Tag Archives: Queensland drought

QUEENSLAND DROUGHT, BRISBANE DOWNPOUR!

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QUEENSLAND in Drought, Brisbane in flood! Now if that isn’t ironic!

I spoke to a mate in Brisbane yesterday; his suburb is soaked, he’s squelching about in his tiny back yard, which at least produces a few bananas.

Most back yards in the new suburbs are non-existent; gutters touch neighbour’s gutters, concrete in between. No garden, as such, and certainly no veggie-patch.

All that glorious rain, wasted on sterile suburbs, run-off into drains, into the ocean: wasted.

City folk can’t believe there’s a Queensland drought. How can they? Their suburb is flooded! Of all places for the rain to fall, on millions of acres of concrete and bitumen…….bloody typical. My drinking-water is nearly gone, and their car is a sodden write-off. My car can never rust, the way things are going.

Strange that supposedly good areas for rainfall, the high hilly areas that force the clouds to drop their burden, seem to be neglected now by rain. But in Brisbane, of all places……all that rain, and none in the dams, because there are none. What I could do with that run-off! Don’t they know there’s a Queensland drought?

My friend said the storm was exciting and marvellous, but complained about all the mess. What I’d give for a bit of his mess; the cracks in the ground here are cavernous, they’d take all his run-off and more, and still leave a foot of dust.

So the city folk are blase about this dying country……………..

                           ……………….they’ll get the message, and soon. Queensland drought?

Queensland drought: THE SHAME OF FIRE.

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Queensland drought; bush-fire: the eradication of a country’s fauna and flora.

It’s a conundrum, a contradiction, an oxymoron; a green drought, back-burning  for safety, firing to prevent fire, etc.. We have to live with fire in the bush, it seems; there’s no avoiding it. The human fascination with fire. The fire-bugs amongst firemen. The deliberately-lit bush, by both children and adults. Burning by the aboriginal tribes for food:easy pickings, saves much hunting-effort.

Fire has been ravaging Australia for 60,000 years. Changing all environments for the worse, from coast to coast. Impoverishing biodiversity. We may never know the number of plant and animal species lost to fire since humans first colonised this country. Who knows what was the extent of dense tropical forests and rich grasslands before ‘man’ first committed his depredations? The sparse fossil evidence is of huge creatures filling every niche from plains to jungle; creatures which could never survive today on our desiccated landscape.

A landscape created entirely by fire-stick. We humans cannot resist a good fire. Stand with your back to the wind, drop an ember from the carefully-tended fire-pot; watch the destruction, listen to the roar and crackle of the flames, the millions of tons of vegetation consumed with absolutely no effort. Later, when the ground is free of embers, collect the singed and gasping creatures, sufficient for the whole tribe to further roast.

Only a certain amount of burned, crippled food can be eaten. The rest goes to waste. The fire rages on. There’s no one to stop it, only a natural barrier, a dry creek, a rocky bluff. Eventually it will die out, after it has destroyed a vast area, as it has done time and time again over the millennia since the invasion of humans.

Fire has destroyed this continent, and the destruction continues. The lifeless soil of the desert, bereft of all humus and all nutrients is the result of fire. A dense forest can be reduced to a bare plain of sterile ground in a very short time, by constant burning. Eventually nothing will grow there, nothing that can be burned.

Nurture a fragment of rain forest, surviving in a cleft hillside, a hill naked except for sparse eucalypt and wattle. Cancel all fire from that hill. Do nothing else. Nothing will happen, perhaps for years, then rain will come. The hill will bloom, the scrub will become leafy for a while. But seedlings from the tiny rain forest nursery will take root amongst the fire-raddled scrub, and grow up green and strong in the field of grey. Deep-rooted, shady, mulch-creating species that will eventually overpower  the fire-trees and cover the entire hill. The process would take only 200, 300 years.

In certain types of country, for example around the Bunya Mountains, the original dense forest species are hard to eradicate. Cleared hillsides sprout the native species very quickly, before the fire-trees have a chance to take hold. A cleared area will return to its original diversity within 100 years, given ‘neglect’. Assume neglect implies re-afforestation. Perhaps because the Bunyas generate vast numbers of wind-blown seeds, any cleared area quickly regenerates.

But look; now the Bunyas are burning, and all because of Man. Sure, lightning is sometimes to blame, but we humans are the root cause of loss of habitat. Second in importance to protecting housing and infrastructure, is the saving of the diverse forest. Bugger the gum-weeds, protect the Buyas, Mt Glorious and Nebo jungle, Springbrook, Tambourine. Although most of the animal species have been eradicated centuries ago, the seed-bank of those areas is vital. And that is just in the Brisbane environs.

