I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well watered place.
We grow rice and cotton, for gods' sakes, in some of the most arid land there is. We water lawns, and use massive amounts of water in industries and domestically. We now use five times as much water as we did back in the 1980s, in dishwashers, showers, swimming pools and toilets. So what do we do? Easy.
Build more dams. No matter who you ride roughshod over. And build them where there is almost no rain anyway, and where you can threaten the existence of the Queensland lungfish, one of six species of lungfishes left.
Australia has a maximum carrying capacity, like all ecosystems, but it is more fragile than most, and more susceptible to droughts. We have a cycle of drought and reasonable rains that take about 20 years, but every century or so there is a major dry. The last one forced the retreat of the cattle industry in South Australia, leaving scores of empty homesteads.
But we have not learned. We simply let gigalitres of water run into creeks and drains from rainfall at the coast. No attempts are made to retain runoff in retention basins or artificial wetlands. We do not recycle water. We do not capture rainwater in tanks. We continue to overuse water, and worse, we continue to expect our population to grow. In my opinion, we exceeded the average carrying capacity of this continent about 20 years ago, and as things get worse, and they will due to global warming, which is already interfering with the monsoon cycle in the north, we may very well get to the point where we have insufficient water to maintain the population, let alone meet our agricultural targets.
And the biodiversity of Australia? Well that is going to have to be sacrificed, isn't it? What's the value of a bloody fish, anyway?
The Queensland lungfish is a survivor of a genus, and possibly the same species, that is unchanged for at least 100 million years, which would make it the oldest species on the planet. As such it is a close relative of the earliest vertebrate to live on land, and has a lot to teach us about our evolution. But even were it just another bloody fish, we cannot permit it to be threatened. For if it is threatened, so are all the other endemic species of plants and animals in that area, and we will end up with a depauperate ecology, and that will affect us.
So, to my premier, I say - before you build this dam, consider all the other things we can do, however politically unpopular. To the Australian PM, I say, you should have done something when you first took office. It's been obvious for that long that we cannot continue to waste water. Banning rice and cotton would be a good start. And to all politicians, take science seriously! If you think the world will conform to your political goals, think again.
Update: The Qld government has rejected a population cap because it would hurt the economy, which of course a major lack of drinking water won't. And PM John Howard's solution? Pray for rain. Because God has so delivered in the past...
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Appalling, and so like our American West where we grow things that require a lot of water, including cotton.
There is a saying that "water flows uphill to money" and it is true, but unfortunately, it is federal money. In effect, the dams and aquaducts and industrial wells draining fossil water are a massive government subsidy for agriculture. Let the cotton farmers build their own dams, while answering all environmental regulations, if they can do that and still make a profit selling their fibres; otherwise, grow hemp. And I have heard that rice grows well in regions with a lot of rainfall; perhaps it would be cheaper to buy rice from those places.
I hope to see a real and live lungfish before it's too late. There should be more scientists in government nowadays.
As I see it, most of these problems resolve to a question of energy. You need to get fresh water and move it from where it is to where it isn't. You have plenty of sunlight and wind, hence solar- and, to a lesser extent, wind-powered desalination plants and pumping stations.
Someone else can do the math to see if it would actually work. 8-)
Great post, John. Water issues are only now beginning to appear in the MSM even though they involve pretty much every region in the world. Lester Brown writes about it repeatedly.
Ian, "throw energy at it" -- even, as you suggest, renewable energy -- goes no where. We will be quite hard pressed merely to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels to any significant degree just for current energy needs. See here for what the numbers look like in the USA.
In a nutshell: we have increasing population, increasing consumption, and the consequent increase in fossil fuel use and increasing demand for water all in the face of global warming and water shortages. Finally this is being acknowledged (a little bit) as a national security issue and debated in the UN Security Council.
As John writes: "Australia has a maximum carrying capacity, like all ecosystems, but it is more fragile than most, and more susceptible to droughts." We humans have become accustomed to thinking technology can always raise the maximum carrying capacity limit. It's simply not the case as is being demonstrated in every corner of the world today. I think this is one of the hard truths we get from science that's very hard to accept.
There are also endemic side-necked turtles in those rivers.
You might be interested in Andrew Bartlett's water issues blog page at http://www.andrewbartlett.com/blog/?cat=32.