The Bloody Camels Will Be Asking For A Glass And Ice Cubes Next

We've had plenty of shark attacks, and crocodile attacks, and we've even had wallaby and kangaroo attacks, but now the camels are invading our towns. They're coming for the water and they know how to get it :

Camels are coming into communities in central Australia and turning on the taps, the Macdonnell Shire Council says.

The shire has applied to the Federal Government for a $4.5 million slice of infrastructure funding to build camel-proof boundaries around 14 communities.

Wayne Wright from the shire says thirsty camels are causing significant damage.

"In a number of our communities it's quite common for camels to enter the community and if there are any taps adjacent to houses they're quite capable of either turning the taps on or knocking the taps off so they get water."

The intention is to put cattle grids at the entrances to the communities and place fencing around them.

Weird. The camels can work out how to turn on, or at the very least break open, taps to get water, but they still can't master the art of negotiating a cattle grid?

The Skies Have Opened, And The 'City Of Drought' Eases Back Water Restrictions

Many residents of Goulburn, in the NSW southern highlands, used to shower with buckets around their feet to collect every spare drop of precious water. Water was precious they weren't allowed to wash their cars or water their gardens.

For more than two years, Goulburn was the largest 'dry' town in Australia, and the savage drought that almost emptied local dams looked like it was never going to end. Lawns turned to dust, gardens died and people all over the country saw in Goulburn a dawning reality that they feared they would soon have to deal with themselves, in their own towns and cities.

But the skies have opened up over Goulburn and the primary dam for the city's water supply is now more than 50% full, after a low of a mere 12% capacity.

Goulburn residents may not be dancing in the streets, but they are watering their gardens.

In a number of interviews with locals aired on television and radio today and tonight, Goulburn residents talked about how they would never take water for granted again, and how the drought and increasingly harsh water restrictions had changed their lives.

Many seemed to think the changes are for the better.

They said they had learned that water could not be wasted, and some shook their heads in disbelief at how, years before, they had treated water as a commodity that would never run out.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

The NSW southern highlands city, which had come to symbolise the plight of the state's drought-stricken rural areas, will go from level 5 to level 3 water restrictions following June's heavy rain.

But one nursery owner said it wouldn't make much difference to his business as most residents had already adapted to the dry conditions.

"When it first started [in 2002], well, you could stand in the store and there would be no one around,'' said Shane Nelson, 42, who owns the Gehl Garden Centre & Wholesale Nursery in Goulburn.

"As time has progressed people have actually seemed to have adapted pretty well to the restrictions. People started adjusting to the conditions and got water-tanks on their houses, used grey or bore water. We definitely diversified ourselves into other things like garden furniture and pots.''

Mr Nelson said the restrictions had meant his customers moved towards plants that were less thirsty and more able to cope with the dry conditions.

"Roses have done very well as they actually seem to thrive a lot better in the dry conditions,'' he said. "They are very disease and pest-prone in moisture.

Plants such as camellias and rhododendrons, which favour moist positions, are not as popular now, Mr Nelson said.

"I talk to customers now and they use more water than they've ever done because of their tank supply,'' he said. "The first couple of years of the restrictions, if I could have picked up my plants and left, I would have. But soon we were holding our own.''

After strong June rains Goulburn's dam levels more than quadrupled, with one of its storages spilling over for the first time in six years.

Plans To Use Super Tankers To Ship Fresh Water From Tasmania To East Coast Cities

When bottled water can sell for $3 dollars a litre, filling supertanker with 40 or 50 millions of litre of water from Tasmania and shipping it up the coast to parched cities like Sydney and Brisbane not only becomes a reasonable part-solution to looming water shortages, but an extremely profitable one :

A number of companies, including one chaired by former prime minister Bob Hawke, are negotiating to capture excess water from swollen rivers on the state's high-rainfall west coast.

(Tasmanian state) Water Minister David Llewellyn told The Weekend Australian he now believed the idea stacked up economically -- and could be used to benefit Tasmanians as well as mainland consumers.

