another excellent production. I have spent a lot of time in the Australian outback over the past 60 years and notice that in the past ten years many people have come to realise that so called "drought" is the normal weather pattern for 7 out of every ten years in Australia. Periods of rainfall are the "abnormal". this is stimulating a great deal of change to agricultural practices here in Australia. and by the way, congratulations on your pronunciation of Australian place names, not many non-Australian do it as well as you did.
Essentially correct with another caveat; Australia's ancient soils are poor in nitrogen and phosphorus and sometimes acidic (strangely). Coupled with regular droughts makes inland farming in Australia a real food production challenge, even for experienced farmers. It's a dry continent with ancient depleted soils (only exceeded in dryness worldwide by Antarctica) with about 10 already named dryland deserts from West to East, South to North covering two thirds of the landmass which have only 3% of Australia's population within them. The deserts are not agriculturally useless; only marginal carrying capacity for dryland cattle and sheep ranching (which is contraversial because hard hoof animals like cattle and sheep damage the duricust and cause erosion).
Desertification is real and devastating. Luckily, we have powerful tools at our disposal to help reverse this process. Reforestation and agroforestry practices have proven to be effective methods, creating not only environmental benefits but also economic opportunities for land reform. Though not the most profitable options, they can make a significant difference in sustaining local communities.
If the deserts lay below sea level, it may be possible to flood it with ocean water, providing some thermal mass (and thus stable climate), assuming liberal use of thermonuclear warheads
Another part of the dry conditions in 2009 were the dust storms. The September 2009 dust storm was extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like it and I've never seen anything like it since. Also on the topic of water security, there is quite a lot of water recycling across Australia now. I live in an area of Sydney which has recycled water, however as there was so much opposition to feeding this into the water supply we instead have two water supply lines into each house. Regular potable water, plus a purple recycled water line (which is marked not for drinking). The recycled water line supplies toilets and gardens and has never been subject to water restrictions in the many years I've lived here.
The one thing missed here is that during the height of the drought Australia was the largest net exporter of embodied water in the world. That is to say as a measure of the water consumed by the products we exported, we had the largest net export of any nation. Household water consumption ampunted to some 1-5% of total water comsumption, all those short showers did nothing, it was mostly water intensive export farming.
I was born on a farm in Victoria in 98. It’s crazy to think that drought conditions were all I knew until I was 12 years old. It is cool to see something that shaped my childhood covered by one of my favourite channels
Seems pretty dire remembering back to it, I was in primary school about 9 years old and remember in class going through “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” (ie the toilet was only worth flushing if you did a 💩) plus we were all sent two minute sand timers to indicate how long a shower we should have, and you would stand in a bucket in the shower and throw the water onto the garden after
Ah the nostalgia... walking 40+ minutes in unbearable heat, in dark grey slacks and a button-up shirt. Get in the cold shower to rapidly wash, shampoo, conditioner and anything else all within a few minutes. Thought I was quick enough but parent starts banging on the door shouting "Wivenhoe Dam just called the phone... they said you're using all the water!"
I remember as a kid I put some buckets outside so when it started raining so I can use the water. My little brother was confused so he brought them back in and filled them up with the tap and then put them back outside
Two minutes is no time at all to shower lol but I remember hearing the same thing about the toilet lol, and sometimes reusing our house water outside. I grew up and still live in dry area, the outskirts of san diego.
This drought was the defining background noise of much of my childhood. I remember local councils distributing hourglasses so you could time your showers, water-saving tips being shown on television, school prayers every morning and afternoon begging God for rain (I went to Catholic school). I was seventeen when the Black Saturday bushfires happened. I remember a summer of coughing up black phlegm every few hours from the smoke, and the city constantly smelling like ash. Rain has never felt sad to me since; after years of summers where dust filled the sky and nearly a decade of constant anxiety about how much water is left in our catchments, rain feels clean and joyful and wholesome. I love the rain now.
I remember all the water saving adverts. People really got into it, Australians tend to become a “hive mind” when there’s a problem and will do what’s needed. Perth now has two desalination plants, and it’s building a third.
@@lucasrem Yes, plant many trees and bushes and auto water them so temps stay in check and desert doesn't expand. But do also know an Australian saying is: Aussie Sun kills everything!
