Moving water at Sydney Uni

I wish all readers of this blog all the best for 2010!
As the end of the year is near, I reflect on the past year and the very dry decade that we have experienced in Australia. In particular, is there anything that we can learn for our future? I will first reflect on the Copenhagen talks and what I feel the outcome has delivered.
I am in fact rather pessimistic around the festive season, watching the waste and wealth pouring out of society in this period makes me very worried. Everything that is wrong with our current wasteful society comes out: Too many presents, buying sprees, too much food, and too many silly party hats. If we could just cut out these two weeks we should be right for carbon emissions. The problem would be that economically we would dive into a deep recession, is there something really wrong that the economy is measured by the success of the X-mas sales?

Some people have asked my opinion on the demise of the ETS in federal parliament and how I thought about the climate change negotiations currently in Copenhagen. It is easy to sit on the fence and not to take a stand in this issue, hoping that the future might be clearer. However I feel I need to take a stand, even though climate change is not my specialism. I have written about this already a few times, but saw a really good article in the EOS (the newsletter from the American Geophysical Union) and thought that I could use that to highlight my argument.

It is about time that I post something again, so here is an interesting conundrum that I found in “Ground Cover” the GRDC publication. There are two articles right below each other. The first one is the article outlining the climate variability salinity link postulated by Prof. Ian Acworth that I have discussed before. Just below this article is an article that has the title “runoff plays a major role in salinity”. Looks like an interesting conundrum to me!

Finally some rain again in Sydney, it has been pretty dry. It is not much better in some parts of country NSW, as this article in the SMH attests to. In contrast, Victoria seems to be getting plenty for a change. The climate keeps us guessing where the falls will occur this time.

While I was mulling over this variability this morning, I listened to Macca on the ABC. I always get a bit upset with him, but maybe that is ok. I think he tends to be very simplistic in some of his environment comments, or maybe it is just that he lets people I don’t agree with air on the show. So that is not a bad thing, I can write my blog, he can have these people on the show. Anyway, this morning someone was having a go at wind energy and arguing that we would still need coal fired plants to pick up the peak demand. The main concern of the caller was the visual damage of wind energy to the landscape.

Finally some rain; It has been a dry couple of months, especially in Sydney. My garden looks like dust bowl and not because of the recent dust storms in Sydney. The amount of soil that was lost in those dust storms is scary and will take years to rebuild. It stresses even more the need to sequester carbon in our soils and many people have already pointed this out. The agricultural community would like to be paid for the amount of carbon they sequester and that is understandable, but, while there is great potential there are difficulties in monitoring the amount of carbon changed. But what about the water? The last month drier weather got me watching the “El Nino” monitor again to see if we are again in for a long drought, but it all seems pretty uncertain. It also got me thinking again about how the rainfall would change under changes in the global climate and how carbon and water would work together.

This past Friday and Saturday, I was on a fieldtrip with some of the 2nd year students. This year I had managed to organise a trip to visit Tarwyn Park in the upper Hunter valley, the property which is now relatively well known in Australia through the work by Peter Andrews. I had read Peter's book and I was interested to see the place for myself, and my students were enthusiastic when I suggested this. So last Friday was the big day as we arrived around 2 pm.

Last week, Floris and I wrote a commentary in the newspaper, building on some of the research Floris is doing and related to the to Cubbie or not to Cubbie question. Anyway, you can read it here. But, while writing this article, I was reminded of another question that I have not yet solved: whether Australia is better off growing annual cops under irrigation or perennial crops. I will explain.