Mr Llewellyn said a proposal from Solar Sailor, a NSW company chaired by Mr Hawke, to export 50 billion litres of water a year from Tasmania, was just one of a number before the Government.

Mr Llewellyn said Tasmania's fresh water supplies were equivalent to two Murray-Darling systems. The state has a population of about 485,000, or 2.3 per cent of Australia's total, yet it has 12 per cent of the nation's water.

Mr Llewellyn said revenue from the sale of water otherwise flowing from rivers into the sea could be invested in dams and irrigation infrastructure in the state's dry north and east.

Tasmania's west coast, home to wild mountains and swollen rivers, often complains of an excess of rain while parts of the state's east and north are in drought.

Although only one of a number of proposals, Solar Sailor is understood also to be in discussion with several mainland states as potential customers for Tasmanian water.

The company's chief executive, Robert Dane, who has held talks with Tasmania's Department of Primary Industries and Water, has flagged using several supertankers to ferry water to centres along the eastern seaboard, including Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland.

Even if the exported water was sold in bulk for a few cents a litre to East Coast cities, exporting 50 billion litres of it a year is going to make some people extremely wealthy.

Maybe the supertankers should load up on melting ice from the Antarctic. Not only will the resulting water be cleaner, wouldn't scooping up all that melting ice and shipping it to Sydney help slow the supposed sea level rises that are likely to result from global warming?

Melbourne Has Driest 12 Months On Record

Climate Change Predicted to Hammer Victoria In Coming Decades

Melbourne has just experienced its driest twelve month period in the 150 years since such records began being kept. Less than half the yearly average amount of rain fell. This is now, according to reports, the 10th year in a row that Melbourne has experienced below average rain falls.

While Melbourne gradually runs out of water, climate change looks set to hammer Victoria in the worst way in the coming decades :

An alarming new report on the impact of climate change in Victoria has warned of risks to some of our most basic services and necessities — including water, electricity, transport, telecommunications and buildings.

The report, obtained by The Age ahead of its release, says water supplies and major infrastructure will be "acutely vulnerable" to climate change in coming decades, even if greenhouse emissions are cut steeply.

...the report found that by 2030 power, telecommunications, transport and building infrastructure would also be at much higher risk of damage from hotter days, bushfires, storms and floods.

Key risks highlighted include:

* Higher water, energy and telecommunications bills to cover the growing damage to infrastructure across the state.

* Worsening water shortages, as temperatures climb and rainfall is reduced.

* Power blackouts and potential fatalities during heatwaves.

* Coastal buildings and infrastructure, including ports, being hit by storm surges.

* Less water for hydro and coal-fired power plants, and more erratic wind generation.

* Longer and more frequent telecommunications outages from stormier weather, potentially hampering emergency rescue and clean-up efforts.

The report cites scientists' predictions that by 2030, average daily temperatures across Victoria will rise by between 0.5 to 1.5 degrees, compared to 1990 temperatures, and by up to 5 degrees by 2070.

Project leader Paul Holper told The Age that Victoria's climate was likely to change dramatically over the next few decades, and that "we have to plan as if we'll be living in a different country".

"I've been working in this field since 1989, and it surprises even me how strongly climate change has begun to affect us already," said Mr Holper, who co-ordinates the CSIRO's Australian Climate Change Science Program.

As population grows, average temperatures are predicted to keep climbing while rainfall is cut, putting water supplies under more pressure. Potential solutions nominated in the report include catching and re-using stormwater, or "costly, large-scale and politically sensitive infrastructure developments such as desalination plants or dams".

More Australian Towns Running Out Of Water

Town Water Supplies Being Diverted To Farms And Mines To Save Local Jobs

Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney are running out of water. The majority of dam levels for all four cities are falling to lows not seen for three or four decades. But Australian cities are not yet completely dry. The same, however, can't be said for more and more rural and outback towns. From my own research - there aren't any official figures - at least 20 towns with populations of 800 to 2000 people in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have only one to four weeks worth of locally sourced fresh, drinkable water left. A few days of good rains will help, but months of regular rains are needed now, and no long-term forecasters are expecting such rains in the immediate future.