It's hard to overstate how much the big dry changed the country, at least the parts I know, which is Victoria. In the late 90s I would travel between Melbourne and my home town of Ballarat and pass over a large reservoir, maybe every three months or so and over the years watched with growing alarm as it emptied out and old structures started rising from the water. In 2000 I moved to Asia for work and would go back once a year, so the changes were noticeable. Other than the obvious harsh conditions what was most remarkable was that a lot of the wildlife moved into the cities and towns -- where the water is. When I was growing up it was all sparrows and starlings but now you can see native parrots in the middle of Melbourne. The ibis, bereft of water, moved closer to humans and has become known as the bin-chicken.
Bin chickens aren't in the cities for water - they scavenge. And 2 years ago the Murray river reached 50 year high peaks. There is plenty of wild life in he bush, but city folk jsut don't see it,
@@havenmist2216 They didn't come into the city to scavenge before the drought. Yes, I expect there is a lot of wildlife in the bush but it's remarkable how many native bird species have moved into town.
I’m from Ballarat as well. Pykes creek ay. I remember one year when lake Wendouree was completely dried out and they held the annual fire works on Australia Day a few thousand people were sat out on camp chairs in the middle of the dry lake bed.
I remember the big dry as a kid, it was all I knew cause I was born right at the start. We all had to time our showers, not flush the toilet unless we took a shit, couldn't have pools or water the garden in summer. So many of my family and friends families had their entire backyards turn yellow as if the grass were dead from the heat, barely sustained by what little rain did come. I remember seeing pictures of pools as a kid and asking why we weren't allowed to have them. The pool didn't cost that much to get and was still available for purchase as far as I knew, but the cost of the water was so high that it wasn't feasible. On the plus side, that's how I found my love of summer water guns.
As much as it was tough, this drought really changed how a lot of us think of our usage of water. In SA the restrictions were self policing, with neighbours holding each other accountable. Gardening practices also improved, including better and more adaptive plant selection and garden design, the use of mulching to retain moisture and suppress weeds, and drip irrigation systems set on timers for appropriate times of the day to reduce evaporation. Even when the drought ended, I think a lot of people continued to follow these practices.
So to solve a drought we take more water out of the environment so the evaporation system can't work . Of course if we'd stop growing cotton in this country we may have a bit of extra water
@@James-kv6kbwater should cycle multiple times before it hits the atmosphere. Fountains are a one and done. They are to sustainability as a one night stand is to marriage.
@@j.kaimori3848 I didn't mention fountains . I'm simply saying I believe a million people watering their gardens during a drought would actually help the situation.but switching one or two fountains off is not going to do anything especially when the water is recycled. Those sort of ideas come from silly blonde women that think they're making a difference when they're actually not doing anything
@@James-kv6kbThe water flow of the inland Murray Darling Basin river system is regulated by major dams in the mountains of the Great Divide. The extraction of water from these rivers is also regulated by an interstate share agreement. Each river system has its own Water Alocation System based on a share of Available Water. An irrigator only sows the area of crop that has Available Water to grow that crop.
I have some early memories of the latter end of the drought. I grew up with harsh water resrictions, we'd keep buckets under our showers (mandated to 2 mins) to water the garden. Newspapers would print and report on the levels of our reseviours, and this was in Melbourne, our 2nd largest city. Hope to never go through it again.
I don't remember showers being mandated at 2 minutes in Melbourne... I'm very sure it was 4 minutes. They even gave out thousands of those little blue plastic hourglasses that were for 4 minutes
@@sylviam6535 You have more people, and the majority are people that are not from Australia compared to 13 years ago. Will they tow the line of timed showers? Will they even understand. It will be an interesting experiment.
@@joel6376 - Many people now live in much smaller blocks or in apartments, so gardens don’t require so much. Also, the desalination plants are online. There’s a few variables moving in different directions. Anyway, it will take a 3-4 years of bad weather before things become if concern. Right now, Australia is coming off a rare triple La Niña event.