We cannot afford to lose those areas through fire. Fire which etches away at the peripheries of the Great Remnants year by year.

The koala hangs on by a thread. How it has survived so far is a mystery. Such a creature has only one advantage: it can eat gum-leaves. It has adapted to survive solely on eucalypts. That advantage has kept it going since humans interfered with its habitat but at what cost? Every human-lit fire killed all the koalas within the burned area, which would within a year or so be re-colonised by the un-burned  neighbours. There are now few koalas left to re-populate; fire and de-forestation will finally exterminate the few survivors.

At a time when Australia had no humans, say 50, 60,000 years ago, the koala may well have been a different creature. Its present diet of gum-leaves is due to the burning of the original forest habitat. The lack of nutrients now available has caused the koala brain to shrink within its skull, and the little creature to become a fragile shadow of its former robust physiognomy.

Endless artificial, human-induced fire, has reduced the iconic koala to its present sad state; both its body and its environment impoverished. Perhaps, before the arrival of the fire-stick, the little sleepy-eyed, slow-moving creature was a robust, intelligent and active marsupial, with a brain more than twice the size, and a strong and vigorous body. A similar creature to the ground-dwelling wombat, which has retained its body-mass and intelligence, along with its diet.

Not just koalas. The magnificent remnants of the vast Australian jungle harbour much diversity. Should fire destroy those areas finally, after so many thousands of years, we have only ourselves to blame. being cavalier with our flames, and neglect of our duty to protect.

As with virtually all the ailments affecting this planet, humans are to blame, and overpopulation the accelerant . Even the tiny and diverse groups of tribespeople arriving by boat 50,000 years ago had a devastating effect on the fauna and flora of the place we now call Australia. And perhaps even the weather. This Queensland drought had its seed sown all that time ago, with the loss of the giant herbivores and endless, endless burning of the environment.

The Queensland and New South Wales drought, and the droughts that have affected the entire country for millennia, are going to oust us in the long run, unless we can put a stop to this maniacal burning.

Rain forest alone is the final barrier to burning of the bush. We must protect and enlarge that forest at all cost. We must spend this dwindling coal-bonanza on fleets of water-bombing aircraft stationed and ready at all major centres, to protect us AND the environment we rely on. An endless Queensland drought, such as we may at present be experiencing, will soon make it impossible for us to continue surviving. We can’t head to the hills; only to the far north and south………

                                ………………..Tassie here I come!

Queensland drought: THE VIABILITY OF AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES DEPENDENT ON RAINFALL

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CAN OUR COMMUNITIES SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE?  First published September 2019.

SURE, ARTIFICIAL, EXTERNALLY-FUNDED COMMUNITIES CAN SURVIVE in hostile environments; in Nevada, Dubai, Antarctica, for example, but what of our towns in Australia, when suddenly deprived of water?

Within three months of the start of this Queensland drought, water is being tankered-in to many townships.

The ramification of this current weather-stasis has not yet dawned on the Australian people. In particular, it has not impinged on the combined conscience of politicians. In general, it does not occupy space in newspapers, radio, television, or the internet. Yet.

Trucking water to a town! What? No alarm-bells ringing? No future foreseen?

Of course it had to be done: absolutely necessary, but the situation is more serious, the problem far greater than the immediate requirements of a township.

Extrapolate, extrapolate. Suppose this Queensland drought does NOT break. There is science to support open-endedness to this current climate period. There is no prediction of drought-breaking rain at any specific future. Right now, all media and policy should be focused on the possibility that water-supply is no longer guaranteed for the majority of settlements in Australia.

Not all centres of population are affected. The far North and South are at present beyond this Prolonged Weather Stasis pattern, and perhaps will receive higher-than-average rainfall. It is inevitable that these areas will suffer a major surge in growth due to the evacuation of waterless communities elsewhere. Curiously, the Northern Territory is losing population right now, perhaps because of the soaring temperatures of climate change, but its rainfall is so far guaranteed.

Bearing in mind the above, consider the ramification aspect.

Immediately, those towns shipping-in water will have reduced real-estate values. Likewise with fire-affected rural areas. The longer the drought, the worse the outlook. Jobs, infrastructure and population will disappear along with dam-levels Townships will become deserted within a surprisingly short time. It has happened before; there are ghost-towns in Australia, and some as a result of drought. 