From the Sun Herald :

A number of outback NSW towns will run out of drinking water within weeks and be forced to truck it in, officials have warned.

Tilpa, on the Darling River, is no longer pumping water from the river for drinking and is relying on the last reserves in domestic rainwater tanks and bottled water.

General manager of Central Darling Shire Council Bill O'Brien said Wilcannia, once the third largest inland port in Australia, would have no water left in its weir in about a month and would have to switch to using salty bore water.

"The alternative was to try to buy water from Menindee, if any was available, and truck it in tankers over 165 kilometres of dirt roads at a cost of about $25,000 a week," Mr O'Brien said.

At Ivanhoe, which normally gets its water from the Lachlan River, bores are being used. Drinking water at White Cliffs is coming from rainwater tanks.

Mr O'Brien said the wellbeing of several thousand people living on the Darling and Lachlan was at risk because of continuing upstream water allocations for agriculture.

Tensions are increasing in these towns as they watch their water supplies being diverted to other "priorities", be they farms, towns facing more dire water shortages, or local industry.

And this is where the harshest choices of all will likely have to made.

Towns need drinking water, but do you shut off water to the local farms, thereby cutting back on crop yields and seeing job losses follow?

A local publican at Tilba reckons they've got only a week of water left. He drains water from the tanks at a local medical clinic, and 'trucks' it back to his pub on his motorcycle to fill the hotel's coffee urn.

Orange is home to thousands of people, and the local goldmine provides jobs for more than 500, as well as helping the local businesses and the community in general to stay alive.

But the Cadia goldmine needs water :

Council staff have endorsed the request for emergency water supplies to prevent the mine's closure, saving at least 500 jobs.

If the recommendation is adopted, water will be provided on a monthly basis and limited to five megalitres a day.

To save the local jobs, and the local economy, water that would go to homes has to go to local industry. It's a massive Catch 22 for all concerned.

If the jobs dry up, as the water supply dries up, how will people be able to stay in these towns, when there is both no jobs and little or no water?

Both the federal government and the opposition government are making big promises about rolling out rebates so that just about every Australian family can install a rainwater tank at home. But unlike the cities, many Australian rural and outback towns never got rid of their rainwater tanks, and they're still just about out of water.

Anyone know any good rain dances?

The "Armageddon Solution" To Mega-Drought - Two Queensland Towns May Have To Evacuated

When Australian Cities Run Out Of Water, Will They Have To Be Evacuated?

Pray For Rain : Melbourne Running Out Of Water, Dam Levels At 40 Year Lows

Australia Faces World's Most Extreme "Climate Change Challenge"

Two Australian Cities Face Ruin Without Rain

How Long Before The Mass Evacuation Of Cities Begin?

How dry does an Australian city or major town have to get before the state and federal governments consider mass evacuations?

The evacuation of the entire human population, by force, of at least two Queensland towns is now on its way to becoming a reality. It sounds like hype, but it's not, read the truth for yourself here.

But what about the bigger towns? What if an entire city of a million or more Australians ran utterly dry of drinking water supplies?

What then?

Without fresh water, any large town or city becomes uninhabitable. You simply cannot truck in enough water to keep a city of a million or more people alive.

The Queensland town of Killarney currently has its drinking water trucked in, at a cost of some $8000 per week. Eight grand a week for a town of less than 2000 people. What dry city could afford an 'imported' water bill clocking up a few million dollars a week?

If the Australian government was eventually forced to evacuate a city like Adelaide or Brisbane, where would all those people go to? There's not a lot of room in the other Australian cities. They're all experiencing, or facing, water shortages of their own. And once you get out of the city and their suburbs, the vast majority of Australia is already suffering scary to shitscary levels of drought.

If we can't pack off the millions of residents of Adelaide and Brisbane to somewhere else in Australia, we're going to have to look overseas.