I’m from Sea Lake originally, a small town in Northwest Victoria in the middle of the wheat belt. My family still lives there so I witnessed the effects of the drought first hand, and experienced 50°C days there firsthand during the drought. The drought essentially killed the majority of the town, its biggest draw used to be a small lake that pulled in a small tourist traffic, it dried in the 90s and only was repaired and refilled in the mid 2010s. Losing this led to the majority of the population moving away, alongside the shuttering of major services like banks. The town is still a fraction of the size it used to be, and only a couple years ago land prices were so low that buying a car secondhand was more expensive. Fortunately after the pickup of the rains the tourist lake refilled, and the nearby salt flats were discovered as a natural beauty spot and became a tourist destination. The town is slowly recovering but will never be the way it was prior to the droughts.
Sadly the largest cause of Australian droughts is unsustainable farming practices. If you look at the historical record Australia has changed much since described by early explorers. The National gallery shows a green country in paintings prior to 1860. Sheep turn the land into bare dirt, on staggeringly large areas. When it rains they crop this bare dirt and have the largest Wheat harvest in history post drought. Wind erosion since white settlement is staggering and 2 or 3% of New Zealand soils are Australia fallout. Indeed in the 1890s peoples laundry got dirty on the line in NZ because so much of Australia was falling on them. Some farmers are responsible and destock some gamble and there is no law preventing this. Historically no one destocked and 30 or 40 000 head dying on your property was normal, with the belief when it rained you would make so much money it did not matter.
yes. And the idiot farmers clearfell the trees too, further destroying the soil ecosystems - and harass their neighbours if they aren't also clearing. To see where this ends, visit the lower parts of Iceland. In more than 100 years of serious reforestation efforts, they've moved the needle by 0.5%. My partner & I spent 10 days there in 2018, driving around in a camper, and it was overwhelmingly like being on Mars.
@@Zackzickel it also means subterranean aquifers aren't replenishing, which can be lead to the lack of soil permeability and increased evaporation, a thing occurring when forests and woods have been turned into large pastures and openfield areas instead of landscaping mixed zones like bocage.
In 2002 my family moved to a small sub-tropical town on the east coast of Queensland. It must have been a very dry period when we arrived because I remember thinking we had moved to a desert (due in part to the weird amount of cacti we had, probably the only plants that were able to survive at the time). I can't imagine how bad it got further inland.
I vividly remember Black Saturday and the subsequent wettest year on record. Was a wild time heading back into Melbourne from a stint living in North East Victoria for 15 months, fantastic video! Absolutely love popping in and watching all the videos you have to upload.
My family grew up in the Victorian dairy industry until 1996, we were lucky to leave the industry before the drought took hold. Having four sons it was expected that we would remain in the industry, that wasn't going to happen, I was involved in dairy politics for some years and knew that the future was going to be perilous at best. I'm happy to be out of farming, but feeling less of a person for doing so, there is a feeling of belonging when you work the land and are responsible for the animals you breed . I really feel for those who have had to endure the droughts and floods, unimaginable heartache for so many. Neither farms we have owned are going concerns now, the price of water makes it nonviable to irrigate pasture for milk production.
I lived through this and even I did not realise Brisbane had recycled water and most of the other desal plants (the Sydney one was a political dust up). At the ATO, drought provisions, especially for farmers, was a constant thing, the intensity waxed and waned over the years
In the cities, people who had tank water to water their gardens had to put up signs “This Garden Watered by Tank”, or else people would yell at them for watering their garden or having a green lawn. By the end of the drought many homeowners had pulled out their lawns and replaced them with tiles, rock gardens, or low water use succulents etc. The small country towns had it BAD. People couldn’t shower at home. Everyone got a once a week shower at a local sports facility with water trucked in for purpose. A few years after the drought broke, many of the low water gardens in the city were reverted back to lawns and shrubberies when houses sold. But a lot of the largest building projects still have clever water saving and water cleaning and reuse systems integrated into the whole building and grounds.