Disaster is already near for dairy farmers, and this is no fear-mongering, it is happening right now. Small-crops, nurseries and orchards are in immediate danger, and bores are running dry. What on Earth will replace bore-water?

Folk being what they are, hope will have the majority hanging-on in the dogged expectation of better times. And it would certainly take courage to assess the situation critically and calmly, and conclude that a quick exit would be wise and beneficial.

We have experienced terrible hope-destroying drought in Australia before; read Henry Lawson for the awful tragedy affecting selectors. But this drought and its cause may be a situation never-before experienced by Europeans, and may even be the reason the Aboriginal population became peripatetic, forsaking farm practice.

The frustratingly-variable rainfall we all experience in Australia, and are resigned to, may be on the cusp of change for the worse: a sudden and permanent decrease. It is possible that the country has been through many similar episodes, and that the cause is continent-wide and on-going burning by humans, for 50,000 years. (See blog: ‘Will it ever rain again in Qld?)

The drying episodes are self-accelerating. After each prolonged drought, that is, a drought of longer than six months or much more, the desiccation of soil-moisture reaches a depth such that even deep-rooted species fail, never to return. We are perhaps experiencing such a hiatus. We must include ourselves, as a deep-rooted species. There is a limit to our hanging-on. At present there are no agencies stating that the drought WILL break: it will rain again, but that’s not the same thing. Will the ground-water ever be replaced, the bores run as before?

As with other recent blogs on this vital and current theme, I hope to hell I’m wrong. It would be the most marvellous relief to be proved to be a fear-mongering idiot, as a vast weather system rolls across the entire continent carrying steady, solid rain for week after week. No good praying, no good wishing, no good putting down more bores. If the rain does come, plant trees, trees, trees. And NOT eucalypts. They are  weeds, not trees.

Post Script, 12th December 2019: What a difference a few months makes to awareness of the severity of the situation. All news is now full of the drought. ABC news/weather yesterday mentioned ‘no break in the current pattern until April 2020. This is an increase by two months of the previous estimate. This putative date takes us past the period of our ‘normal’ summer rains and into what used to be the ‘dry’ winter.

The winter/summer rain patterns have broken down during the past decades; coastal Qld. and NSW no longer seem to experience the xmas thunderstorm deluges, nor the dry months of winter, although this concept is very much of the author’s memory. Nevertheless, should the dams and the soil continue desiccating, what then?

Seriously, no rain for a further five months, and an open-ended forecast, is a reason for drastic action by governments AND individuals. Think, think: what will YOU do?

Queensland drought: THE GRAB-BAG climate in Australia

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THE GRAB-BAG: symptom of the Queensland drought.

I SAILED ABOUT THE PLACE FOR TEN YEARS, in a lovely old ketch-rigged double-ender. Not in an adventurous way, mostly down the coast and back, seldom out of sight of land.

For fear of disaster, an ever-present trepidation affecting all wise sailors, I carried a grab-bag. A bag containing essentials necessary when abandoning ship and taking to the inflatable. Top of the list was the EPIRB. I won’t list the other contents, but you can imagine great thought went into the selection, and the immediate accessibility and portability of The Bag.

Those days are over for me, and a modern grab-bag now contains fantastic technology.

Well, I thought those days were over, but now, on hitherto safe dry land, the fear of disaster returns, and the grab-bag is ready again.

Now, today, the contents of the grab-bag are stacked near the back door, and they won’t fit into a bag, but must nevertheless be loaded into the car in a few minutes, ready to abandon ship.

The ship, in this case the house, could disappear in a roar of fifty-metre flame within minutes of any warning, though hopefully within hours. But you never know. Who will wake you in the dead of night?

The exit must be fast. No time for decision-making; choice must have been decided and packed in advance. What to take? Too late, too late, too late; just go, go go.

Who would have thought, this time last year, that such a situation could come about? What previous weather-pattern in our short European history could have set an example, a warning of possibility? There have been awful, prolonged Queensland drought in the past, but this looks different. This may be pattern-breaking; a drought that continues, continues.

In our subconcious, we wait for Christmas thunderstorms; every afternoon without fail. Without fail……..

Then the January rains, when the whole world is hot, and damp, and mouldy, the creeks are high and roofs leaking.

But this Christmas and January may be different. January, February and March may go past with only the occasional local wetting. Then on into the year, a year of no hope, hopeless. Our hope-gland run dry through over-use. Then what?

Already after just over three months since a warning from the BOM, (not broadcast, but simply stated) the possibilities are being examined by everyone. Some political parties are of course still in denial even now. The country is not yet on a war-footing, but soon……could this be the worst Queensland drought on record?