How about Canada? They're looking for a few hundred thousand new immigrants in the next few years. But be warned 'exported' Queenslanders, it's mighty cold in Alberta, where all the new jobs in the shale-into-oil industries are waiting to be filled. Pack your woollies.

Of course, all these Australian climate change refugees might find a new home in the rapidly melting lands of the Arctic. The ice-free Arctic coastlines of Canada, the US, Russia and Greenland are going to be the new homelands for tens of millions of climate change refugees in the coming decades.

The bizarre irony of Australians possibly being forced to evacuate their towns and cities due to the severe effects of climate change is that Australians were recently debating whether or not we should welcome the expected human tide of climate change refugees from the islands of the South Pacific, some of which are already being consumed by rising sea levels.

How hardcore climate change effects Australia is likely to only get more weird, from here on in.

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According to this international news story, Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery, the superbly apocalyptic Climate Change Voice Of Doom, is "the country's most recognised scientist".

Well, maybe. He's certainly Australia's most recognised Australian Of The Year.

According to Flannery, who tends to beef up his Voice Of Doom when speaking to journalists on the international beat :

Australia faces the world's most extreme climate change challenge as millions of city dwellers try to cope with water shortages, according to the country's most recognised scientist.

Flannery said the drought meant two of Australia's largest cities, Brisbane and Adelaide -- home to a combined total of almost three million people -- would run out of water by the year's end unless the so-called "Big Dry" ended.

"We could see a catastrophic situation developing here by the end of the year. It's become a huge issue," Flannery told AFP.

"Even a year ago this would have been unthinkable. I think it's the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now.

"We have a situation where, if there are no flows in the Murray-Darling (river system), Adelaide, a city of one million people, has only 40 days' worth of water left in storage.

"If we don't get any rain this year Adelaide and Brisbane may be facing diabolical problems."

Catastrophic situation? Diabolical problems? Cut all the soft talk and sugar-spin, Flannery, and tell the bowel-loosening truth : If it doesn't rain in volumes that would have made Noah hire on extra ark builders, Adelaideans are going to be evicted from the city and packed off to the colds of Canada, via cruise ship.

Nobody wants to be the first to say it, but now I've said it. It's done, there you go. So deal with it, Adelaide, or start towing Antarctican icebergs into your ports.

It's always interesting to take a look at the international media stories on how Australia is being hammered by climate change, and the subsequent water shortages, crumbling coast lines, destroyed crops and mega-drought. They don't tend to hold back on the heavy stuff like the local media does.

There was a spectacularly doom-laden feature in the UK Independent a few weeks back, which I sat down to read after I finished liberally hosing off the path, wastefully washing the car, filling the swimming pool, flushing the toilet repeatedly to get rid of a fly that was doing laps in the bowl, and turning on the front and back lawn sprinklers for four or five hours, not because the grass was dying, but just because I love the way the sunlight glistens in all that watery spray.

If it's good enough for key members of the Australian media and the federal government to be deniers of global warming and climate change, then I can be a water-shortage denier.

And so much for all that.

But seeing a point-by-point mini-history of how the mega-drought and water shortages have impacted Australia in the past couple of years can make for some pretty freaky reading, even more so if you live in a city or town where water shortages have already hit hard :

The drought, which has lasted a decade in parts of the country, has slowed Australia's overall economic growth by an estimated 0.75 percent as crops have fallen 62 percent.

The impact on rural communities has been devastating. Many farmers have been forced off the land and counselling services have reported unusually high levels of suicide in rural areas.

Children have water conservation messages drummed into them from an early age at school and householders face hefty fines, or can even have their water disconnected, if they are found to be wasting the precious resource.

The government is also concerned that Australia's tourism industry, which earns billions of dollars a year, will be hit by "jet guilt" -- a reluctance by holidaymakers to take the heavily polluting, long-haul plane flights that are the only practical way to reach Down Under.

Authorities are also considering culling some of the million-plus feral camel population after dromedaries "mad with thirst" rampaged through a remote desert community.

