[Cabrone]

The water in Australia's biggest river is running so low and is so salty that the nation's fifth-largest city, Adelaide, is at risk of having to ship water in to its residents, politicians have warned.

Guardian

[kiwichick]

they have known about this for some time

they can use geothermal or wave or solar power
to desalinate water

of course the fundamental problem is people

[SeaGypsy]

Adelaide has been growing like mad for at least 2 decades; without addressing the inevitable water crisis. The water is foul. Has been for decades. It starts as the farm runnoff of Australia's main industrial agriculture patch/ the Murray Darling Basin/ it is teated and piped over the range to the City.
Adelaide is one of those places where it should be illegal to have a flushing toilet. The place is a friggin coastal desert; go into what's left of the hinterland forest and you see extremely highly adapted natives used to zero water for 6 months at a time.

[lowem]

Okay I know nothing about Adelaide so I went to look it up. According to wikipedia :

A sea water desalination plant capable of supplying half of Adelaide's water requirements (100GL per annum) is currently being planned, with construction expected to be completed by 2012. The provision of water services is by the government-owned SA Water.

Just wondering - how's that project coming along? Is 100GL/yr enough?

[SeaGypsy]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 680138.htm

$1.8 billion AUD + $45 million a year in ongoings? Na. 2012 is a pipe dream. I know Adelaide and it's politics I would add about 10 years to that estimate. Unless all the argy bargy is to railroad a non green powered desal plant. There is a lot of global warming awareness in Adelaide; the non green version would be political suicide. The green version is so expensive it is unlikely to ever really happen.

[JJ]

Adelaide has been growing like mad for at least 2 decades; without addressing the inevitable water crisis. The water is foul. Has been for decades. It starts as the farm runnoff of Australia's main industrial agriculture patch/ the Murray Darling Basin/ it is teated and piped over the range to the City.
Adelaide is one of those places where it should be illegal to have a flushing toilet. The place is a friggin coastal desert; go into what's left of the hinterland forest and you see extremely highly adapted natives used to zero water for 6 months at a time.

this could describe a number of major cities in the southwestern United States.

[Cabrone]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/08/2680138.htm

$1.8 billion AUD + $45 million a year in ongoings? Na. 2012 is a pipe dream. I know Adelaide and it's politics I would add about 10 years to that estimate. Unless all the argy bargy is to railroad a non green powered desal plant. There is a lot of global warming awareness in Adelaide; the non green version would be political suicide. The green version is so expensive it is unlikely to ever really happen.

Looking at the current situation won't 10 years in the future be too late?

If people start going without water then that I can see that plant up and running very quickly - regardless of the cost.

Nothing like a bit of thirst to put the frighteners on the people.

[mcgowanjm]

first off, the Murray Darling is dead.

Died last October.

second,

With global warming, the strength of the East Asian monsoon is on a marked upward trend. This suggests that positive Indian Ocean Dipole events — and droughts in south-eastern Australia — will become even more frequent. Water for the future? If the drying of the Murray-Darling Basin is driven by global warming and can be expected to get worse, how far and how fast is the water likely to ebb?

Australia is being turned into a giant desert. The Big Dry is not going to end until ice starts to reform in the Arctic.

Same for India. Greenland must stop melting. China's paying $5
the bushel over US for soy. And, of course, same for SoCal.

So far, the governments that run the Murray-Darling Basin have shown no inclination to take the recent science and its lessons on board.

BTW, I put Australia wheat, which is simply the export of water, at maybe 16 MMT. Maybe. World Shortfall of 60 MMT.

[SeaGypsy]

Have you ever been there?
Or to Southern California?
These are highly populated areas with wastefull water management built on the edge of deserts. Many of these same areas are right in the line of fire for global warming sea level rise catastrophy. Hence the politics are immense. Best idea for Adelaide is an immediate drastic change in water management practices; such as mandating grey water systems and composting toilets along with rainwater tanks. Adelaide is also on the idiot list for proscribing against rainwater tanks in the 1970's to force revenue into their now rat__t monopoist water system.
The same idiotic behaviour went on around the world about the same time; not sure where the original tumour started but it went right through the lymphs and the patient is now in serious trouble.

[SeaGypsy]

There is mega water in Australia of a quality unmatched anywhere in the world. Problem is that it's all up north in the least populated part of the country right smack in the monsoonal belt. The mediteranian climate of Southern Australia is what people are used to; not extreme tropics.
So does the gove move the population? No they plan to dam the great rivers up north and build collossal infrastructure to pump it 2000 miles south. Then others get up and call such ideas a travesty of nature and the argument rages on and on and nothing changes. That's Australia.

[mcgowanjm]

Have you ever been there?
Or to Southern California?

Sound like my Dad. I ain't ever been to Mars either, but I know
it has ice at the poles.

And as a farmer and climatologist, I know how to grow and what water needs are.

And China, India, Australia, forgot to mention Argentina and Canada, and SoCal
ain't gettin' it.

Off the Top of my head (Does china have 1.2 billion people? I've never been there;} that's 2.5 billion in danger of 60 MMT shortfall

as well as the World Top 5 producers of grain.

And of course that great transfer of Water South? We're moving head first into the Last Depression. Develop Gorgon Gas and:

Australian coal port reforms can be achieved - BHP - Worldnews.com
Sep 2, 2009 ... AUSTRALIA'S largest coal export port risks descending into chaos - and ... Ore Alliance plans to develop a independent terminal at the port, ...
article.wn.com/.../Australian_coal_port_reforms_can_be_achieved_BHP/ -

or move water. Which one you want?