The prospect is ruinous. Turn off the rain, what survives?

Queensland drought: WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN in Qld. and NSW?

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WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN?

IS THIS QUEENSLAND DROUGHT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING?

PHILLIP ADAMS, THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, NOV 23-24 2019: The Gravity Of Water.

HE WRITES, ‘It will take a thousand millimetres to even dent the drought, let alone break it’. I tend to agree with him, invariably. Now you know my politics and philosophy.

A couple of days after reading his article, I had digested the implication of a metre of rain; he’s right, of course. We are unlikely to get a metre, of course. Of course.

On a previous blog under a similar heading I suggested that climate change occurs as a series of steps, not necessarily a gradual slope. I proposed that the tree-cover of any given area may not recover its former health after a prolonged drought, and that many species of vegetation may die out. Seeds sprouting after showers but killed-off in dry soil.

I considered that the the desertification of Australia occurred in this way, from the Centre to the extremities, with tropical and temperate forest retreating after each drought. (By forest I mean trees, not open grassland).

Phillip Adams’ insight: a thousand millimetres of rain, answers a few questions.

Rain after a prolonged Queensland drought does NOT return the situation to normal. Does not replace sub-surface moisture. Rain only instigates a Green Drought. Tree-cover is constantly using deep moisture to survive; the shallow-rooted species (gums, wattles) dry out and die first, but hang on as seedlings, for a while.

When the sub-soil is thoroughly dry, and the deep-rooted species finally die off, they will never return, unless their seeds have Phillip Adams’ metre of rain, in one, long, gentle episode: rain that will penetrate the sub-soil and hold a reservoir to nurture the survival of temperate-forest species.

Hence the drying-out of Australia. A prolonged drought, and there have been many, is not relieved by rain. Neither is it relieved by sudden torrential down-pours, and this is the forecast for the future in Australia, as predicted by the effect of global warming and climate change, and particularly Sudden Stratospheric Warming: fewer and heavier rain-events.

Perhaps the inadvertent but perceptive statement from Adams answers the conundrum of the drying of Australia. In a nutshell, after a prolonged drought, the situation does not return to normal, despite ensuing rain, even good rain. Tree-cover is only maintained by regular rain, dependable rain, whether light or torrential.

Tree-cover is also self-sustaining, to a great extent, barring human interference; artificial destruction (by burning) permanently alters the forest environment, and each fire-event impoverishes both the soil, the species, and the climate.

(For decades I watched the effect of the regular annual burn-offs of Mt Coot-Tha park in Brisbane. The result was a desolation of rotten old trees, no mulch and unviable stunted saplings. A few years of ‘neglect’ enabled straight, healthy sapling to survive with no scars; saplings that would eventually form a healthy forest of shapely trees. Then the burning started again.)

Our climate, long ago, sustained forest coast to coast in Australia, perhaps during the final era of the mega-fauna. The climate no doubt was variable sixty thousand years ago, with floods and droughts, but NOT with fire. Fires were rare and local, and caused only by lightning. Once humanity became widespread in tribes across the continent, and the large grazing species exterminated, and tree-cover regularly and universally burned, the destruction of habitat and consequently of climate, became inevitable.

Fragility is the word. Poke a stick at the environment, and who knows what the result will be. And it’s not just humanity poking the stick: we can’t be to blame for everything…..we haven’t been around that long. It is problematic to blame ourselves for global warming, but very possible. The climate as we think we know it has had many many drastic changes long before humanity existed. The effects of CO2 and its depletion, creation of oxygen, the changes in the Earth’s axis, the movement of the continents, ice ages, asteroid impact: the causes are many that we know of and surely we know little. Burning fossil fuel?

I should be most interested to be able to examine the overall vegetation of Australia during the era of the Megafauna, say 60,000 years ago, or at least before the arrival of humans. There is no doubt that, compared with the present, extensive forest and jungle would cover most, if not all of the continent.

Driving through hundreds, thousands of kilometres of impoverished Queensland landscape, on roads lined with sparse eucalypt and sclerophyl forest, one will often see, in a hillside cleft, a fragment of rain forest dark green against the surrounding grey. A patch of lush green containing no gum trees; hanging on despite the dry. Existing not because of a secret water-supply, but because it is inaccessible to fire. Even on Mt Coot-Tha itself, in the heart of suburban Brisbane, there is a tiny pocket of the original virgin forest surviving in a steep gully, never having been burned: a bright green remnant, a reminder of what Australia was like before Fire.

