Two messages for Canberra:

Firstly, Australia does not have a problem with too much carbon dioxide going to the sky – we have a problem storing enough of the water coming from the sky.

Secondly, Australia does not have a shortage of wind and solar “farms” – we have a shortage of water, stock feed and low-cost electricity on real farms.

Politicians fritter our money on dubious “research”, climate propaganda, foreign adventures and handouts for trendy, vote-seeking green causes. But they have not built a serious water supply dam since the 1980’s, and the last big coal-fired power station was opened 11 years ago. For a country with a growing population, abundant supplies of coal and uranium, and a history of severe droughts, these are serious omissions.

The Snowy Mountain Scheme (opened nearly 50 years ago) was a visionary project that produced large volumes of low-cost water for irrigation plus reliable hydro-power for industry.

The new Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a fraud – it will produce no extra water and will be a net consumer of power. Its sole purpose is to try to plug the holes and fluctuations in electricity supply caused by a bi-partisan love affair with expensive green energy toys producing unreliable, intermittent electricity.

Cease this baseless war on carbon fuels. Carbon dioxide does not drive global warming – it is driven out of sea water by ocean warming.

Australia should cancel Snowy 2.0, withdraw from all Paris and Kyoto Climate Treaty obligations, dump the NEG “plans”, remove all green energy subsidies and start building some real power stations and real water supply dams and pipelines.

No matter what the weather does, we will need more cheap, reliable water and electricity.

[Compiled by Mike Williamson from Australian Government Statistics.]

More:

How to Drought Proof a Dry Continent:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/build-more-dams.pdf

Reliable Infrastructure before Green Grandstanding:
https://carbon-sense.com/2018/08/20/reliable-infrastructure-before-green-grandstanding/

The Idiocy of the Turnbull Energy Policy:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2018/08/18/turnbulls-new-approach-to-electricity-smoke-and-mirrors/

Time to Drain the Energy Swamp:
https://carbon-sense.com/2018/08/01/drain-the-swamp/

The Real Snowy Mountain Scheme:
https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/our-energy/hydro/the-scheme/

A Nosedive in dry Australia’s dam water capacity per head of population:
http://theconversation.com/dam-hard-water-storage-is-a-historic-headache-for-australia-33397

AFS – APOCALYPSE FATIGUE SYNDROME

Hon Keith DeLacy AM

As an inherently impressionable person I have been dealing with the coming apocalypse all my life. It started with the bible. The Book of Revelation in the New Testament vividly warned of impending doom, and many of the Hebrew prophets forecast the apocalypse.

Pope Sylvester II at the beginning of the millennium year 1000, predicted the Millennium Apocalypse, the end of the world. Riots occurred throughout Europe and pilgrims headed to Jerusalem seeking salvation.

And the Apocalypse was always associated with sin, it was deserved. “And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:40) If I had been thinking sinful thoughts, I trembled at night, dreaming of the fires of hell. There was no escape.

Thomas Malthus wrote an Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and became the preeminent father of doom. Unchecked population growth would lead to inevitable catastrophe – population growth was exponential while the growth in food supply was arithmetical.

We were impressionable kids, we grew up with Malthusiasm, waiting for doomsday. It was a compelling argument. Yet 200 years later, despite exponential population growth the world is so much wealthier and better fed. The Malthusian apocalypse was no better than Pope Sylvester’s.

Paul Erhlich became a cult figure in the 1970’s. Malthus’ inability to deliver on his population apocalypse proved no deterrence to Erhlich. He wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 forecasting that “sometime between 1970 and 85 the world will undergo vast famines, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
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Water is essential for all life, and happily it is abundant on our blue watery planet.

However, salty oceans cover 70% of Earth’s surface and contain 97% of Earth’s water. Salt water is great for ocean dwellers but not directly useful for most life on land. Another 2% of Earth’s water is tied up in ice caps, glaciers and permanent snow, leaving just 1% as land-based fresh water.

To sustain life on land, we need to conserve and make good use of this rare and elusive resource.

Luckily, our sun is a powerful nuclear-powered desalinisation plant. Every day, solar energy evaporates huge quantities of fresh water from the oceans. After a stop-off in the atmosphere, most of this water vapour is soon returned to earth as dew, rain, hail and snow – this is the great water cycle. Unfortunately about 70% of this precipitation falls directly back into the oceans and some is captured in frozen wastelands.

Much of the water that falls on land is collected in gullies, creeks and rivers and driven relentlessly by gravity back to the sea by the shortest possible route. Allowing this loss to happen is poor water management. The oceans are not short of water.

Some animals and plants have evolved techniques to maximise conservation of precious fresh water.

Some Australian frogs, on finding their water holes evaporating, will inflate their stomachs with water then bury themselves in a moist mud-walled cocoon to wait for the drought to break. Water buffalo and wild pigs make mud wallows to retain water in their private mud-baths, camels carry their own water supply and beavers build lots of dams.

Some plants have also evolved water saving techniques – bottle trees and desert cacti are filled with water, thirsty humans can even get a drink from the roots and trunks of some eucalypts and many plants produce drought/fire resistant seeds.

Every such natural water conservation or drought-proofing behaviour brings benefits for all surrounding plants and animals.

People have long recognised the importance of conserving fresh water – early settlers built their homes near the best waterholes on the creek and every homestead and shed had its corrugated iron tanks. Graziers built dams and weirs to retain surface water for stock (and fence-crashing wildlife), used contour ripping and good pasture management to retain moisture in soils, and drilled bores to get underground water. And sensible rules have evolved to protect the water rights of down-stream residents.

In some snow-fed rivers like the Nile, floods are generally a reliable and predictable annual event. For millennia the Nile delivered water and silt fertiliser to the farmers on the flood plains in Lower Egypt. The massive High Aswan Dam may have done more harm than good – it certainly did great harm to the farmers and land down-stream by stealing the silt and the water that supported the productivity of farms that have fed millions since Roman times. The value of the electricity generated by the dam probably does not compensate for these losses.

But in Australia, rainfall is usually a boom and bust affair. Much fresh water is delivered to the land surface suddenly in cyclones, storms and rain depressions. But “The Wet” is always followed by “The Dry”, and droughts and floods are normal climatic events. People who fail to store some of the flood must put up with the drought.

Read more, as well as:

• Trickery and Puffery in Climate Spending Claims
• Professor Ian Plimer in Westminster

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/build-more-dams.pdf [PDF, 170 KB]

Tags: Water, dams, irrigation, desalinisation, Ian Plimer, Heaven and Hell, climate industry spending, slush funds.