Climate sceptic? Met 40,000,000 thirsty people

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

I believe the ban on urban tanks was primarily for health reasons - both the health problems likely to result from the drowned rats etc, the somewhat toxic water from ronoff from roofs and trim painted with lead based paints, and the fact that they can easily provide a breeding spot for mosquitoes.

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Don't forget dead snakes. lizards, geckos and pigeons on the roof or in gutters (and their droppings), I have a little 3000L rainwater but only use it for the washing machine and flushing the guest toilet, not for drinking. This winter has been wetter here than most as the tank lasted all the way through, normally I have to go back to mains water until the summer rain comes, around the time of the Gold Coast Indy or whatever they call it nowadays.

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Originally Posted by AK83

You know the tragedy of this story .. is not the repeated nature of it .. it's that in the next 10 years 'people' will forget what happened just prior to this event!

That is, the hume weir was at something like 10% capacity and the news stories for the mindless masses being told were of doom and gloom and fairytales of death and destruction going forward, due to the lack of water from this point onwards.

I'd really love to know what is it about the here and now, that nullifies the memory of the past.

Maybe it's due to some psychological condition in the majority that catalogued historical event are some kind of conspiratorial agenda or something, and hence not to be trusted?

This country (and in others) has experienced much worse floods and droughts at some point, than we have in this post doom and gloom era of climate change.
The difference is that we personally may have experienced this era of wet and dry spells, and what happened in the past happened to others(ie. not us!).
it's only the here and now that seems to be the important factor.

These stories of 'millions going thirsty' is nothing but a sensationalist grab for attention by biased parties .. nothing more and little else.
I'll bet my last dime that the people noting this current situation(usually some illiterate journalist) have biases for the doom and gloom scenario of a warming globe.
I'm 99.9% confident that they haven't looked into the water supply demand upstream of the rivers before claiming drops in flow levels and capacity levels.

In this country(that I really concern myself with) it is a fact .. verifiable fact, not from these biased illiterate journalists .. that global warming is leading to a wettening of the entire country(as an average). Some parts will become dryer, most areas are becoming wetter. This info comes directly from the raw data provided by the Beauro of Met. You only need to see this data for yourself.
I have read of similar analysis of Africa too. I can imagine that on the whole, the US will be in a similar situation.
It's happened before, and the reasons for this phenomenon makes good sense.

So these headlines of millions going thirsty are not due to climate change! Just as in this country .. 99.99999% of it are due to gross mismanagement of the water resources as the infrastructure was intended to provide.

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The SOI Southern Oscillation Index/ Indian Ocean Dipole/ La Nina/ El Nino/ Madden-Julian Oscillation, is a far better predicter of Australia's rainfall, what climate change does predict is greater extremes, one reason for this is warmer oceans generate wetter weather, so more frequent and extreme floods, cyclones, etc. Thus the average may look great at say 1200mm for a year, but not good if it all falls in one go, much better to get 100mm a month. This is why I think we should be building more/bigger dams to catch the windfall of water for the dry/drier times ahead.

I suspect water temp is a great indicator. Tropical fish down in Mexico and our huge kelp ( seaweed) been stripped bare is clear to only the people who get wet of course.

On a bigger study plus "The study team, led by Hartmut Aumann of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, combed through 15 years of data acquired by NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument over the tropical oceans to determine the relationship between the average sea surface temperature and the onset of severe storms." was not pretty.


" tropical ocean surface temperatures may rise by as much as 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. The study team concludes that if this were to happen, we could expect the frequency of extreme storms to increase by as much as 60 percent by that time. Although climate models aren't perfect, results like these can serve as a guideline for those looking to prepare for the potential effects a changing climate may have"

Estimates and predictions are prone to misfires. History is not depending of course on the search parameters.

Floods and droughts are evident over millions of years almost every where in our landscape. The creek at the bottom 200m below where I sit drops another 100 ish metres to the Yarra river less than 5 km from here. The hills or gullies carved out millions of years ago by floods and water? Change is inevitable over time. rapid made changes to our environment are not with a little effort.

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Population and water is and always will be a management issue.

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Here lies the real problem, no one is managing the population.
Consider this, 100 years ago, after WW1 the world population was around 1.3 billion.
Today we are surging past 7 billion, predicted to reach 15 billion around 2025 or 2030.

We have to be fed and watered, natural rain forests cleared for 'irrigated crops' to feed us.
Livestock has to be watered to feed us, not to mention filling the backyard pool in rich countries.
Huge increase in water demanding industries, to give us all the 'things we need'.

We are simply using more than the rains supply, don't fully blame the climate.
Verging on a disaster now, What about in 20 years?
Human behavior is what it is, do nothing until it happens.
So, how do we manage the world population? good luck with that.

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Originally Posted by RANDLOVER

Don't forget dead snakes. lizards, geckos and pigeons on the roof or in gutters (and their droppings), I have a little 3000L rainwater but only use it for the washing machine and flushing the guest toilet, not for drinking. This winter has been wetter here than most as the tank lasted all the way through, normally I have to go back to mains water until the summer rain comes, around the time of the Gold Coast Indy or whatever they call it nowadays.

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We too only use the water out of the tanks for the washing and toilets
As we have found those listed things IN the tank, also a dead cat
I can understand things getting in through the overflow, but it’s got me ****ed how a cat got in there[emoji848]
Maybe last owner left the lid off for a while 🤨

Yass town water is so undrinkable we do the reverse.... We have a 2000 gallon tank attached to the garage that is our source of drinking water. The garage is all colourbond however, and the tank has stainless screening. Hasn't killed us yet :-)

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be keen to drink the runoff from the house roof with 120 year old roofing iron, lead flashings and is a possum highway most nights.

Regards,
Tote

We drained an undergound tank at a mud brick house near Bet Bet Vic when I was a kid. My role was to fill up a bucket of mud and crap to be lifted out. The mud and muck was above my waist we I first dropped in[tonguewink] I assume it had not been cleaned out for a bit[bigrolf] Bones of mice, rats and birds I assume in the mud gave me a interesting time considering it was our main drinking water tank. It took two days as the people up top got tired.

I love Melbourne water. Sweeter than Sydney and Perth's by a long shot. My water tank feeds the loo, garden and car wash.

Growing up on farms the loo was always plumbed to dam or bore water as it was by far the greatest consumer of water in the house.

Regards,
Tote

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Originally Posted by Tote

Growing up on farms the loo was always plumbed to dam or bore water as it was by far the greatest consumer of water in the house.

Regards,
Tote

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Ours was too. The camouflage the dam water gave to deposits did give provide a bit of cover IF some one forgot to flush or a floater was stubborn on the way out [bigrolf]

In Narrabri in the 1970s, it was standard practice to have three taps over the sink: hot water, cold water and drinking water (from the tank).

When I coated the inside of the tank with a product to deal with all the pinholes in the tank, I found an interesting collection of bird and frog skeletons.