These tiny remnants once covered the whole country. Their very existence is proof. Even now, a long fire-free period would promote a small expansion of these pockets of tropical forest. This I see happening wherever fire is repressed for a long period, regardless of the rainfall. The dense, shady tropical areas of figs, tall bunias, kauries, hoop pines, vines and deep-rooted species will grow where at present dry bush exists, if, and only if fire is kept away. Those forests of dense shade suppress eucalypts, squeeze them out. Suppress fire too. But the boundaries of rain-forest are vulnerable, and shrink with each burn-off.

Soon the last of the koalas will be burned out of their habitat, either by design or accident. The eucalypts are fire-trees. The dense vine-forest with its clear underwood is resistant, but is reduced in area with every fire encroaching from the bush. The koala will soon be extinct in the wild, despite all conservation, because of inevitable fire; there is no safeguard. Fire is inseparable from humanity; it’s what we do.

There is, then, no doubt whatsoever that the depletion of tropical forest and vine forest, and perhaps thousands of species that depended of those forests, is due solely to deliberately-lit fires. And this for at least 50,000 years. Is this Queensland drought likely to be the worst on record, and is it due to the culmination of centuries of incendiary habits?

The extent of those original pre-human forests is unknown, but may well have covered the entire continent, excepting the grass-land created by the giant herbivores. Dense tree-cover promotes rainfall, soil-conservation, and soil-moisture. Gum-species deplete the whole environment; they are the weeds that survive on the wasteland, contributing nothing, promoting fire.

Here’s a plan, a start, a reparation………Isolate the tropical remnants from fire by gum-clearing and slashing, and those remnants will grow outwards and thrive. Start at the urban centres and work outward. The recent horrific fires are nearly all eucalypt-based. Gum-trees retained in and near housing: crazy. Get rid of them, plant figs, for example; there are hundreds of varieties. Big, shady, undergrowth-killing figs. Within twenty years a park-like garden free of weeds and lantana could surround outlying homes.

So, there’s no doubt in my mind. Science will catch up and prove me right or wrong, but those tiny patches of green in a wasteland of burned landscape show what once existed. How far did the green extend, long, long ago. Perhaps to the Now-Dead Heart of the country…………

Here’s a question. That tiny remnant of original vegetation, surviving in a cleft of rock on Mt Coot-Tha: just how long ago did it extend in every direction, right to The Bay, everywhere? Are there ancient stumps or even roots surviving of pre-fire years, which can be dated? We assume that the landscape of this area has always looked the same, but it has not. The endless tracts of eucalypt-forest are recent; but how recent? 500 years? 5000 years?

Take an area which has never been totally obliterated by regular human-lit fire: the Blackall Range, 100km north of Brisbane in Queensland. It could not be burned-out because the dense tree-cover had no combustible undergrowth sufficient to provide the heat, plus a generally moist humus even during drought. Not obliterated by fire, but by tree-clearing European farmers, exactly dateable, and recent. Now the rainfall has even deserted this once-green oasis: are we surprised? Now the fires have access, finally.

We cannot both clear land and have rainfall-plus-topsoil; an impossible situation.

One metre of rain in one long, gentle event. I can’t see it happening. But I hope. However imagine the complaints; we’d all be praying to our mythical gods for sunshine. More than  a week of rain would turn us all into Poms.

 

 

 

 

 

Queensland drought: WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN in Central Queensland and New South Wales?

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WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN? WILL THIS QUEENSLAND DROUGHT EVER BREAK? First published Nov 21 2019.

Of course it will.

WILL IT EVER RAIN SUFFICIENTLY AGAIN ?

Possibly not.

OUR CLIMATE IS NOTORIOUS; ‘land of drought and flooding rains’, but the overall trend is to more drought and less rain. Concerning rain, it seems the events are as regular as ever, within the limits of our short history of weather-recording, but the amount of rain that falls during those events seems to be diminishing. Rain periods are increasing in intensity and decreasing in duration.

As a large island in the middle of a vast roaring ocean and huge weather-systems, it is a mysterious fact that usually these systems swirl around Australia like a river around a rock. As if the land-mass repels the rain-clouds.

In the Northern Hemisphere, for example, the lands exposed to to the Atlantic Ocean and the prevailing Westerlies, are constantly soaked as rain-clouds roll on their course. Those clouds do not veer away, leaving Ireland as a desert.

The Westerlies that could bring regular soaking rain to the exposed Australian coast almost always are repelled by the land. A constant feature of satellite images of Australia shows cloud-formations swirling around and away from the coast, seldom crossing the country. Why is this so? What phenomenon diverts the prevailing gyres away from the land-mass?