This channel has been my brain food for the past years. Needless to say I enjoyed every single episode, slightly more for topics that's not too technical. And i can see the shift in your content from technical to strategic. While I'd appreciate a video a day (mainly because i drive to work everyday), but i do hope that you can take a break or slow down and not burn out. Keep up the great work, will be nice to meet up when I'm in tw
I live in Australia, I’m 73 yo and have seen government after government play politics with water. It’s big business, and I can assure you there were much better options than the BS desalination plants we were made to buy. Thing is those with the money listen to those that want it and turn deaf ears to those who know better. Now we are caught up in the BS drive to zero emissions, again the politicians, those with the money want more!! From us. It’s got bloody nothing to do with fossil fuel use but if we believe that the taxes can be raised. Climate change may be happening, it has for millennia, but it has nothing to do with fossil fuel use. A far more URGENT issue is deforestation, but wait we can’t tax that cos that would mean our ‘mates’ would have to pay…the developers
This one hits me personally as I was doing from primary school to high school and then to an adults in my early/mid 20s while being in central Victoria during the millennium drought and it's eventual and disastrous ending with the floods. Living on a small far right next to a drinking water supply reservoir , I saw everything from lush wet seasons in my early childhood with fond memories with weekly strong thunder storms during summer, and often some snow in winter. Then, as the video nailed it on the head, in 1997 things started to changed and I noticed my favorite summer thunderstorms became a thing of the part. By 2002, in high school I was driving quad bikes on the "desert planes" which I called the bone dry and weed infested 10s of square Km of reservoir lake bottom and once even drove my paddock bomb on there. Spend my holidays exploring this empty lake. I also remember the land being infested with gauze and thistles, pattisons curse and all kinds of hard to kill noxious weeds, something that I virtually didn't see as a child. Black Saturday was also close to home in a lot of ways, where I was also had bush fires the same day and I recall the day being dark and it raining ash all day. Once 2010 hit, we got something like 400mm of rain in 2.5 days and one of the days was close to 200mm. The house and gutters were completely overwhelmed, filling the cavity in between floors of the 2 story farm house until the entire ceiling plaster of the living room collapsed and fell to the floor and 100s of L of water in the living room floor. There was much difficultly in insurance as much of the state of Vic was underwater and many of the insurance companies went broke. Luckily we eventually pushed them enough to get repairs done. Also, not anything to do with the millennium drought, but I also was in Melbourne driving home over the Bolte when the thunderstorm asthma even happened. I had asthma as a kid and oddly I was completely unaffected by the intense yellow haze. One of my work colleagues however got quite sick from it. Many many people died that night and over the next several days. Australia's climate is unforgiving but it is a way of life here.
Other government responses included installing kilometers of piping for irrigation water, and the subsequent decommissioning of networks of irrigation canals
What is is with Australia being perpetually cursed? Like, "hey, we recovered from that drought!" "Great! but like 10% of the country is on fire, and people are reporting literal waves of mice eating everything they can, and we keep taxing everything fun to do"
It's not cursed, it's a land of extremes. Government corruption and plagues of introduced vermin aside, Australia really only works in extremes. If it's hot, we get bushfires and droughts, if it's wet, it will flood. If an animal is dangerous it will be the most dangerous ect.
If booze and cigarettes are fun, I guess so. There’s always gambling. If we have anything left from smokes and booze we pour the rest into slot machines (pokies). Lucky we have a mandatory retirement savings scheme I guess. Now at annual GDP and will be double in 2030.
Great video. and well done pronouncing Mel-ben. You didn't mention the effect of the Indian Ocean Dipol (IOD). It can have a significant influence on the north west of the country, and upper level troughs can pull the tropical moisture down through the centre to victoria and southern New South Wales. In 2011 we not only had a strong La Nina, but a negative IOD bringing more tropical moisture into Australia's south east, which contributed to the devastating floods.
Awesome job, id love to see you cover what happened after all this. The level of corruption that went into what was essentially banking stolen water and selling it back to the state and federal governments is insane. The Murray Darling is under extreme stress now because of it and many towns that were along the river further down stream have essentially been abandoned because of the cotton farming industry.
Wow this is sucha random subject to find here. I remember this period well, the most alarming part was the amount of hyhdrophobic dusty dirt. The dirt in many location is naturally poor only a 20cm of water holding nutrient holding soil. But it got realy thin and dead around 1999-2001. The past few years has been weirdly wet it seems strange to me. if you spend some effort applying compost it's quiet easy to built a thick top soil layer now.
Here in Southern California, which is defined as a desert, they are changing their ways. Extremes of weather are the new norm. Dry or wet extremes are the forecast. Efforts to retain the big soaks are now a thing. Example, they are diverting some water off the aqueducts into the desert to percolated into the water table. More dams, a desal. plant in San Diego, largest in the nation, and more. A lot more people in this area than Aussieland in whole. It needs to be figured out big time.
