Geez Chris, if this load of tosh is the best the WWF's Conservation Programme Director can come up with, then the planet really is in strife.

You run the usual arguments about one season of hurricanes in one region being proof of extreme weather events being caused by global climate change and then suggest that world needs to do something about it. Exactly what it is remains unclear, except that it has to be something.

This is the problem with the WWF and other well-meaning green groups. They're good at beating up an issue, but kinda lacking on the details when it comes to feasible responses. Simplistic sloganeering maybe OK in undergraduate student politics, but it doesn't cut it in the real world.

In order to take beetr care of the environment that sustains us, misguided biologists need first to learn about Applied Mathematics and in particular, Statistical Thermodynamics.

Australian scientist, Tim Flannery said that the pessimism of Professor James Lovelock's evaluation, described by The Independent as the bleakest assessment yet of the effects of climate change by a leading scientist, was due to the British scientist's ''pessimism'' about the political inaction of the major polluting nations.
Dr Flannery said the world still had "one to two decades" to take action to reduce global warming, despite Professor Lovelock's warning that billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as we know it would be unlikely to survive.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/flannery-sets-deadline-to-save-world/2006/01/17/1137260034863.html

Comment:

Thermodynamics predicts that a quasi closed system like our biosphere will be pumped to higher and higher levels of ORDER and complexity the more that energy is put into the system.

The 100 year-out scenarios painted by these two frustrated scientists clearly approaches a thermodynamic equilibrium, where less energy is available and less effective work can be performed by living creatures or machines.
This is just contrary to the thermodynamics involved and clearly, as the so called global warming is already happening AND our civilisation is getting more complex and sophisticated every year, this simple science is largely proving itself.

Further, these two scientists continue to confuse global warming and climate change. That is a most annoying habit for two so called eminent scientists. Global warming is a thermodynamic state that has the biosphere approaching a thermal equilibrium where chaos rules and little useful work can be performed.
Climate change is a thermodynamic movement of ENTROPY in the world's oceans from low entropy formations in the tropics and off deserts towards huge coastal wastewater pollution plumes. Atmospheric pollution is less than 10% of the thermodynamic imbalance and thus only 10% of the problem. Curbing air emissions should be about stopping TOXIC gases and particulates from entering our bodies, not about saving the world from harmless natural gases like methane and CO2

If Flannery and Lovelock want to worry about something, If they want to take care of the environment, they should consider:

1. The explosive combination of Peak Oil and Greenspanian economic promotion of overpopulated cities. This is the only thing (apart from a meteor) that can destroy mankind --- essentially internecine fights over scarce oil reserves by Rwanda-fied first world populations.

2. The localised climate change effects from accelerating coastal development, mining, industry and agriculture and resultant growing pollution plumes and dead zones in adjacent seas. These changes, from now, will accrue way too fast for any GW theory to explain because of the greater heat capacity of oceans. And these climate changes will contract sharply within just a few years if coastal margins become protected from unabated wastewaters.

These two problems remain a double edged swinging blade above our corporal being as it is hog tied to the table of economic imperative.
It will not be the end of our race, but its consequences will be unimaginably abhorrent to all but a few corporate executives, the odd military man and enthusiastic politicians.

The solution for biologists and Greenpeace, is not to chase down whaling vessels but rather to:

1. Attack any politician in the world today who promotes population growth in large cities, for whatever reason.

2. Attack any source of untreated wastewater being emitted into coastal seas, especially where big dead zones are forming and where mining or agriculture operations are prominent

When I saw Flannery's response to the Lovelock's article, I laughed out loud. Of course we have another ten or twenty years to address the problem of global warming. Of course it isn't too late to reverse the damage we have inflicted on the planet. Of course we have to "keep up hope". Otherwise, who would pay all the scientists, environmentalists and their hangers-on for their vast range of forecasts, prognostications and survival theories? They would all be out of a job in an instant, wouldn't they?

For better or worse, we have created, and live in, a society that has been built on certain economic theories. And economists still cling to the belief that we act out of enlightened self-interest when faced with problems such as this, and spend their time on schemes such as carbon trading.

Reality is somewhat different. We are greedy, we are selfish, we are living far beyond our ecologically-responsible means. We actually know this, deep down, but can only see as far as our next overseas vacation, when we vaguely consider the effect on that ozone-layer thingy of the tonnes of damaging emissions we create as we jet off to Thailand.

