Australian Floods - is there a positive side?

Factual Questions
1

Large parts of Australia is suffering from lots of flooding, especially in Queensland.

Australia also suffers from water shortages and vast arid areas. The amount of inhabitable land in a country which boasts 2,948,000 sq miles must be tiny and drinking water puts a practical limit on the population sizes of many parts of the island.

Now without wanting to belittle the suffering and financial loss of the locals, if this becomes a regular or semi-regular occurrence can this type of flooding actually help to make Australia a more livable place to be? i.e. could flooding give Australia the ability to support a reasonable increase in population?

2

Australia does indeed have vast dry areas, but that’s not where the flooding is occuring. The Queensland area, currently being flooded, does get rain every year - just not this much. (And maybe not at this point in the calendar.)

3

Australia is experiencing the effects of the La Nina weather pattern at present which essentially causes a wetter wet season for the tropical areas of the country (Queensland, Northern Territory and perhaps the northern part of Western Australia.) This sort of thing happens every now and then so the long term effects are the country as you see it.

Also, I don’t think Australia is anywhere near the limit of its population capacity, it can support an increase in population as it is.

4

It is and always has been a semi-regular occurrence, at least for the past 15, 000 years. Eastern Australia has the most variable climate in the world due to the effect of the El Nino Southern Oscillation system combined with being on the very margin of the monsoonal trough systems. Australia is, notoriously, a land of “droughts and flooding rains”.

In La Nina years there are good rains. In years when the monsoonal trough pushes south there are good rains. In years when cyclone systems develop at the right time there are good rains. Last year just happened to be a La Nina year where the monsoonal system pushed south almost to Brisbane followed by a major cyclone which then deteriorated into a rain depression. The result was three years worth of rain in one season.

Not really.

First off the water needs to be applied to land, not rushing out to sea as it is now. There have been many schemes to try to harvest these floods, but they are impractical for several reasons.

The biggest factor is the lack of reliability. The current floods are once in 100 year events. Even the more moderate floods run on a roughly seven year cycle. To be able to harvest enough water to be worthwhile for seven years would require a truly massive storage structure. The type of thing that would dwarf the Hoover Dam. Smaller structures that hold enough water for only one year are pointless. Nobody is going to farm land for one year and then go away and become a banker for the next six years until the water is available again.

The second factor is that Australia is very, very flat. There just isn’t anywhere to build a large dam in Eastern Australia without the wall being about 20 miles across.

All the experts will disagree with you. Australia’s sustainable population lies between 6 and 20 million, a limit that has already been reached.

Australia is currently experiencing massive problems with water supply, power generation, food prices, housing prices, health care, land degradation and a plethora of other serious social and environmental issues associated with uncontrolled population growth over the past decades. Just two years ago at least two capital cities had implemented plans to import water. Three capital cities have been forced to construct desalination plants to provide drinking water. Even politicians have been forced to admit that health care is in crisis in three states states. The continents largest river system literally stopped flowing for over 5 years.

I could go on and on about the very clear and incontrovertible evidence that Australia has long since reached the limits of its population capacity. And all this is occurring at a time when the Australian economy is thriving. In more stable economic times the situation would of course be be far worse. Were Australia forced to adopt the austerity measures forced upon many European nations it is doubtful that it could hope to maintain maintain many of its basic social services.

At present Australia is managing to maintain a reasonable, though rapidly declining, standard of living through export of non-renewable resources. It is in no sense sustainable at current population levels.

It is possible with a massive restructuring of the economy and changes to basic lifestyle that Australia could be sustainable. But as things stand Australia has already well exceeded it sustainable population limit.

5

Geography, distance and gravity.

Damming the rivers has been a national pipe dream since before Federation. It had it’s heyday in the Snowy Mountain Scheme in the 50’s. All the low hanging fruit options have been exploited. Faced with the “worst in 100 year” drought just preceding this wet year most of the capital cities are investing in desalination capability. Were any additional dams commissioned, they’d be for supplying water to the existing urban areas. There is no viable option to divert water inland.

At the moment the reality of metropolitan dominated Green politics is a plan to reverse what capital dam works have been done and return “natural flows” to the environment. Natural flows in Australia are inherently variable by orders of magnitude. I have a photo of my grandfather in the early 1900s as a small boy standing with his legs either side of a trickle of water that was the Murray. At the same point now, the flood plain is about 8kms wide and the flood water hasn’t broken it’s confining levees yet.

The eastern seaboard of Australia (from Cape York to central Victoria, about 3,500km) has a mountain range called the Great Dividing Range. In comparison, I believe the Appalachians are around 2,400km. It’s not of great elevation, there are only a handful of peaks above 2,000m. Much of it you can cross at less than 750m. About 95% of Australians live on the seaboard side, which is also where most of the rain falls.

Getting water from where it falls to the other side of the range where all that rangeland is, would be about as practial as diverting water from east of the Appalachians into the mid-west.

Remember that Australia is slightly smaller than the US’s lower 48, and that evapouration is the only economic way to lift water of any volume.