One would expect this continent, which sits un-sheltered in the midst of swirling storms, to be a land of constant tropical rains, and carpeted with jungle from coast to coast. And those jungles do exist in North Queensland, as do giant eucalypts in Tasmania, but the majority of the country is desert-dry, and the coastal fringe not much greener.

It is true that high mountain ranges cause local rainfall, and that most of Australia is flat. As Henry Lawson says in Some Popular Australian Mistakes, ‘There are no “mountains” out West, only ridges on the floors of hell’.  Rainclouds that do penetrate the coastline continue on their course without  interruption, retaining their moisture, causing deserts. This is the current reasoning.  However, the very aspect of this land features water-leveled plains, and where small hills and ranges do exist there are wide valley-bottoms; all created by rainfall of huge extent. To form a level plain out of mountain ranges requires not time, of which there is plenty, but non-stop rainfall. At one time, every level plain bounded by ranges of hills must regularly have flooded to great depth, in order to both erode the hills and deposit the flood-silt.

These floodings obviously have not occurred within any geological period recognised, and  possibly not since human settlement. To extend the puzzle, Australian coal-fields certainly are dateable, to when the country existed in a different location on the planet, in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, with weather of staggering rainfall.

Our planet has changed as CO2 has been depleted. Vegetation is less successful. But why, in certain defined areas, has rainfall either decreased or increased dramatically? Australia has definitely lost most of its rainfall. Has this been a sudden or a gradual decline? Is rainfall itself governed to any extent by CO2 levels? What is the real reason for the Queensland drought today?

Why do these  events happen? When one area of the globe suffers a prolonged period of rain, and another area drought? And why is Australia becoming progressively more dry? Climate agencies have since the 1950s benefited from increasing scientific data, as can be seen from the proliferation of weather-based acronyms, and the predictions are worrying. Adverse climate-change seems to be our fault. But the long-term history of climate needs to be examined.

So, considering this, the long-term; given sufficient rainfall, any area of sterile sand will grow massive forest; no soil-nutrients necessary, no humus formed. Rainfall equals tree-cover in warmer climates. Where has the rain gone in Australia? It used to be there, and has gone; shrunk to the north and south extremities, and still shrinking, it seems, even in our short recorded history. And the Queensland drought rolls on.

Note, recorded.

The ocean gyres of rain-clouds avoid the land-mass of Australia. Why? What is the repellent force that steers most rain away from the coast? Why, sometimes, do rain-formations actually traverse Australia, bucking the trend? How much, and why, does Sudden Stratospheric Warming change our weather, and how permanent are these changes? The Drying of Australia is a problem yet to be solved.

Not ‘where’ has the rain gone, but ‘why’.

Weather forecasting and prediction of rainfall-trends in Australia is based on information collected from 1900, with accuracy increasing from about 1950. The trends are there to be accessed by all, the patterns of change apparent. But what of pre-industrial trends, and pre-settlement 50,000 years ago? What has been happening to the climate of Australia prior to human occupation?

Mention was made of the floods affecting Brisbane in 2010/2011, in a previous blog.  A small area received water-bourne silt to a depth varying between ten and twenty centimetres. Valuable top-soil, but un-appreciated by the recipients. All the current agricultural plains in Australia were created this way: deep floods and deposited silt.  The critical question: are these deposits dateable? Is there a signature within the silt-layer which could be translated to a year, or era? We have an excellent test-sample to examine within the Yerongpilly and surrounding area in Brisbane. This top-soil was created exactly in 2011. Other floods at other places since European settlement have left dateable silt.

Excavation of any level plain will reveal strata of silt deposits which may be measured for each flooding event, from surface to bedrock, with possible interruptions due to meandering creek-beds, etc.. But can these individual deposits be dated? If so, the information would give a true and exact record of climate and its change over time. We would discover real trends prior to industry, to European settlement, and to human occupation, and major questions could be answered concerning the drying of any area and the time-scale involved.

Information of climate trends prior to, and during these three periods is vital to current concept of climate. Can this information be accessed through geology? Radiocarbon and photoluminescence dating is apparently difficult for shallow silt layers exposed at the surface. Dating of surviving vegetable material is possible and accurate, but rarely available, especially at depth.

The dating of each flood-deposit layer, and an estimation of the depth of floodwater responsible, would open a window onto the real climate of the past at any time and place, and answer so many questions concerning our responsibility for climate-change.