An Australian here. When this video started, with the words '"the millenium drought.... fundamentally changed Australian society'' I thought I was watching an old soviet TV news programme - remember Soviet TV broadcast internationally via satellite in the 1970's? Nice music but their news used to gleefully report things like '"Australian workers are striking again, as they have had enough of the harsh conditions'' and show footage of some protest somewhere that involved a single firm in a single industry, amounting something 0.1% of Australia's workers at most. But without actually telling lies, they would make it sound like the whole country riven with industrial strife. The millenium drought certainly had NO effect on me, and no noticeable effect on our society generally. Farmers were certainly affected, but very few Australians are farmers. it should be noted that poor farming practices contributed to unnecessary dependence on high rainfall. most wheat farmers have recently adopted a different ploughing regime which better retains soil moisture. However, this video went on to be generally good. Asianometry did miss something important - our State governments needed to address water shortage in recent years not because of climate change, and not because of a drought - marked lack of rain periodically has long been understood as a normal part of Australia's climate - but because of considerable population growth. Since the early 1960's the population has exponentially grown from 9 million to 27 million. States ran out of convenient rivers to dam up, and had to turn to desalinating sea water. That's a 3 times increase and naturally the government has had to provide roughly three times as much water. we all drink about the same amount, flush the toilet about the same number of times, water gardens and lawn, etc. Governments don't like to spend money or accept blame, and like governments worldwide, our State governments have blamed the climate - anything other than themselves - when in fact they should have planned for the population growth and built desalination plants and other measures sooner.
Your description of Russian Sat TV news of Australia sounds awfully like modern BBC in the UK. Misleads massively without (often) telling outright lies. Arguably rivals any totalitarian regime for social engineering.
@@causewaykayak; Yes, I have noticed that in BBC shows repeated on UA-cam. For example, on a prgramme about nuclear power, without actually saying so, they implied that power stations operate teeter-totter and can explode like a nuclear bomb. In fact they can melt down, but they cannot explode.
Spot on. Like almost every environmental problem in the world, overpopulation is to blame. Australia, however, in its stupidity, has chosen to import a problem it could easily have avoided, but greed’s a hell of a drug!
There has to be a way to build cheap water infrastructure, such as dams, artificial aquifers and so on. The age-old way of winning against floods is canals, not dams. This could create protection against both excessive rain and drought, and without the energy cost that recycling or desalination has.
Regulations, partiality of policy makers, and labour costs are holding back applied engineering and production. We can't rely on technology alone to solve all our problems, but resolving the above can definitely advance the technology we use.
You should explain that the US system works in Australia: If you leave the land your loan is secured with, you no longer have to pay off the loan: That's a motivation to give up the farming job. In other countries, the bank pays part of the loan by selling the soil, but you still have to pay the rest yourself. A big problem, because then you have nothing left to work with.
At first I thought this was a drought that lasted from the end of the 19th century into the first decade of the 21st century and I was thinking. "How come I've never heard of this? I guess Australia is still extremely dry and just slightly less extremely dry now.
I was born into and grew up through this drought. I don't really have any memories of rain until 2009-10, when it suddenly felt like the entire country was drowning all at once. I'm still not sure I'm used to how much rain we get these days.
How well researched! I as a old geezer recognized them all, yes even the before my time ones as I love history. And best of all, you didn't scream "Climate change" . Our government screams that every time we have wind,rain,drought,fire,snow...whatever
I remember when it broke in 2007/2008 haha. My dad came home to find 10 year old me filling all the waste bins with 100s of Litres of water from the gutter drainage. He joined me in his work clothes and we were just soaked 😂 Ps soon after it was mandatory to have a rainwater tank in every new home.
Snowy River Project to divert water inland. You forgot about the recent Brisbane River floods including 2011 and 2017. And Warragamba dam overflowed in early 2021 during the big wet.
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror - The wide brown land for me! -Dorothea Mackellar We have had this on and on for ages.
if you have a natrual energy source like natrual gas, hydro power or geothermal then desalination is viable. I think dumping the slurry into a pond inland and let the sun dehydrate the water will leave minerals that could be recycled.
