated by the burning of brown coal.
 
The Murray Darling river system  is in dire shape but not soley to climate change. The Darling river is a major tributary of the Murray it runs south from Queensland through New South Wales and joins the Murray at the Victorian boarder then flows through South Australia and enters the ocean via a now degraded Coorong lake system.
 
  Huge dams line the route of the upper Darling. The river is being sucked dry to grow massive acreages of cotton and canola (much of it GM).. These crops should not be grown in this region.
The Murray suffers a similar fate. Its flow is interrupted by a series of dams and its water is over used for irrigation.
 
There have been some positive remedial steps by the government. One of them is they have initiated a water buyback scheme form some of the larger irrigators in the upper Darling in Queensland. Too little so far.. This was in response to the public out cry to the proposal to flood the entrance lakes with sea water.
 
The climate change debate is far from over in Australia. It is about to erupt with all the fury of the raging fires and floods.
 
The genetically modified debate also goes on. East Gippsland  Shire Council (the area I live in) has recently declared East Gippsland GM free.
 
Regards
Rob Wilson
 
 
 
 


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  • [Livingontheland] Climate Change, Fire and Drought in Australia, Rob Wilson, 02/17/2009

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