David

I don’t believe you are thinking about this in the right way.

We need to be striving for a balance between water-provision and demand, while allowing for a very healthy excess of water reserves and supply capability to get us through the driest times. We also need to be very aware of the energy involved in developing schemes and maintaining them, especially with our energy economics rapidly changing as fuel prices rise.

Huge fandangled schemes such as flooding Lake Eyre in the vain hope that it may lead to an increase in rainfall in some areas to the east has got to be one of the hairiest ideas yet. (I mean no offence. I’m just saying it as I see it).

Bradfield was responsible for another hair-brained scheme – turning the coastal rivers of the north across the ranges to water the vast inland plains. Well gee if we’d done that, we would have been in much more strife. Huge areas would have been opened to irrigation, to the point where the resource was being overused with no buffer left for dry times, as we see in many places now across the country.

There is nothing to suggest that the same sort of expansion and over-utilisation of resources wouldn’t happen today. Afterall, we continue to have absurdly high national immigration / population growth and interstate migration, with much of it in water-stressed areas. Our expansionist ethic is just as strong as ever, despite all our recent sustainability awareness.

Big schemes done without the collective push to limit human expansion are not the answer.

Ludwick dismisses the idea of flooding Lake Eyre completely off the cuff. All I'm suggesting is that since Bradfield, there has been very little detailed scientific research to see if we cannot obtain some benefit by checking out his ideas. We cannot afford to dismiss possible solutions without having given them a detailed scientific review. All I suggest is that we give scholarships to say a dozen PhD students to consider the whole problem. If they should find in favour, then we can proceed with a feasibility study. If they are not in favour, then we will have built a body of expert knowledge which is useful for the future and that is a gain in itself. I feel we must consider every possibility and not jump to a conclusion which is not soundly based or adequately researched.

David,
the sun will have no trouble lifting a lot of water from a flooded Lake Eyre.
But, before getting too carried away in contemplation of its rainmaking prospects, there are some serious matters for consideration about keeping it filled:
What is the area of Lake Eyre.
What is the evaporation rate over that area.
What width of channel do you contemplate (its depth will be no more than about 10 metres).
What rate of flow is expected in the horizontal channel.
Do you contemplate an outgoing tide as well as an incoming tide.

Davick, I have not dismissed your idea out of hand. Let’s go right ahead and consider schemes like this (even really hair-brained ones!). But for goodness sake, not in isolation from the continuous human expansion aspects, and hence the high likelihood of any new resource being fully utilised and most probably over-utilised before very long.

The essence of my view is that we simply MUST address the continuously increasing demand side of the equation with just as strong a fervour as we address the supply side.

I’ve said it before numerous times on this forum – it just completely befuddles me as to how the governments and residents across the country fail to appreciate the enormous stupidity of continuing to increase population directly in many areas that have major water problems. It is as if there is some enormous inbuilt mental block to dealing with this issue (and many others that are connected to continuous population growth) in a balanced and hence an effective manner.

David,
And then what we do after that?
And then what we do after that when we come AGAIN to a sudden stop
The more power we produce, the more people come to Australia to fill the space.
Peter Costello is telling us to reproduce.

OK, Lets double the 20 million people we have . . . and what do we do then when we run out of power, water and food because we have put all our farmland into housing blocks . . . what do we do. We have doubled out problem because ewe have doubled the population.
Hey, in NSW we having fishing licences because the whole NSW coast is running out of fish.
And all we have then is 40 million people.
The USA has 350 million and Australia in size is about 80 percent of the size of the USA.
What we need to do is STOP, sit down and just look after what we have got . . . or we will all be broke.

OK, how do we stop people moving to SE Qld, the 1500 climate refugees who resettle here every week?

Build a big fence? Ban people selling land? Ban developers?

Maybe tell them if they come here they will have to drink their own piss? Problem is most people in Australia already drink piss, at least Toowoomba got a vote on it. I note the no case was funded by a property developer worried about land prices :)