All the research in the world won't convince us to change our ways, if we don't believe it will hurt us in our lifetime. We are fully accustomed to delegating the thinking and doing stuff to the government - isn't that democracy? Isn't that why we elected them, to decide what is best for us? So tell us what to do, Mr Prime Minister, that's what we pay you for.

One small problem. In order to get elected, a political party has to talk to us through our wallets. They sure as hell ain't going to tell us we have to change our ways, otherwise they will be out of a job too.

So that's where enlightened self-interest has led us. To a place where we just cover our ears and keep saying "I can't hear you I can't hear you la la la la I can't hear you."

Have a nice day.

I see KEAP has us all in dirty water again. Find a life.

From the time of our putative ancestor "Lucy" some three million years ago until the present, climate has been changing: There have been dramatic differences between the good and the bad intervals. So why should we be urged to get excited at the prospect of change now? Maybe the degree of excitement, or lack of it, depends upon an individual's faith, science, common sense, hope - or a mixture of them in relation to the folowing:
Of the last 50,000 years, only during the last 10,000 has climate been sufficiently benign, continuously, for the development of agriculture. And geological trends indicate it is almost time for that to come to an end.
Ten thosand years ago pressure on their environment would have been from less than two million people. We are now 6.5 billion: both we and our life styles consume raw materials and excrete waste products at a much higher rate and, having nowhere else to throw waste, we crap in our own kitchen. All added to by numbers increasing at 1.3 per cent.
We have fossil-fuel dependency. For two hundred years it has fed technological development, transport, and agriculture. Only it has enabled the world to increase human numbers over that period from 1 to 6.5 billion. And it is reaching its limits for present numbers.
But amazingly most environmental writers neglect to mention population pressure as the fundamental driver of environmental decline. Yes, we can improve our habits. And we need to do it quickly. But the rate of those improvements has to be greater than the rate of human increase. That is not happening. Furthermore, the right to social equity, in order to minimise conflict, has to spread world wide. But, to take the necessary steps to defer catastrophic climate change's arrival, this equity is not possible for anything like present numbers, let alone the expected extra.
Why, Chris Hails, do you belabor us with details while expunging the foundations of the problem from your article. Is this neglect because you are an ambulance chaser rather than a disaster preventer?

We have a state of flux regarding sea levels, climate and extreme weather on a local front. The global crust itself is slowly changing and humans were always under threat living on the margins. The world was never a perfect place.

Rising populations depending on the margins is the issue today, not Greenhouse.

Greenhouse is only a threat if we can’t adapt to high density living in fragile places however many people believe Greenhouse will become the issue soon as more margins succumb to attack by the elements in any transition.

An accelerated attack is likely if nature can’t restore the balance quickly. Environmental vandalism will certainly add to our problems like deforestation of tropical and other areas where sudden rainfall and floods will remove the very fertility we depend on.

When do we act as dampers? Only when we are part of the flotsam! Some things are not immediately recycled either and we stink.

Living on seaside sand dunes, cays and piers, steep woody hillsides, even mountain tops must be at best a calculated risk. The world at large owes us nothing; we need to realize that before we find our true perspective in any disaster.

A smart emergency service should know no boundaries.

Another broad-brush environmental article with no mention of population. The closest Chris Hails comes is “human activities”.

The single most inexplicable thing that I have come across in 20 years of environmental lobbying is this extraordinary lack of expression and action from environmental groups on population size and growth. WWF, Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation, etc, etc have all been woeful in this regard. It does not compute. They are all just a bunch of “ambulance chasers”

Like too many (if not all) other UN expensive opuses produced upon sixty-year history of this comfortably nesting the privileged-from-around-a-globe organization, the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Kyoto protocol are contemporary toys for international bureaucracy only with no practical long-term outcome at all as to be concluded in the next century by still remembering these papers, some defined number of experts in history of international affairs.

“Where was security when the floodwaters wrecked New Orleans? We thought we had the engineering prowess to build a city on a silt-based river delta, interrupting the natural deposition cycle and lulling hundreds of thousands of people into the false sense of security that it was OK to live next to and below sea-level” - it is not a false sense of security, it is false assumption based on pure false rationalization and ignorance of locally collected data. The Netherlands are still in situ as many other places.

“A stable, sound environment will not guarantee safety in the wake of colossal natural disasters - like the Asian tsunami or American hurricane - but the evidence is there before us that it reduces the risks” – playing English at Australian / some other universities and international/UN meetings for overpaid instead engineering the creative applied solutions is a weak response to disasters that are already a part of of environment.

“The United Nations took the threat seriously enough to establish a high-level panel on challenges to global threats and security” – that is exactly what it is good for: spending money on own wages rather than on development projects.