6

There is, but not the one you posit. Floods are by definition sporadic and so cannot sustain a general increase in agriculture, indeed they are destroying large portions of it right now. The upside is the same as for the floods in NSW that happened a few months ago; the water that fell on the western side of the Great Dividing Range made its way downstream into theMurray/Darling system and has refilled all the natural wetlands along the way, including the iconic Coorong wetland at the mouth of the Murray, which was on the verge of permanent death at the time.

There is no shortage of drinking water, which is a minuscule proportion of the water required by modern civilisation. What there is a shortage of is water for farming and industry.

7

Thanks for the insights everybody - most interesting.

8

Melbourne’s total water capacity is approximately 1.8 million megalitres. Daily usage during water restrictions is approximately 1040 megalitres. So the total capacity is about a 4.7 year supply.

Adding one more dam the size of the Thomson would increase it to 7 years.

The Thomson is big, but considerably smaller than the Lake Mead reservoir if my google-fu serves.

Thus: it would require more infrastructure, but the scale is comparable to dams that have already been built in Australia, and certainly smaller than the Hoover.

9

Do you have a cite for those figures?

10

Yes, 20 million sounds on the low side. Australia could (in my opinion) sustain a higher population, but with the extra population mostly in coastal Queensland and in the Top End of the Northern Territory. The big problem with both of those areas is that they are regularly hit by tropical cyclones (as Queensland is at present), so if you are going to add a lot of people there, you need to plan for these regular floods and high winds.

11

You do realise that Melbourne isn’t farmland, don’t you?

12

“Australia: The World’s Quarry”.

It’s far worse than that, because probably something like one megalitre is lost to evaporation for every megalitre used currently. And the longer you store it for, the worse this gets. I suspect that if the plan was to catch a flood and use it up over the next seven years till the next flood, only a small fraction (much less than half) would not evaporate over that period.

13

I can’t really be the only one person who thought you were asking if there werea positive side to Australian food, can I? (Answer: I’m told that in the cities at least, you can get food that isn’t Australian. That’s the positive side.)

14

I agree with you about the ideas with respect to dams, etc, which I have snipped for that reason. Watering west of the Great Divide with water from the east is not a viable option. Dams can work as exercises in flood mitigation, but not as flood storage.

As to the rest, I can’t avoid the sense that it is all a bit overstated. Water supply and the presence of adequate agricultural land I will accept are limiting factors to population, but housing cost is a consequence of policy and a cultural addiction to a particular version of the Australian Dream where everyone desires to own a quarter-acre block instead of denser options.

This causes traffic and infrastructure problems and urban sprawl, but that is not really a population ceiling issue so much as a transitional issue as we inevitably move to bigger cities. We have enormous amounts of land for housing. I accept that the growth of infrastructure that is a consequence of population growth is not a linear function of the population growth. But that is something that all countries with larger populations than us have managed. We can too.

Power generation is equally only a problem because of prior short-sightedness in not planning adequately. We have more metric shitloads of coal and uranium than can be imagined. I accept there are green problems with power generation, but everyone has those - that is not a peculiarly Australian issue, or a directly limiting factor on population growth. We could build all the power generation we require. The present problem is with unrealistic expectations of cheap power that were bred by not undertaking capital works in the recent past and allowing infrastructure to run down.

Similarly health. The health crisis is a crisis of expectations. If people think that egalitarianism means that the state should pay to have an otorhynolaryngologist on hand immediately every time anyone gets the sniffles, then the issue is realistically managing those expectations. Having enough doctors is an issue of planning, not of population per se, and says very little about whether Australia can sustain any particular population.

Or so I think. I am not seeing a sense of the “rapidly declining” standard of living you speak of. It all sounds more than a little catastrophised to me. If you have cites that demonstrate you are right, I am more than open to being persuaded.

15

I think the USA should help bail them out financially. They will need billions of dollars to rebuild the country and the only one that can do that is the USA.

16

Very funny. Even with the floods, Australia is in better financial shape than the U.S. Have you noticed how the AUD has been appreciating against the USD recently?

17

It wasn’t intended to be a joke, I am serious.

18

Then Sir, I fear 'tis you that be the joke.

19

I agree with you, but personally I think the issue is also one of infrastructure and jobs.

To get people to move to somewhere like Longreach (just to pick a non-obscure small town as an example), you’re going to need to ensure they’ve got a decent job to pay the bills while they’re living there. You also need a service sector (beyond the local fish 'n chip shop, pub, RSL, and KFC), and you’re going to need professional services, and roads, and schools, and post offices, and shops, and so on.

I read somewhere that one way that’s been suggested to get the ball rolling on this is for the Government to start decentralising some of their offices to “regional” locations, and I know in the past it’s certainly been tried with varying degrees of success.

But yes, I agree there’s room for far more people in Australia.

20

Actually, that’s bad for the economy. People are buying online, because with our dollars being more or less equal to the american dollar, products online a much cheaper, as they don’t have GST on them. Myers, David Jones and a few other big Australian retailers are throwing a hissy about this.
But Australia is still in a better position then America.

The problem with Australia is no one wants to live in the inner regions. My idea is to put all the refugee’s from desert countries inland, employ them to build infrastructure there ( which also stops people whinging about them taking our jobs) ??? profit!