How informative to actually know the date and extent of the rains that caused the deposits of silt on valley farm-land. And the pattern of floods through time, from most recent to ancient. Can it be done? Is it possible?

Queensland drought: PROLONGED WEATHER STASIS AUSTRALIA chapter 2

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SUDDEN STRATOSPHERIC WARMING and THE QUEENSLAND DROUGHT. First published Nov 8 2019.

The Sudden Stratospheric Warming event over the Antarctic Region is the likely cause of the current Prolonged Weather Stasis affecting the central latitudes of Australia.

Predicted about three months ago by the Met Office as lasting until ‘Possibly January or February 2020′ this event continues to suppress rainfall generally, despite the occasional local showers giving false hope to those recipients.

My previous blog on the subject outlines the possible effect of Prolonged Weather Stasis, or PWS, on Queensland drought. Sadly the predictions are so far becoming reality for rural townships, graziers and all farmers within the affected zone, which includes most of the coastal fringe excepting the far North and South, and Tasmania; these areas may actually receive more than average rainfall.

As I wrote previously, graziers are de-stocking cattle at an alarming rate, of necessity, there being no feed. Dairy farmers likewise are downsizing, every dry day bringing disaster closer. These are the initial preventative measures in a situation which is daily becoming worse, and these are the businesses which are first affected. As PWS continues, more and more ventures and industries will be forced to close, an accelerating cascade of unemployment throughout the community, as inter-dependent services collapse.

City-dwellers are far from exempt. Critical to the well-being of our communities is the level of water in the dams. At present we have excellent storage in the major dams, and should this tide us over until rain resumes we should thank the original planners and designers for their foresight. If rain events do not resume, diminishing dam levels will become a nightmare for us all, with no viable solution except drastic rationing. Should even that fail, the last option, which should be implemented immediately, right now, Friday the Eighth of November, is the building of coastal de-salination plants: hundreds of them.

De-salination has successfully provided water for coastal market-garden greenhouses, utilising evaporation and condensation of piped sea-water direct to the growers, returning the salt-rich brine to the ocean.

Households can subsist on a relatively tiny water supply…..after severe education and rabid policing, but industry and essential services need massive quantities, which may simply not be available. Think of the staggering volume required by breweries, shock, horror. But this is serious. Industries, to remain viable, must oust residential areas from our coastline in order to operate on desalinated water, though pipelines may span distance. This situation is, of course, going to cost everyone.

As I write, dam levels are dropping. If my forward-planning is a false alarm, so be it. A double pipeline was constructed years ago to pump treated sewage-water from Luggage Point to Tarong Power Station. Excellent fore-sight for exactly this situation.

Well, not this situation exactly, for we may be on the cusp of suffering a far worse outcome. An open-ended Queensland drought.

The weeks pass. The rainy season approaches, many believe, and hold their breath. A month or so and we’ll be at Mid-Summer. We may wait and hope, but action is needed immediately, for this year, The Rains may never arrive. Then what will we do?

Politicians flutter and seem to not be aware of the catastrophe facing huge areas of the country. All are currently and rightly horrified at the fire-devastation which can never be controlled, and may affect every community within cooee of a tree, or a paddock.  But this is just the initial sign of worse to come, although having your house burned down is pretty bad. Once the trees have gone there will be a period of realisation, as townships, one after the other become no longer viable: no water supply. No farm. No industry. No job. No mortgage repayments. Shops with very expensive food. The thought-process of extrapolation from events happening right now are very scary, although we watch the nightly news with comfortable trepidation. Soon each of us may be directly affected; time will tell, but really, there’s little we can do to help ourselves, and nothing we can do to change the weather.

 

Queensland drought: SUDDEN STRATOSPHERIC WARMING AUSTRALIA

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Sudden Stratospheric Warming and the result:

PROLONGED WEATHER STASIS, AUSTRALIA AND THE QUEENSLAND DROUGHT. First published Sept 16 2019

Queensland and NSW drought, September 2019, possible prognosis.

In Queensland and New South Wales we are experiencing a period of sunny days, not unusual in normal years. However, this is not a normal year.

Due to the rare phenomenon of Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) over the Antarctic, the immediate effect is stagnation of local climate in its current mode: absence of cloud, the satellite images  showing no foreseeable rain events.

Prediction of effect and duration, due to the scarcity of previous SSW events in the Southern Hemisphere, is at present  educated guesswork based on Northern Hemisphere knowledge, but the relatively small land-mass and vast ocean may cause a different outcome.

It is thought that the southern parts of South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand could be affected, with cold, wet or snow to the southern extremities (Tasmania, NZ South Island, etc..) rain to the north (Cape York), and static drought and cool conditions between.