Na, we already have huge salt lakes in S.A.. Besides, the "environmental effects" of desalination are overstated by opponents. Desal plants pump half the water back out to sea, with double the salt content, which is hardly "hyper saline brine", let alone a slurry. Outfall's are monitered, and dilution occurs immediately.
“..:Murmurs by a few disgruntled people.” That’s a polite way of putting it. To use local terminology, people carried on like pork chops. All of a sudden “tank water in use” stickers popped up on everyone’s front gardens, whether they had a tank or not! Although these days rainwater collection is compulsory in many places for new builds so it’s far more common than it used to be.
They were upset as farming uses 70% of water supply, some of which goes to rice and cotton farms. Any water restrictions on residential use (20% of total) is wasted effort, collective virtual signalling and a cause of division and anger in thousands of suburban streets.
@@havenmist2216The Southern Murray Basin water allocation system shares the available water resource among water users. General Security water is the least reliable water. NSW Murray River General Security water was Zero for 3 years during the middle of the middle of the Millenium Drought. They ran some water down the bed of a few channels for Town Water which is similar reliability as most of South Australia's water. No rice grown in Southern Riverina for years. Most rice mills moth balled for years. Australia imported rice to keep rice on the supermarket shelves. Food riots in Egypt same time as no rice exports from Australia. No Water, No Food.
@@kevinkelly7078 The water in the Murray and Darling, doesn't come from the Sothern Riverina system. The Murrumbidgee catchment is in the Murray Darlin Basin and feed the Darling which runs to SA. That is where rice and cotton are grown. They have never grown rice in SA. And YES they are now growing rice in 2O21-22 in the Murray and Murrumbidgee valley due to water allocation, after 2021-22 where the Murray and Darling flooded to the the highest it had in 50 years. Yet it still is the dumbest thing you could grow in Australia. Without locks the Murray and Darling would dry up much more than they do now, naturally as they have for millennia. Its only human effort that makes growing food in the Riverina possible. Yes, no water no food - lets stop flushing it out to sea via SA.
Or you could be the brisbane government in 2010 who left water restrictions at level 3, when the dams were at 108%, then we had extereme rainfall to the point of flooding, and they had to let the dams out so they didnt break, adding to the floods of brisbane
One problem with is Australia city culture is it doesn’t believe in grey water plumbing or devices like wash shower or wash basin to toilet etc Along with instant bathroom copper pipes to save water & to instant heat the water
So, are the El Nino and La Nina events the same effect in both the south and north ends of the pacific, or is it reversed like the seasons? People talking about weather variations up here in Canada often refer to this cycle as well, but all the charts we use cut off around the equator, just like the ones in your video.
El Nino causes drought in South East Asia as well, on both sides of the equator. Basically the whole Western Pacific dries up, while the west coast of South America get floods. La Nina reverses things.
I recall Linux Conf Australia 2011 in Brisbane - the show went on with a hasty last minute change of venue after the floods. Was quite surreal walking along the riverwalk in the city seeing the high water mark well over head level
Ah yes I remember that one also. Mark Newton said he was giving a talk in Radelaide 3 days post-LCA so I changed my (motorbike) travel plans to try to go there on the way home to Sydney. 2500km (I turned for home at Mildura for unrelated reasons) in 42C+ weather. Up to 46C in places. I love riding but that was not a fun time
I imagine a good way to make economic use of the desalination and recycling plants is to store that water somewhere so it's stocked up for drought years. Unfortunately, just filling a reservoir requires good geography and would have lots of evaporation losses year to year, and a giant underground cistern would cost immense amounts to construct and maintain. You could have smaller plants operating continuously and build up a reserve for those heavy drought years where even the plants can't keep up with demand. A minimum solution I suppose is at least getting more rainwater to infiltrate and store as groundwater during heavy rainfall years and minimize how much flows out to sea. That require a lot of retention ponds and swales across millions of acres of private property, but it's at least scientifically sound.
Where I live, they attempt to put excess water into the aquafir. I am not sure how well that works. I have often wondered why there aren't lots of solar powered desalination plants. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of seawater, but certainly lots of solar potential.