Unfortunately those concerned with environmental sustainability are genuine pacifists, while whose that champion economic growth are more than happy to use whatever force is required to achieve it.
At what stage of global deterioration do we become aggressive in our quest to save the world, Or will we meekly protest peacefully until the end?

Hails: "By the time enough scientific data has accumulated for scientists to state with confidence that climate change is to blame, we may have experienced many more Katrinas."

This seems to be another example of the scientific method as interpreted by greens. Perhaps the data won't show what you presume to be true.

Hails: "This is a pity because we know that climate change is giving us more extreme weather events."

No, we don't.

As for the finding that more human lives were lost in areas where there was human activity than in mangrove swamps, well, is that supposed to be surprising?

I am quite tired of these kind of articles that leverage human tragedy to push an agenda and pull in some money. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake, which if anything should show that, far from being the fragile, delicate mother the greens brand it as, the earth is more powerful than us, and our best defense against such disasters is human engenuity.

And what on earth is a post-tsunami world?

Lizardman, a “genuine pacifists” is not synonymous to not thinking really of data collated. Playing someone emotions is a very common thing by manipulating a reality.

if global atmospheric warming is occurring so would global atmospheric pressure.
pv=nrt
volume could be assumed to be fixed by gravity and escape velocity .

if temperature increases then atmospheric pressure should be increasing on a directly proportionate basis .

could someone point to stats/data that confirms or explain why the data doesn't confirm this?

Yeah, Earth de facto is an open system. That is why, I think.

No, we don't need to take better care of the environment that sustains us, We NEED A COMPLETE OVERHAUL. The reasons for this are locked up in complex Physics and Statistical Thermodynamics so the solution has been hidden.

The Key to Australia's natural environmental wealth and carrying capacity is, believe it or not, our deserts. Deserts provide the heat engine (entropy) that drives coastal ecosystems.

Currently, all the heat from deserts is dissipated without any retention. We call this climate change. Retention of energy is needed to create constant ENTROPY gradients between Australia's centre and coastal areas.
Heat energy is best retained in internal areas in large, slow flowing bodies of water and in Wetlands. Most of Australia's wetlands have been bulldozed for farming and urban development so heat flows too quickly to coastal margins, taking all the moisture it can suck out of the soil. This phenomenon is clearly visible on TV weather maps. You frequently see throbbing Low pressure zones say off the coast of Sydney. These throbbing zones act like a thermodynamic heartbeat in pumping moisture from the low entropy centre of Australia to the open sea where it does no man or beast any good.

A network of 10,000 2 acre Engineered wetlands is required at strategic basins throuhghout the interior of Australia to retain moisture and all important sustainable Entropy gradients to coasts. This will cost about $5 billion but will save $3 billion in agriculture lost to drought each year. It will also significantly decrease bushfire events, another cost saving.

Additionally, an $800 million project for a solar desalination plant to pump water from Port Augusta to Lake Torrens and Lake Eyre would cool a significant area of South Australia such that important rain bearing winds from the Great Australian Bight will NOT be deflected towards the Tasman sea. The probability that moisture would be directed to inland SA Victoria and NSW becomes higher under a flooded Lake EYRE scenario.

michael, why is it then that nasa scientists are able to publish findings of global warming of pluto based on rising atmospheric pressure. surely pluto would be an open system too?

Let you check a Pluto's reality yourself, mate..................

Kaep's plan to cool the centre of Australia via large ponds is a really magical idea. And it is not the first time the suggestion has been raised for getting water permanently into Lake Eyre.
Kaep suggests putting fresh water into it. That adds an extra dimensin to a problem that is already tricky enough.
Let's just contemplate those earlier ideas: let the seawater trickle downhill into lake Eyre, as it is below sea level.
What sort of a channel would be needed, and how fast would the water have to run?
Lake Eyre (North Lake Eyre is 177kmX77km; Lake Eyre South, 64kmX24km)covers a substantial area - roughly 15,000 square kilometres. It is about 18 metres below sea level.
Average annual rainfall there is about 0.13 metres; evaporation 3.30 metres. That gives an average nett loss to evaporation on exposed water surfaces of 3.17 metres for Lake Eyre.
If the lakes are going to be kept full, there needs to be an annual input of (15,000X3.17) cubic kilometers of water.
It is a big project, so let's think big and dig a decent channel - say a kilometer wide. As there is only a drop of 18 metres, it is not much use having the channel more than 10 metres deep.
A kilometer length of such a channel would contain a packet of (1X1Xone hundredth)cubic kilometers of water; i,e., one hundredth.
To keep pace with evaporation, every year (15,000X3.17)X100 packets would have to pass aong the channel from the sea to Lake Eyre.
Each packet would have some 9 minutes in which to make the trip, which is about 400 kilometres.
Some two and a half thousand kilometres per hour is a bit fast for laminar flow in fluids - the turbulence could cause erosion in the channel.

