Moving water @ Sydney

When I was listening to Radio National on the way from Cootamundra to Goulburn, I was reminded that I wanted to write a blog post about the water accounting that the Bureau of Meteorology is currently developing. I might have written about this before, but I think it warrants highlighting. In particular, it is worth discussing what its current status seems to be, and more importantly what needs to be done and what it could mean for Australian water management.

Maybe it is pretentious to think that people are waiting for my blog posts, but I think I should just point this out. This blog is not as regular as it was in the past, and as it should be given the number of water issues that occur in Australia. This is not because I don’t want to, and so it really is a problem of affluence.

There are two random articles that I recently read that I found interesting but also disturbing. I think this blogpost is again about science and academic communication and how this can be interpreted, because both of the articles I read dealt with this topic. So it is more about the public perception about academic writing. Academics are expected to provide advice on issues that society faces, but it is interesting to note how this is done and how this is possibly perceived.

As a result of new floods in Queensland, the coalition has revived the idea of increased dam building in Australia. And, inadvertently, this has attracted the critics. You can count me as one of the critics as I have pointed out the first time that the opposition leader raised this plan in 2011. At that point I called it knee jerk reaction. However, things have changed since my first comments, which were in fact echoed by the Labor spokesperson in parliament ("Now, if you want to avoid drought, you need to manage a dam that is always full. If you want to avoid floods, you need to manage a dam that is constantly empty.."), so it is worth to highlight additional issues.

There has been much discussion about the amount of area that we would need for crop production to feed the future global population, for example in this article , and raised question on whether Malthus was actually right. Of course one way to counter the Malthusian doom scenario is by increasing agricultural productivity. It now seems that the increase in agricultural productivity will make sure that we will not run out of agricultural land.

On the day that world is supposed to end at 10:11 pm Sydney time, I thought it would be good to write something about the gods, more specifically the Mexican gods related to water (see picture).