Will Australia burn down before it dries up and blows away?

Maybe, but it's not going to happen in the next few days, so I'll worry about that later.

My bit isn't going to do either , we've had over two feet (note conversion from metric for our measurement-challenged friends) of rain in the last few days.

On the positive side my recently planted kaffir lime has buckets of growth after just hanging in there for three months.

As the oldest continent we believe age and cunning will defeat the youth and enthusiasm of you young upstart continents.

Life is rough all over . . . right now, according to the CBC, the temperature is -21 degrees, with a wind chill factor of -27 degrees (that's in centigrade, for our measurement challenged friends).

I hope Cherrie and her folks get through this unscathed, without loss of either health or property.
My goal here was to start a conversation about the situation in Australia which for some odd reason seems completely missing from the American press. In conversations here about climate change, no one mentions Australia despite the fact that the Big Dry has been going on now for seven years and counting.
Set is right about the brush fires near LA, the people there say they have hope when they see the mudslides putting out all the fires. Meh

The question is whether Australia can continue to grow while its water supplies disappear.
The other question is is any other place, I'm looking at you, Texas, learning from the experience Oz is going through.??

Joe(Can a continent survive on de-salenated water?)Nation

Hey joe, where you goin' with that gun.... Oops wrong wrong thread

Thanks for your concern, but if its any consolation the last drought ended a couple of years ago and we've been in el nina since. But like a compadre said previously we've long been a dry continent. The monsoon has come a bit late this year making conditions in the south more fire prone, especially since el nina boosted vegetation growth.

I think you mentioned we were building desalination plants all over the place, but that's not actually true, in fact the last one, built in Brisbanea few years ago, was seen as a white elephant in the last state election which tossed out the incumbent. Here's the list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_desalination_plants_in_Australia
Three built, three under construction.

Not to say that the need won't arise again.

The beauty of climate change is its a dice roll that we can't predict Maybe well get wetter, maybe the gulf stream will change and Britain will look like Iceland..

Adelaide has one.....it's mothballed for now, as the drought ended, but it has pretty major capacity.

Joe, Hinge is correct in that we don't really know....but the predictions are mainly for more extreme weather. This suggests worse droughts but also more extreme storms with heavy rainfall. The mega fires appear to be coming from higher temperatures plus more people living in bush land plus inadequate land care.

You mentioned earlier that if sea levels rise, you'd have an inland sea. Sea level rises could submerge Florida, the south coasts of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas, too.

But on CBC tonight, i heard a much more striking effect of warming. Last year, it began to get warm in March. We'd have a significant thaw, then winter would clamp down again, then another thaw, then more winter, and so on. In Ontario, the apple crop is worth $100,000,000 and more a year. Last year, the trees began to bud, but most of the blossoms ended by dying in the bud. More than 80% of the apple harvest was lost this last summer--$80,000,000 or more.

Yep...that sort of stuff is happening everywhere.

Well, not re thaws in Oz, generally speaking, but with weather that ruins crops.

i am told that Edward's Apple Orchard of Popular Grove Il where my family has gone most every year since the mid 60's had less than 20% normal harvest because of drought. Washington's crop was great but prices have shot up here as our apples backfill other areas. I hate to think what mid westerners are paying right now!

That sort of thing is troublesome because of the capitalism-based food distribution system. Governments need to stockpile some basic food items (rive/other grains) which can be stored safely for long periods of time. Your basic agri-business investor doesn't give a rat's ass if you starve, only if you are willing and able to pay higher prices. I'm sure you'll recall the rice "shortage" of a few years ago. Climate has changed again and again over the centuries, that we know--North Africa was once the granary of Rome, and wine grapes were grown in Britannia. A little more effective planning and action is worth a whole decade's worth of conferences full of hand-wringing and accusations.

The countries with the best grasp of how and where climate change will occur will have the best chance of being economically viable. Crops will have to be changed, those apple trees may have to be replanted 100 miles farther North, winter wheat might end up being grown all year or not at all.
The most troubling thing to me in the USA is our continuing huge reliance on Corn as both animal feed and in hundreds of "food products" as sugar, syrup and filler.
Right now we have hundreds of thousands of acres of corn which could not survive in any other fields because of the tons of fertilizer and anti-weed **** poured on them.
I'm glad to hear from our friends in Oz that things are not quite as dire as I thought, (though keep those water plants well lubed as a cautionary move.)

It's appalling to me that, despite our best technology, we don't have better predictive models for the weather than we did when the Farmer's Almanac was published the first time.

Joe(I am going to continue to watch)Nation

Well, there are currently floods in Queensland....so rain doesn't seem to be a technical problem.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2013/01/26/08/00/qld-residents-prepare-for-storm-tides

Yes...
what I can't figure out is why Antarctica doesn't fall off and go spinning away like a frizzbee?

Joe(whee)Nation

It's stuck on by the ice.

Oh. that makes sense.
Are the penguins stuck to the ice or is it some kind of magnetic force that keeps them on.?

I have always wondered how a tiny magnet could be so much stronger than gravity. Hold a magnet over a paper clip and the force of gravity cannot hold it to the table.

Joe(I have a cat's head shaped like a heart stuck to my refrigerator)Nation

Jaazzus, mini-tornadoes and floods......no balls of **** floating in from the sea.???

Joe(boulder sized)Nation

It's actually an optical illusion. Penguins are not really flightless; they just fly right next to the ice ceiling.

So..

when I was considering moving to New Mexico, a local architect friend in northern california warned me about global warming (which I had indeed heard of and was concerned about, but, y'know, I'm older and that wasn't one of my bigger concerns re the move for me personally), so I tossed that off, I hope not in a rude manner.

Nuts - she was right. Lots of sturm and drang about water here, especially now, when the ice pack on the Sandias, such as it is, is very dry. Also, of course, fire, but I'm used to fire, being from west Los Angeles. I'm no statistics person re how anything has changed here over what amounts of time.

My back walkway is damp, hey, moisture!

One of the reasons I like Australia from afar, besides liking the people on a2k from there, is that I recognize a lot of the land and water situations, plus, the plants.


Hinge - there is El Nino and La Nina - and I'm not clear on which you were talking about.