Colin,

Nice diss attempt.

Readers may want to consider:

* It is 300 Km from the deepest part of L Eyre to Pt Augusta.

* An initial project will seek to flood the canal and L Eyre. An area only big enough to be covered by shadecloth will be flooded. The cloth design will control evaporation rate and collect condensation to water 3 strata of native vegetation along the channel and around any flooded areas.

* The extent of area cooling will initially be small. It will grow in line with revegetation of watered areas about the project.

* Revegetation will be extensive and an important part of the planning will be to involve volunteers and schools in a program to 'Reseed the Heart'.

* As well as the canal, some piping will be required to pump water to selected sites for revegetation.

* The project would begin with a pilot study in L Torrens to test the solar desal concept, the shadecloth, the amount of evaporation and its impact on localised natural precipitation, the revegetaion regimes and the provision of water to local farmers and tribal stakeholders.

* Lake Eyre WAS permanently flooded some 10,000 years ago when the area was burgeoning with life. There is a precedent for this project's success. How far we can return the area to that ancient condition and its ultimate impact on climate in the eastern states will need to be assessed via modelling and by the pilot project described. The stakes are high for this country and it will require some bold leadership to reach deep into the continent's history to reseed the heart of Australia.

* And as confucius said " A journey of a thousand miles (or 300Km) begins with a single step".

One more pointon on a prescriptive flooding of L Eyre:

The concept of utilising the dry salt lakes of Sth Australia as a Thermodynamic traffic cop to direct coastal precipitation bands deep into the eastern states on a far more regular basis, is an entirely new mode of thinking.

Previous historical contemplations of flooding L Eyre were soley to do with Sth Australian agriculture and in particular sheep grazing.
The limited scope of these contemplations was the reason they never came to fruition. The cost/benefit ratios were not worth the risk.

The thermodynamic analysis I have initiated plus modern materials technology, reduces risk to an acceptyable level particularly in conjunction with preliminary modelling and a pilot test scheme.

Kaep, if desalinated water is to be introduced to Lake Eyre, I suppose that the salt is going to be dug up and removed.
That will not please the likes of Donald Campbell and Eric Warby in their quests for a place to try for new land speed records.

There must be an error in your calculations, colinsett
Here's how I calculated it.

The area of Lake Eyre is 9500 square kilometers
9500*1000*1000 = 9,500,000,000 square metres
9,500,000,000 * 3 = 2.85*10^10 cubic metres of evaporation per year
(the rate of evaporation from the full lake is actually closer to 2 metres, but lets assume it's 3 m)

So at least that much has to flow through the canal to keep it full.
(2.85*10^10) / 365.25 = 78,028,747.43 cubic metres per day
78,028,747.43 / 24 = 3,251,197.81 cubic metres per hour
3,251,197.81 / 60 = 54,186.63 cubic metres per minute
54,186.63 / 60 = 903.11 cubic metres per second

If the canal was 1km wide and 10m deep it's cross sectional area would be 10,000 square metres. Therefore, the rate of water movement through the canal is:
903.11 / 10,000 = 0.0903 metres per second

0.09 metres per second (0.325 km/h) is so slow you might not notice it flowing even if you were standing in it. The canal could be only 100m wide and the rate of flow would still be less than 1 metre per second.

So the idea of flooding Lake Eyre with seawater is not unrealistic. In fact, the ground between Spencer Gulf and Lake Eyre is almost ideal for it. The canal can run through the bed of Lake Torrens, which is only 8 metres above sea level. The canal can be sea level for almost the whole distance, with a weir at the Lake Eyre end to regulate the flow into the lake. The only pumping needed is to pump water back out of Lake Eyre to keep the salt concentration from getting too high.

Using desalinated water is not an option. The cost to desalinate that much sea water would be astronomical. Using sea water will get the job done as far as evaporation & climate change goes. Lake Eyre is naturally a salt water environment anyway, with natural salt concentrations that are many times higher than sea water.

Geek100,

Nice analysis on L Eyre.

I did some calcs on pumping brine out of L Eyre. It appears to be long term unsustainable. But if you don't pump it out, the project only has a 50 year life till the Lake is fully silted up.