I personally think they should build pipelines over the Great Dividing Range, so that the desal/recycling plants can pump excess water into the Murray-Darling system, when the coastal cities don't need it. There are plenty of years where the coast gets enough rain, but the inland doesn't. The river water is over-allocated to irrigators, so adding more water to the rivers would allow farmers to get their full allocation, while still keeping the river ecosystems alive.
Drought and flood will always be part of Australia’s story, though there’s no argument that it is becoming more and more frequent over the past couple of decades. Whether it’s climate change or natural cycles matters not, our approaches have to change. The fact we’re still growing cotton and rice in the Murray-Darling Basin is complete insanity. Those crops have no business beyond the tropics.
Remember droughts in Australia including this one ended with massive flooding rain. It's just the cycles in Australia. Droughts and flooding rains. I hope the next show is the 2011 floods...
You say that watering was self regulating. I can tell you that during times of water regulation if you have a green lawn your neighbours would have harassed you and dobbed you in or shamed you in some way I also notice after going overseas our toilets etc use much less water.
Between shuttering desalination plants and pulling back on farming, sounds like Australia’s government has been making some questionable long term moves
Questionable for society, but in line with the corrupt neoLiberal ideology both sides of politics adhere to. The amount of corruption in water allocations under the previous government would shock the world.
@@TimJBenham Because people need water to survive? There’s a lot of essential services that are run at a loss, desal plants aren’t needed in same places in Australia right now (like Melbourne) because we’ve had a lot of rain, but in places like north-west NSW they’re experiencing a drought
This channel is quickly climbing the list of my favorite subscribed educational channels with the variety of topics, research into them, and unbiased straightforward delivery of the details with some nerdy jokes thrown in here and there. You deserve over a million subs, its a crime that you don't have it already.
"desalination plants are best used all the time for efficiency" me: "yes, so it's best used to replenish the aquifers?" gov: "let's turn them off until needed" Farmers: "we are out of water with the aquifers" Gov: "we aren't yet experiencing a drought, but we will give the farmers dedicated access to rivers to take as much water as they like" Gov: "our rivers are running dry and it is not raining, we are in a drought, begin level one conservation and prepare to enable the desal plants again" me: "hmm... I wonder if they are going to need massive maintenance before being turned on...?"
Excellent report. It's unfortunate that, despite the fact that you mostly only talk about the cyclical drought cycles and don't even touch on climate change and its impact (apart from merely listing that ever more extreme cycles), YT felt the need to inject that disclaimer context - and that acted as a red flag to the usual suspects, many of whom I suspect to not even be Australian. As for ourselves, living on a small farm, we see first hand how things are swinging back and forth ever more violently. After 3 years of "do I need to build an Ark or something?!", we've now had the driest 3 month period ever measured - and that includes long-term data from soil and tree rings, not just weather observations.
Australia is mostly an urban society. Most Australians only barely know of the millennium drought. People living in rural areas did suffer. West Australia has been experiencing a drought for 30 years. In 2023 it is getting worse and a third desalination plant is under construction in Perth.
Actually, El Nino and La Nina affect Australia's NORTH-east rainfall, not South-east. As you later mentioned, both the Southern Ocean Oscillation and Southern-Indian Ocean Dipole affects the south-west and south-east.
Look, Australia is SO urbanised. So with people living on the coast, particularly in the South East, I don't believe we focus on drought as much as you think we do. Australia is 90% city dwellers and then 10% crazy farmers who live in the interior. They can go round naming things as crazy as they want, but if you REALLY want to have a discussion around water management, it begins and ends with corporations using such RIDICULOUS amounts of water on crops that are just held up by the Government. Anyway I'm from Melbourne, so the big natural disasters for us are always bush fires. I will NEVER forget Black Saturday and any Melburnian will remember where they were during that week of 45 degree (celcius) plus weather.
The irritating thing about the water restrictions, then and now, is that houshold water is less than 5% of water usage in australia. SO, making people stop using sprinklers was a pretty stupid, minimal, though highly visible thing. kind of like the government trying to put single use plastic back on the public, instead of the industry producing and using it, or like greenhouse gases from personal uses. Like, every little bit counts, but even if every australian had stopped using all their household water, it would have made no realistic difference...
another excellent production.