Queensland is being affected now. Already, the loss of water supply in many townships is imminent. Maintaining these areas will soon become a logistical problem with perhaps no solution, other than importing water in road tankers and instigating savage restrictions. Long-term pipe-line construction may be immediately considered.

The principal and un-answerable question is: how long will this Queensland drought last? So little information on the effect and duration of Sudden Stratospheric Warming in the southern hemisphere makes prediction most uncertain. The Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, tentatively forecasts current dry conditions until December/January, but this is of necessity guesswork.

We are in Queensland currently experiencing an event for the first time in our short technological history, though no doubt common in past eras. For the past twenty years the graph of rainfall has been trending downwards, despite occasional blips. Records for 100 years prior make assessment of trends confusing, but simple observation of geographic features make obvious the fact that large creek-beds and alluvial levels suggest that floods were massive and regular in the past.

But when was that past? In living memory creeks regularly flooded fifty years ago, but not since. Perhaps flood-plain building is a more recent phenomenon than thought. The last Brisbane flood deposited ten to twenty centimetres of alluvial silt in a small suburban area upstream from the city. There was no flooding downstream; river banks contained the flow.

Previous floods within the past 180 years were similar, but nothing compared with the massive plain-building events of the un-documented past.

Perhaps SSW in the past caused small-scale ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’ events, altering the climate at each stage, wetter or drier. Our tree-cover in Queensland is variously fragile. Right now, September 16th 2019, in, for example, the Toowoomba area, some eucalypts and wattles are on the point of dessication; a not unusual event. Within one day, as roots dry out, leaves hang limp: the tree is dead. The more substantially-rooted species last longer.

Once this stage has been reached, without rain, more trees die, the most susceptible first. Bleached white gums are the tombstones of previous dry periods, a condition we consider normal now in our recent history. Perhaps Aboriginal experience would shed light on the true situation. Fire and drought have no doubt reduced original rain- and vine-forest to the present small fraction, eucalypts once being in the minority.

Right now we are on the cusp of a Queensland drought which may not fit the ‘normal’ pattern, but which may continue over a vast area  for months. Neither water-supplies nor tree-cover can survive so long. This event may well be an example of previous sudden droughts which destroyed so much rain-forest, not as a result of climate-change over thousands of years, but of sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis (SPWS); in this case drought. Six rainless months would just about kill all vegetation, leaving only seeds.

There are perhaps other examples on the planet of Prolonged Weather Stasis caused by SSW. One most obvious caused the extinction of the remaining woolly mammoths in Siberia. The startling discovery of these beasts encased in what until recently was permanent ice, revealed that they died in situ, where they were grazing. This astounding fact has only one meaning: on one single particular day, whilst the beasts were feeding, it was snowing, AND IT NEVER STOPPED. They became snow-bound, then suffocated where they stood, to be encased in a never-ending snowfall: the weather was locked in one mode.

Sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis could be to blame for many situations where civilisations small and large disappeared, leaving their cities intact. It is assumed their water supply failed, both for crops and dwellings. A dwindling supply would suggest a gradual decline of viable agriculture and consequent deterioration of buildings due to the population shrinkage, but a city deserted intact requires a sudden and permanent weather event. Otherwise it would be re-occupied.

There is also the possibility that sudden PWS is not an event after which the climate returns to normal. These events may be the tipping-points from which there is no return. We may be seeing, in Australia, not a gradual desertification from the Red Centre outwards, but a stepped series of drying-events from which the land does not recover its previous vegetation.

There are, around the planet, possible cases of SSW causing massive and continuing rain with its attendant disaster; the weather in fixed mode until SSW dissipates

So, what are we in for, here in Queensland? The next few months will tell. Extrapolating from the worst case is too dismal and obvious to describe, and calls for immediate action from engineers and planners from all Australian cities to solve what may be very long-term problems.

However, the effect of sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis on farming will be a disaster. We may be able to supply domestic water, but not food. Already, within weeks of the last small rain, there is no feed for cattle, all of which are, as I write, on their way to abattoirs. Dairy cows on many farms have no feed or no water, or neither. They may have to be culled soon. A fleet of cattle-trucks is on the road as I write.

Land-crops may be a tragedy; plant- nurseries surviving for a time on underground water. Infrastructure may survive until better times, but where will the farmers be then?

We can only hope that the present outlook is indeed temporary, and Sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis  is in fact not ‘prolonged’, but just a blip on the radar of our rather unsatisfactory climate.

Andy Jenner.