I felt that the answer is to use a network of many 1-5 acre engineered wetlands (EWBs) specialised for the dry,hot conditions. This includes the use of shadecloths and multi-tiered vegetation specific to the area to regulate evaporation to optimal levels.
This strategy keeps local stakeholders and greenies happier and opens up some possibilities that are not at first obvious.

* This year should see Eyre flooded from the Nth with fresh water from Cyclone Larry. A pilot patchwork desal EWB setup could investigate the propensity not only to direct precipitation to eastern states but also to attract monsoonal bands closer to Sth Australia. The run off from closer monsoonal activity could hit the Cooper river and keep L. Eyre in fresh water on a more permanent basis. The pilot would determine what level of EWB networking was required to kick start this phenomena. It is important to remember that there is a historical precedence for mechanisms like this when the Lake was the centre of a burgeoning Great Artesian Basin.

* The desal required for such a pilot would still need a large volume rate of water. But the heat over L Torrens is a bonus because special black sheet evaporation infrastructure there could produce the fresh water required relatively cheaply, pipe it on its way downhill to L Eyre, and pump brine a lesser distance back to Pt Augusta. Additionally, this desal evaporation process itself will be a significant thermodynamic cooling for Sth Australia.

Again I estimate a pilot-study would cost around $100 million and if it turns up positive results a serious-infrastructure will cost around $800 million. The agri Benefit to eastern states could be up to $3 billion per year, at least equal to that of the Snowy scheme along the Murray which is essentially a natural-solar-desal-operation over-a-similar-land-area.

Reading this simplistic math is a real fun as calculations reflected primitive non-engineering approach of amateurs being eventually employed by similar mates of their at appropriate well-paid positions.

However, even Australian-educated so-called professionals, recently graduated especially, too often do not know elementary water/sanitation engineering patterns used round a globe routinely but play computers.

That is why overseas-qualified recognized members of the Institution of Engineers Australia might predominantly dream only of being employed locally if they are non-Anglo-Celts particularly.

Speechifying of ungrateful migrants not happy gardening and cleaning toilets in Australia is common in this forum.

MichaelK,

Tortured grammar aside, do you have any evidence to support your ridiculous claims that large multi-disciplinary infrastructure projects like flooding Lake Eyre are all about ENGINEERING.

Get real, Engineers will get a slice of the pilot PILOT project to start but they will be way down on the list of scientific personnel required to get such a pilot to a stage where Engineering becomes significant.

My calculations are based on a breadth of experience including a trek through the main areas concerned between Port Augusta and L Eyre. They are not intended to be 100% accurate, only indicative of the worth of a pilot project.

And one last point, with extended droughts due to climate change, Australia will soon have no choice but to investigate the flooding of L Eyre and the optimum technology to ensure this project can drag & drop SA coastal rain bands deep into NSW and Voictoria.

Surely, ANY microstructure-related project is not about engineering only, because engineering is a COMPLEX tool to implementing political decisions.

Many people play guitars but the Beatles were/ARE one only: to be an engineer a PROFESSIONAL education background should be melted with personal inspiration and imaginary.

Practically, unlike in music, a bulk of data further combined with inspiration and imaginary does not work in absence of a professional basic knowledge developed with a range of specific science/engineering subjects.

No sorry that my engineering brain is still better functioning than it has been supposed (and allowed) by local master-minders with their perfect local English.

Come on MichaelK,

Put your engineering brain into gear and show us what ideas you can come up with to drag and drop SA coastal rain bands deep into NSW and Victorian territory.

Calculate the evaporation rate required to lower SA temperatures in a 20Km line between L Eyre and Port Augusta by .5 degC. Calculate the salt produced by the evaporation and its most efficient removal cost.

Prove that a .5 deC average temperature drop along such a line would indeed steer coastal rain bands inland and calculate their new vector.

If you can address some of these issues I will listen.

Otherwise .....

PS it is coincidental that the Federal government today allocated $820 million to the eastern states for water reform. My 14th April estimate for a basic L Eyre project was $800 million with the potential to deliver increased eastern rainfalls, the eqivalent of Murray River inflow from the Snowy Mnts scheme.

C’mmon KOEP.

Are you going to pack all seemingly perfectly estimated with computer soil on Coles/Safeway shelves?

Tell all this crap of “meticulously calculated patterns” to boys paying from state coffins for such useless calculations in order to gratify their NETWORK.

