As the people of the Kimberley region receive the first rains of the wet 2 weeks early some of us further south ponder the coming summer, when we enter our dry season.
Many rain dependent farmers in the southern areas have had sufficient rain to start their winter crops. This year may be a relief with a 50% chance of normal rains across much of the continent.
Sydney’s Warragamba Dam receives 330 million litres of water per day from the Shoalhaven catchment. The total supply currently available is 40% of capacity and it is currently falling at 0.4% per week with daily temperatures in the Sydney region rising from their current low to mid twenties.
Read here
The last time full operating storage was reached was just prior to the end of calendar 1998.
In Tasmania the Hydro is currently at 33.6% and rising having bottomed at 22.3%. Currently full storage capacity varies between 22.3% for the Great Lake and 100% for the Mersey Forth [It is also recorded as rising, 110% ?, must be a victim of propaganda] http://www.hydro.com.au/Storages/Storage.pdf
Our day to day activities are confined with in the parameters of climate with its occasional perturbation, as the mundane tells us if we listen.
In 2004 Cyclone Irvine dumped 455mm of rain on the Kimberley in 12hours, scarring parts of a landscape with a low population. Remember, it went across the Gulf of Carpentaria map like a ‘normal’ cyclone and then reversed direction and came back.
Recently we have seen another, Hurricane Katrina, come to a more populated and lower lying area, the Gulf states of the US bringing its version of scarring the landscape, this time a more populated one, with storm surges across low lying coastal land.
Regardless of the emergency response or even of the levee building to protect New Orleans this storm would have been as powerful. Casualties may have been fewer and flooding of a city less but the power of the storm would still have been in the category 5.
Retreat dramatically
Over the past 35 years the Hurricanes that are in the 4 to 5 category, the strongest, have been increasing along with temperatures.
Since 1978 the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University have been documenting the loss of polar sea ice. In the past 4 years sea ice has begun to retreat dramatically.
A continuation of this trend will see the rate increase as the northern waters heat up more, due to the loss of the reflective and this cooling capacity of the sea ice, as the ‘normal’ coverage of 7 million of square kilometers falls through its now 5.95 on what appears to be a trending curve that rises ever more steeply, a system that is feeding back on itself.
As some climate change denier sagaciously pointed out recently, sea ice melting is like the ice in a glass of water, the volume varies little between the solid and liquid forms.
However, the first thing that will occur when the sea ice melts is the water in both polar seas will warm. This will, regardless of agreements signed in Kyoto or elsewhere or whoever the parties are, see a change in climate patterns.
Further, as the land ice held on Greenland and the Antarctic, as glaciers and ice shelves, melts and enters the sea [adding more and more ice to the glass] sea level will rise. Also the thermohaline circulation patterns such as the Gulf Stream will be further altered by the addition of freshwater.
And then there is the methane hydrate lying quietly locked in the permafrost, the fozen bogs of the boreal, with a supply of the greenhouse gas 62 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, currently on a slow release, little by little and feeding the trigger point where that system feeds back on itself.
A runaway train, once released, unstoppable by any known human action. There is no program of reduction in the production of the 8 greenhouse gases that will offset the release of methane from its frozen hydrate form. [Really big apologies and endless buckets of money will not change anything here]
The fool from the fifties may be a little less relaxed and comfortable about his Canute like capacities to hold back climate change as his first decade of Premiership nears.
Huge system
Having moved from denial of climate change, through a stage of minor concessions to the big treaty without stated substance, Howard may hope to bask in the light of environmental hero, before reality shows the substance of has new clothes.
He may stay with us long enough to find that the huge system that determines our weather takes much longer to react than an election cycle and once it shifts, it retains its new pattern regardless of the promises of politicians to woo it back.
It is more likely that the master will be gone when his lack of handiwork comes home to roost, those families he was supposedly so concerned about finding themselves focused on the fundamental issue of climate change, other fundamentalists put into the background by the urgency of survival.
phill Parsons enjoyed his recent visit to Manly and other warmer climes, where the presence of the weather was as inescapable as the news of it activities. As you can see, normal transmission has resumed, decision makers avoiding these broadcasts of doom and gloom to ensure that they become reality. [Reference to Bush down home on the ranch intended].
On behalf of the Minister for large sizes [actual sighting confirming media image] I apologize to Mr Parkin. It was not the Minister’s intention to infer that seeking change through non violent activity or working for a peaceful world terrorized the government, it just scared the shit out of it. Visa cancelled.