Researchers warn the drought could drive Australia's iconic koalas to extinction within a decade.

The scale of the problem hit home for many Australians in April when Prime Minister John Howard said there would be no water for farms in the Murray-Darling river basin unless the drought broke soon.

Covering more than one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) in the southeast of Australia, the Murray-Darling basin is the country's largest river system, almost three times bigger than Japan and four times larger than Britain.

It is Australia's rural powerhouse, producing more than 40 percent of the nation's agricultural produce, worth 10 billion dollars (8.3 billion US) a year.

The Murray-Darling supports half the nation's sheep flock, a quarter of the cattle herd and three-quarters of irrigated land.

It's clearly time to evacuate the residents of Brisbane and Adelaide to the wilds of Canada and divert their fresh water river flows to Sydney and Melbourne, where they are needed most.

The Brisbanians and Adelaiders won't be happy, but harsh sacrifices must be made in such times of national emergency. Sydneysiders and Melbournians will appreciate the sacrifices made by their fellow Australians. We might even send these new Canastralians a post card, or two, but only if they ship back an ice berg or two, if there's any left by then.


Prime Minister Says "Pray For Rain", Renowned Priest Says Begging God To Stop The Drought Is "Pointless"

Melbourne Also Running Out Of Water - Vegetable Crops Production To Drop By Two-Thirds

Australia's Mega-Drought To Cripple Local Food Supply

The "Armageddon Solution" To Water Shortages - Start Evacuation Of Queensland Towns

Small Town Runs Out Of Water As Scientist Warns Drought Could Become "More Acute"

Tankers Haul In Emergency Water Supplies

Wallabaddah is a small town in northern New South Wales which now portents a terrifying new reality for drought-devastated Australia. The town's water reservoir has run dry. The town of 300 has, literally, run out of water.

The only steady supply of fresh water for most of the town's residents is from the tankers now hauling in supplies.

This is going to get expensive.

From ABC News, Australia :

The Liverpool Plains Shire Council says the water reservoir in Wallabaddah became empty at lunchtime after the town well, serving about 300 residents, failed.

Council acting general manager Bob Stewart says the town has recently been looking for other sources of water because the well's levels were so low but the situation has now become critical.

"I've just ordered the carting of water at the moment to fill the reservoirs and we've replaced immediate level seven water restrictions, which basically bans all external use of water."

Australia's drought could become even more acute :

A stronger Asian monsoon could bring harsher drought to Australia, a new study by Dr. Mike Gagan, a palaeoclimatologist with the Australian National University has revealed.

Dr. Gagan and his team looked at how drought in Australia is affected by an El Niño-like climate engine in the Indian Ocean called the Indian Ocean Dipole.

They found that a strong Indian Ocean Dipole involved a cooling of the eastern Indian Ocean, which in turn caused changes in weather patterns that decreases the amount of rain coming from the west to Indonesia and the south of Australia.

... a strong South Asian monsoon could drive winter rain-bearing winds towards the Southern Ocean, missing mainland Australia altogether.

"Over the years, everybody's been looking at the El Niño-Southern Oscillation as the driver of drought in Australia. It turns out that a lot of our drought is caused by changes in the Indian Ocean," said Dr. Gagan in his study published in the journal Nature.

Another town, Woy Woy, on Australia's east coast has water reserves down to only 14% capacity. Ironically, Woy Woy means "much water" in the language of the original Aboriginal inhabitants of the area :

Summer vacationers have arrived to find beachside showers turned off, and the lawns of rental houses are crispy brown because of a ban on watering. Local authorities have handed out four-minute shower timers and low-flow shower heads to every household, and most people now shower with an array of buckets underfoot to catch the precious “gray” water, the only thing that can be used to wet gardens or wash cars

Australia's Dwindling Fresh Water Supply Is Now A "National Emergency"

Lethal Snakes Move Into The Suburbs In Search Of Water

Crippling Drought In South Australia, Now Widespread Flooding After Huge Rains