All you mention is a MISERABLE part of a task and I am not going to do anything for nothing because of a reality, when a non-Anglo background automatically makes professionals de-facto undesirable and unemployable in Australia

MichaelK,

Why do you have to bring race into the the discussion? It has nothing to do with the topic. You can't assume that either me or KAEP are of British background or some other background.

Also, if it is not feasible to flood Lake Eyre using a sea-level canal, please tell us why.

You are absolutely mistaken: mere racism grounds everything in Australia and engineering decisions - a privilege of a few has been just pure reflection of this reality.

Pumping ocean water into lakes is simplistic stupidity of narrow-minded politicians with, at least, very limited understanding of enviroissues.

A hint: such actions are not novelty round a globe.

I still don't see how racism has anything to do with it. We're talking about how to improve the climate of Australia by filling Lake Eyre with water, whoudn't this be a good thing for all Australians? You can argue the merits of doing it or not doing it, which is fine, but racism has nothing to do with it.

Your argument makes no sense. Are you saying that it's because of my race (whatever it is) that I make/support the suggestion of flooding Lake Eyre? I hope not, because that would be racism.

> Pumping ocean water into lakes is simplistic stupidity of narrow-minded politicians with, at least, very limited understanding of enviroissues.

Fair enough if you believe that. But you haven't done a very good job so far of articulating your reasons for believing that it is simplistic, stupid or narrow-minded. I personally think it is a bold suggestion, and I have reason to believe that it would make some positive changes to the climate of inland Australia. That is the very opposite of narrow-minded.

Please, if you are against filling Lake Eyre, make a rational argument to support your position. Otherwise, you only look like a troll.

There will come a time when humanity will perish along with all the waffle written here and elsewhere.
In MichaelK's case, bring on the apocalypse!

There will come a time when certain stick in the mud politicians will perish along with all the public service waffle. Then people will begin to realise that rains come from coastal ocean evaporation and not from desert bore water mismanagement.

No need to bring on the apocalypse. Its already here with soylent Green style X city tunnel funnels, ghost M7s and Snowy/Monsanto 'we own what you eat and drink' people funnels.

Things can and will get better if we rid ourselves of Political-Private Partnerships and supplant them with true Public-Private Partnerships! Federal and State politicians have to stop manipulating our economy to make life easy for themselves at the expense of the community at large. A successful L Eyre climate manipulation pilot study could be a saving grace for certain politicians who are in my opinion on very shaky ground over the Snowy sale in the light of other disgraceful public asset sales.

You are so kind, Lizardman! Definitely, one could feel your empty proposals during business hours add much to a national 500-bill.dlrs-debt as their author is personally being paid well enough.

It is simply as one-two-three that decisions reflect interests of inherited the decision-making places, and further mentoring on this issue is useless if you still do not caught, geek100.

Yeah, KAEP, “There will come a time when certain stick in the mud politicians will perish along with all the public service waffle. Then people will begin to realise that rains come from coastal ocean evaporation and not from desert bore water mismanagement” sounds to me as a perfect example of Wolf Creek tourists mentality, where naivety and believes in good intentions rather than elementary scepticism and logic reflect and characterised predominantly twenty-something generation. However, I like your comment the most. At least, it echoes some physical reality:

http://omega.twoday.net/stories/302957/

It seems this link was already mentioned somewhere around.

I have long been interested in the idea of flooding the Lake Eyre region as a way of improving Australia's rainfall. It seems to me that there are two ways of doing this.

One is the sea-water technique. This would need two canals or pipes. One would bring in sea water. The other would remove more-salty water, to prevent eventual salting up of the whole basin. The differences in high-tide sea levels suggest that pumping water from the north, and waste to the south, would be the way to go.

The other way would be the Snowy Scheme method. Again, the water would come from the north, but it would be fresh water from damming one of the rivers that run into the Gulf.

Either way, the amount of energy needed would be very large. I can only think that a dedicated nuclear station would be needed, or another dam and hydro power. Depending on the plan, a huge amount of water must be pumped up about 200m. Where it is in pipes, there is a large amount of friction because of the distance.

I personally think that the best plan is to lay pipes and pump sea water from the Gulf to the headwaters of one of the south-flowing (normally dry) rivers. Then dig a channel down to the tip of Spencer Gulf. The route might be by pipe along the Flinders river, then use the Diamantina to gravity feed to the new inland sea. There is a pass there that is just 200m high, and this minimises the amount of pipe needed.

I can't stress enough that the amount of water needed would be Immense. Once flowing, the pumped water would need to cover the evaporation, as well as allow suffficient outflow to keep the salt level under control. At least half the water would need to flow straight through, though this would be helped by higher flows from the increased rainfall.

