sirenianshores

It has not been given much media attention, but Australia is facing its biggest drought in over a century. This has prompted the government there to consider taking control of its largest water system from the four states in eastern Australia.

Australia, for example, is facing the worst drought in a century. The drought’s length and severity is consistent with some projections of global warming, several scientists note. The national government has proposed a controversial, $2.5-billion (Australian) plan to wrest control of the withering Murray-Darling river basin – the country’s largest river system – from the four states in eastern Australia that draw water from it. Meanwhile, Queensland has adopted regulations that since last March have required each new home in the state to draw nearly 40 percent less water than pre-2006 homes. In some towns, building codes specify the installation of large holding tanks to capture and store rain for use in gardens and to flush toilets.

There are numerous examples from history of what happens when cataclysmic environmental events occur - the net result is often war. Oceans rising and flooding fertile coastal plains result in people have to fight for ever scarcer resources like they did back in the early days of mankind. Think of what has been happening in Africa, except spread to other continents.

What happens when a coastal city gets flooded? It creates refugees, the same sort of refugees to flee to the West and become our problem. That creates civil unrest which fuels war, terrorism and crime if not properly dealt with.

Governments will care about global warming when it affects the economy and creates political instability. A small taste of this is happening in China recently. China is heavily dependent on coal burning power stations with an average of one a week being built. They are often inefficiently designed and poorly constructed and consequently generate more smog than typical coal-fire power stations in the west would do. The government in China is facing increasing public anger and civil unrest in some of its larger industrialised cities stemming from concerns about pollution destroying people’s health and quality of life.

Added to the fact that the solution for ending terrorism from the Middle East is staring us right in the face - ending our dependence on fossil fuels as people like Al Gore are advocating. If you stop funding the enemy every time you fill up your gas tank, he will be less able to kill you and your family. The oil is going to run out at some stage anyway. The sooner we develop an alternative the better.

Do you think the Republicans in the Whitehouse could ever go for the most logical, long-term solution? Of course not. War is their business. They and their backers companies like Halliburton and KBR profit from it. War helps them get elected and it distracts the public from their leader’s incompetence and short-sightedness.

Not that us Europeans are much better. Alternatives like wind power has been tried with limited success. But large-scale introduction of wind power has been hindered by not-in-my-backyard-syndrome. Europeans also tend to strongly oppose any form of nuclear power, even though it generates a small tiny fraction of the pollution which fossil fuels generate.

Perhaps a few more years of drought infested summers and stormy winters may concentrate people’s minds. I hope by then it is not too late to undo the damage.