Op-Ed: Water, economics, food, and Australia’s big river problem

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For us water isn’t an academic exercise. We’ve still got three major cities on high water restrictions. Wheat, you name it, our production is down by about 30%, and even with the cheapest food in the world, the prices are going up.

Melbourne, which is hundreds of miles from the deserts, has been buried under dust storms. The topsoil just gets up and leaves. We have freshwater fish getting skin cancers.

Now our rivers are getting screwed up, by climate and human mismanagement. The Murray-Darling system is one of the biggest river systems in the world. It also feeds a lot of the world.

One problem has trashed some of the main ecological supports in the river system. Acid mud. The change in climate has promoted sulfate production by bacteria. When the water’s there, things are OK.

When the water’s not there, and the sulfate interacts with atmospheric oxygen you get mud with a pH of under 2, which can easily burn skin off. Nothing can live in that. Acid soils in Australia are so strong they can, and do, dissolve building foundations.

So a drought, which exposes a lot of mud, tends to promote situations like that, and if they’re reversible, it’s not an easy task, or cheap. Floods, ironically, make the problem worse. In the case of Adelaide, the acid mud is so close to the city’s water supply it’s actually a risk to the city.

Irrigation’s another problem. We need it to support the crops, but it’s also taking water out of the system. These are big, ancient, river systems, and disrupting their flow affects the entire country.

The big drought didn’t help much, either. Even the drought in the 1890s didn’t match this one. At one point the Darling River, which runs from Queensland down to link up with the Murray, was a collection of puddles. The heat, which was hot even by Australian standards, (anything under 105F isn’t particularly hot, or unusual) desiccated the inland. Wheat growers were growing dust. Livestock had to be sold off because the feed was so expensive.

ABC’s science program, Catalyst, has a series of videos which explain the problems. The four sections dated 1 May 2008, show how complex the environmental equations can get.

The whole program, Fire, Flood, and Acid Mud is on the link on the right. Because it will disappear into the archives you can use the direct link here.

Australians have a different perspective on climate change.

Australia’s used to geniuses from other countries telling us how irrelevant food production is. We produce billions of dollars worth of irrelevance per year. People actually eat it, too. Can’t imagine why.

There’s a place called Asia (that’s right next to Cleveland, for those having trouble finding Earth on a map) that seems to like eating, and have some pathetic desire to do it again, some time. Might happen, too, if they can afford it. On current prices, they can’t. They’d go broke buying it. Their GDP wouldn’t cover it, let alone their wages.

We’re also familiar with a supply of ignoramuses explaining to us that droughts are normal in Australia (we had actually noticed that, incidentally) and that if the entire countryside drops dead for a few years it’s not a problem. If the water supply crashes to the point of every city in the country being down to 20%, it’s all normal.

No it bloody well isn’t.

Normal droughts are something we've learned to live with. They don't crash food production like that, nor do they practically evaporate the city water supplies.

If you want a look at climate change, come out here and have a look.

While you’re at it, try going for a few hours with no water, because the mains have been turned off, and an area with the highest average rainfall in the country looks like the Sahara.

Put it this way:

It really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about climate change.

It’s what happens that matters.

Just remember, when paying $10 for a loaf of bread, that it’s all normal.