Is anyone still interested in this?

Recently, it is crystal clear that the Snowy System was a usual short term politically motivated decision-making disaster calming testosterone of European post-war refugees and Whitehall metropolitan masters. Perfect engineering solutions pleasing an overseas elite still claiming scalps of not supposed having a productive intelligent outsiders in Australia especially, constitute a very ground of ecological disaster locally.

To my vision, your ideas follow a very traditional colonial approach to this situation.
Nuclear generated power might really sustain appropriate water supply following a power producing processes the newest nuclear technologies to offer.

Understandably, traditional love to natural reservoirs –lakes hardly reflects oncoming reality of utilizing ocean water.

The Filling of Lake Eyre.

The time has come, the pundits cried,
To speak of many things,
Of ozone layers and climate change,
And whether man can win.

Explorers sought an inland sea,
But went in the wrong year.
The sea is there, it’s normally salt,
We named it after Eyre.

But when the rains cross Darwin’s hills
And wet the inland ground,
The pelicans and cormorants know
Good times have come around.

We’ve rain aplenty every year,
In Queensland and the Gulf.
It runs the wrong way, out to sea,
It’s time to cry “Enough!”

Lets turn the water round, my friends,
And send it to the south.
Turn the land from brown to green,
At least more than its now.

The land is dry, the land is flat,
The way is very low.
Once it’s up, it’s all downhill,
Just let that water flow.

They did it with the Snowy,
It was a mighty task.
The Murray-Darling basin
Grows all the food we ask.

More water for the inland,
To grow tree, crop and plant.
But also to evaporate,
And fall as rain again.

Roper, Towns, Cox, Rosie,
They all go to the sea.
The Leichhardt and the Flinders,
Which one should it be?

The time has come, or so say I,
To speak of many things,
Of drought’s dry grip and climate change,
And filling up Lake Eyre.

A nice, poetic message there, Cliff.

Your idea of diverting the rivers inland (an idea that has been around for quite some time) would be good for growing crops in the desert, which in itself would help the local climate somewhat. However, I don't think it can be used to permanently fill Lake Eyre because of the large area, and very high rate of evaporation. I remember reading somewhere that even if the entire flow of the Murray were to flow into Lake Eyre, it would only just be enough to keep up with evaporation.

There are problems with this plan. Firstly, how do you regulate the level of the lake? It would vary according to rainfall, since the only outlet is evaporation. Also, if the lake gets priority over irrigators, there may not be much if any water available for irrigation. If irrigators are considered more important, the lake will probably remain dry.

My proposal is to dig a sea-level canal, about 500 metres wide and about 20 metres deep, from the head of the Spencer Gulf to Lake Eyre South, via Lake Torrens. This would have the side-effect of permanently draining Lake Torrens, though it's no great loss since it fills more rarely than Lake Eyre. The sea level canal would be free-flowing, and the water level in the lake would stabilise at sea level or only slightly lower. Water would flow through Lake Eyre South into Lake Eyre North. To regulate the salinity, a pipeline (or multiple parallel pipelines) will extract water from the Belt Bay area and dump it in the Great Australian Bight, somewhere between Streaky Bay and Ceduna.

This is the best solution, in my opinion, because it only uses sea water, which is free and inexhaustible. There's no point using freshwater of any origin for this project. If fresh water were available in sufficient quantities, we would sooner put it to use in irrigating the desert to grow crops, which would have almost equal evaporation benefits while being much more economically productive.

Some times something sounds as Usual utopia of mates privileged to have a paid job in Australia: evaporation, erosion/salinization and power consumption will out-weight water supply benefits.

I like your thinking, geek100, but there is one small teaser in the logic. The canal would not be dug 20m down, but to 20m below sea level. I don't have detailed information, but I did think that it would be at least a couple of hundred meters deep in parts. A search suggests that it might not be so deep, but even Lake Torrens is 34m above sea level according to one reference:

http://www.atlas.sa.gov.au/go/mapviewer?envelope=431383%2C1666822%2C1221509%2C2078129&appdatatopic=Physical+Geography&launchmap=Launch+Map

On the positive side, you could get more fall by using a sea wall to hold the high tide height.

If the excess salt is to be piped out, it would need to be concentrated. This could be done with a desalination plant, producing fresh water and brine.

How about using pipes to get sea water in? One suggestion is a tunnel, no uphill pumping.

