Moving water @ Sydney

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).

The people at IMTA have posted an interesting little blurp on the IMTA website about my visit, and a little video cool! I was very impressed with IMTA, particularly with the super-cool hydraulics lab (see picture below), but also their hydro-climatology group. Definitely a group I am going to keep talking to.

I enjoyed my period in Mexico and arrived back on Sunday at the hottest day in Sydney for a while and the day of the disastrous bushfires in Victoria. I can only extend my condolences to the people of the towns affected. Climate change in claimed to have played a role. Maybe…maybe not. Clearly, it was exceptionally hot and exceptionally dry in this period and that is not helpful. But is this climate variability or climate change?

And yes I missed a post last week. I was just a bit too tired and there are too many things going on. Australian Research Council grants (ARC) are due in two weeks, teaching will start again in 3 weeks and I am trying to finish and work on what I have learned in Mexico. So this is maybe a bit scattered post and not very coherent. Next time maybe better.

It is still Sunday for me, even though in Australia it is well into the afternoon. I am back in Mexico: ¡Ola! I’ll stop there, my spoken Spanish is definitely not up to scratch. But I can read Spanish and I am getting better at it. So I picked up a story in the newspaper this morning about the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, held a speech. The interesting thing is that the Secretary of the UNFCCC Mr Yvo de Boer called Mexico one of the leading countries in the climate change area. This is because Mexico has set a target of a 50% reduction of emissions by 2050. In contrast, Australia is still planning to reduce its levels by 5 – 15% by 2020. The date is earlier, but the target is substantially lower.