[SeaGypsy]

OK so as a farmer and climatologist do you know anything about Australia's farming history?

"With barely 30 years' knowledge of this new country to go on, farmers needed reliable information. In 1865 George Goyder provided it. He discouraged farmers from planting crops north of his line, declaring this land suitable only for light grazing. However farmers were optimistic. 1865 was a year of bumper rains, so many ignored Goyder and headed north, starting farms and planting crops. Just a few years later many had to abandon their farms. Goyder was proved correct and the land was indeed unsuitable for crops. Many farmhouse ruins can still be seen near Goyder's line.

There have been periods of development north of the line, but invariably nature has won out. Entire towns and farms were abandoned when there was a return to longer-term average rainfall. The line has proven remarkably accurate, an amazing feat since it was surveyed in just two months in 1865 by Goyder, then the surveyor-general of South Australia."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyder's_Line

Australia is a lot more complex than you or many other people realize.
The largest subterranian aquifer in the world (Great Artesian Basin) covers about 1/3rd of the continent which is currently 99.9999% desert.
The worlds last great tropical Savannah; Arnhem Land in the top of the Northern Territory/ bigger than Texas with extremely reliable 2 meter plus rainfall. Cape York and the Iron Range; half a dozen pristine massive tropical rivers with vitually no agriculture on them. The total population in these 3 parts of Australia is less than half a million people covering an area of about half of Australia's land mass. Australia lies about half north half south of the Tropic of Capricorn. North of this line there is a Monsoon.
So if the monsoon stops then Australia will be a truly dry barren place, as much of the south is becoming. Until then Australia has plenty of water.
Just not where the suckers are.

[mcgowanjm]

Until then Australia has plenty of water.
Just not where the suckers are.

Australia is a lot more complex than you or many other people realize.

I realize quite a lot actually. And I realize everyday that
SoCal and Australia have a lot in common.

Both have way overshot sustainable human pop levels
and attempted to bring water where it doesn't belong:

The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and Districts (MIA&D) consist of two irrigation areas, Yanco around Leeton, and Mirrool, around Griffith, and the Districts of Benerembah, Tabbita and Wah Wah (Figure 2 and Table 1). Rice, horticultural crops, cattle, poultry and eggs are the main commodities produced.

It is estimated that up to 80 per cent of the MIA is affected by shallow watertables, with up to 5 per cent of the area having gone out of production because of waterlogging and salinity.

You posit the exact same solutions that SoCal, LasVegas
propose. With the same results.

One in six Mediterranean mammals face extinction
Sep 15, 2009 ... It is the first time that all Mediterranean animals have been assessed ... a list of nearly 800 species they say face imminent extinction. ...
http://www.physorg.com/news172231545.html

Humans not far behind.

[SeaGypsy]

A more interesting paralell with the Americas is to take out the borders down to Guatamala. That's a better reflection of the real situation in Australia.

[VMarcHart]

Australia is being turned into a giant desert.

Wasn't it a giant desert to begin with?

[Ludi]

Most of these water problems could be reversed, if people really wanted to do it.

http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/

[SeaGypsy]

Australia is being turned into a giant desert.

Wasn't it a giant desert to begin with?

Dom's point here is only partially valid; the part which has been historicly the main farming area is being desrtified. Much of this is in what used to be 'Mallee' scrub. Mallee is a highly adapted ecosystem for semi arid climates. The fragile topsoils when Mallee is cleared last a few years at best, before farming becomes virtually hydroponic/ totally fertilizer dependent. Much of this same area was under the sea for several million years a couple of times, and is very flat. The Mallee controlled the salty water table by sucking with very deep roots. When the Mallee was taken away a Pandora's box of environmental catastrophy was unleashed; the effects of which can best be seen by googling the area within a 200km radius of Mildura on the Murray near the Darling junction.

My point here is that Australia was settled in the modern sense by Europeans and deeply attached to the south of the continent. The most fertile part of the continent is NOT where the people all are; they went there for the climate not the natural fertility. Europeans are generally scared of the tropics. The natural desert in Australia has added about 5% to it's total area since settlement and is in the process of claiming much of the Murray Darling basin. This is likely to worsen with global climate change. However there is no evidence of desert spread northward into the monsoonal belt; which is immensely fertile.

[kiwichick]

seagypsy; would you care to post some evidence of the north
being amazingly fertile?

[SeaGypsy]

Get on google earth. Follow the coastal strip from Kunnunurra (lake Argyle water project/ Ord River dam) around the top of the Northern Territory into the Gulf of Carpenteria and around Cape York to the Southern Atherton Tablelands. Take note of how many large rivers penetrating miles inland there are and how green the zone is. Also note that dry season images look totally different to wet season. Monsoonal farming is not the same as temperate or Mediteranian farming.

[SeaGypsy]

Another reason besides climate for population concentration down in the South East corner is to do with the gold rushes through the 1800's.
Very little gold was found in the flatter parts of the country, partly due to the need for flowing water for sluices. Navigation was a major issue too, with the great barrier reef and hundreds of smaller reefs scattered around the north coast. Sat nav has changed the navigability issue a lot. Pumping water from deep underground and cyanide leeching has brought forth a lot of gold in the remote north also, along with the worlds biggest diamond mine at Argyle.