Fresh water from the Gulf would not need to keep Lake Eyre full all the time. It need only extend the time it is full a bit to be useful. So a (relatively) small trial could see what benefit there is. Also, it need not be either/or. Sending water inland from the Gulf, the eastern Queensland coast or the southern ocean can all be beneficial.

I think it would be preferable to keep the lake full all the time. It would give a more consistent climate effect.

Using a tunnel to get water in would require a pretty big tunnel if it is to be gravity-fed. Pumping water in may involve lower initial costs, but higher ongoing costs. A lot of water has to be moved.

As for concentrating the outgoing brine, I was thinking of just letting the lake do it. If the pipe removes water at one third the rate of evaporation, the salt concentration in the lake would average 4 times the salt concentration of Spencer Gulf, which itself would then have reduced salt concentration because of the continual flow-through of water. I guess you could have less pipe if the salt is concentrated, but the energy cost of concentrating it is probably less than the cost of pumping it all the way to the Bight.

So, after practising perfect native English, what all this fuss of a lake was about at the VERY end but a DISCUSSION?

G'day All,
I have read quite a few comments about how sea water could be fed to Lake Eyre, several with suggestions of a relatively deep canal from Port Augusta through Lake Torrens and maybe a tunnel feeding the water through to Lake Eyre South. Some discussions included flow rates needed to fill and maintain the combined Eyre lakes at a sufficient level while compensating for evaporation.
I have not seen any suggestions regarding a syphoning pipeline utilising the 10 to 15 metre fall to Lake Eyre South. I'm told the pipeline from the Barossa Reservoir to Kadina passes over the Hummocks range without any pumps being required. The likely inland climate benefits have been discussed to the extent that the Murray Darling catchment could benefit substantially from reducing the deflection of southerly air streams. Waderyrekon?

G'day All again,
Have I made it clear? My suggestion is to SYPHON sea water to Lake Eyre South from Port Augusta. I ask - what size pipe would be required? A big one I imagine, but a more practical prospect than a more costly canal and tunnel system.
I don't see a need to drain the highly saline water back to the ocean. During significant natural flows into Lake Eyre South the water over flows into Lake Eyre proper and salt would accumulate there at the lowest places. Would that be a problem - I think not!
I know that when something like this is proposed, the 'nay sayers' think of every conceivable reason to deny its progress.
What size pipe and how much would it cost are open questions. Please let me know!
frostyinferno

Estimating mechanical parameters of water supply systems has been considering anomg the simplest engineering tasks.

What sort of a strategiclife-time water solution might be offered by one incapable to estimate such the simplest stuff?

Saying something is simple and not offering an answer is a big cop-out!
It's also quite aggressive to cast aspersions on someone's capabilities without having a clue as to what they might be. Let's have some positive responses to ligitimate questions please.

Personally, I do not participate in this forum to lecture on very grounds of a water supply of which selecting a pipe diameter belongs to.

And "legitimate questions" sound too often like just a next testimony to the legitimate rejecting of professional non-Anglos-es, who, as one understood, according to Canberra's minders are good for sustaining a heard at endless English courses for creating job places for native English speakers mostly.

A syphon won't lift water more than about 10m above the source water level, because the weight of the water in the uphill section becomes such that atmospheric pressure is not sufficient to push it up, and a vacuum will develop at the top. If you were to build a syphon pipe, it would have to tunnel through any land that is more than about 7m above sea level (you don't want to run too close to the 10m limit, or water will start vaporising in the pipe as it heats up). Overall, I don't think the syphon idea would work very well.

It seems, deliberating the syphoning testifies perfectly to a very context of my posts because, according to Collinsett 's post on 4 Feb-07, "...let the seawater trickle downhill into lake Eyre, as it is below sea level".

I agree with geek100's assessment on the 'lift limits', but not totally convinced yet - that it is an impractical proposition.
If the syphon 'lift' was kept to a maximum of say 6 to 7 metres a substantial proportion of the distance from Port Augusta to Lake Eyre South can be easily accommodated with a pipe laid in along the edge of Lake Torrens (about 7 metres AHD). Question - What is the minimum height profile from Lake Torrens to Lake Eyre South?
That would determine whether it would be practical to 'trench in' or tunnel a syphoning pipe right through.

frostyinferno,

What has got a rooster to a wind-pointer?

I would very much appreciate your priceless on technical/engineering merits attending to my question.

For MichaelK,
It is a 'weather cock' - cock head - points to the wind!

Already ostracised here, I try avoiding any ambiguity of which cock-words are.

Thank you for eventually broadening your understanding with issue.