I have spent a lot of time in the Australian outback over the past 60 years and notice that in the past ten years many people have come to realise that so called "drought" is the normal weather pattern for 7 out of every ten years in Australia. Periods of rainfall are the "abnormal". this is stimulating a great deal of change to agricultural practices here in Australia.
and by the way, congratulations on your pronunciation of Australian place names, not many non-Australian do it as well as you did.
You’re misunderstanding of climate is appalling.
Although, being a Gold Coaster, I'll tell you that he butchered the name 'Bilinga' 😅
If you look at Jupiter long enough you can see that planets have weather patterns. Australia is no exception.
lol
yep! and ours is changing due to CO2 emissions @@miinyoo
This channel is a goldmine. I look forward to having dinner while watching your videos for as long as possible.
Essentially correct with another caveat; Australia's ancient soils are poor in nitrogen and phosphorus and sometimes acidic (strangely). Coupled with regular droughts makes inland farming in Australia a real food production challenge, even for experienced farmers. It's a dry continent with ancient depleted soils (only exceeded in dryness worldwide by Antarctica) with about 10 already named dryland deserts from West to East, South to North covering two thirds of the landmass which have only 3% of Australia's population within them. The deserts are not agriculturally useless; only marginal carrying capacity for dryland cattle and sheep ranching (which is contraversial because hard hoof animals like cattle and sheep damage the duricust and cause erosion).
Desertification is real and devastating. Luckily, we have powerful tools at our disposal to help reverse this process. Reforestation and agroforestry practices have proven to be effective methods, creating not only environmental benefits but also economic opportunities for land reform. Though not the most profitable options, they can make a significant difference in sustaining local communities.
Yes, growing plants is tough in Australia: poor soil, lack of water and generally unpredictable weather.
If the deserts lay below sea level, it may be possible to flood it with ocean water, providing some thermal mass (and thus stable climate), assuming liberal use of thermonuclear warheads
@@Demopans5990 Glad you're not the PM
Another part of the dry conditions in 2009 were the dust storms. The September 2009 dust storm was extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like it and I've never seen anything like it since.
Also on the topic of water security, there is quite a lot of water recycling across Australia now. I live in an area of Sydney which has recycled water, however as there was so much opposition to feeding this into the water supply we instead have two water supply lines into each house. Regular potable water, plus a purple recycled water line (which is marked not for drinking). The recycled water line supplies toilets and gardens and has never been subject to water restrictions in the many years I've lived here.
The one thing missed here is that during the height of the drought Australia was the largest net exporter of embodied water in the world. That is to say as a measure of the water consumed by the products we exported, we had the largest net export of any nation. Household water consumption ampunted to some 1-5% of total water comsumption, all those short showers did nothing, it was mostly water intensive export farming.
I was born on a farm in Victoria in 98. It’s crazy to think that drought conditions were all I knew until I was 12 years old. It is cool to see something that shaped my childhood covered by one of my favourite channels
Seems pretty dire remembering back to it, I was in primary school about 9 years old and remember in class going through “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” (ie the toilet was only worth flushing if you did a 💩) plus we were all sent two minute sand timers to indicate how long a shower we should have, and you would stand in a bucket in the shower and throw the water onto the garden after
Ah the nostalgia... walking 40+ minutes in unbearable heat, in dark grey slacks and a button-up shirt.
Get in the cold shower to rapidly wash, shampoo, conditioner and anything else all within a few minutes.
Thought I was quick enough but parent starts banging on the door shouting "Wivenhoe Dam just called the phone... they said you're using all the water!"
I remember as a kid I put some buckets outside so when it started raining so I can use the water. My little brother was confused so he brought them back in and filled them up with the tap and then put them back outside
A lot of councils say it's illegal to use grey water on the garden
@@James-kv6kb I think that was for veges and fruit trees that you eat from, not so much flowers and things
Two minutes is no time at all to shower lol but I remember hearing the same thing about the toilet lol, and sometimes reusing our house water outside. I grew up and still live in dry area, the outskirts of san diego.
This drought was the defining background noise of much of my childhood. I remember local councils distributing hourglasses so you could time your showers, water-saving tips being shown on television, school prayers every morning and afternoon begging God for rain (I went to Catholic school). I was seventeen when the Black Saturday bushfires happened. I remember a summer of coughing up black phlegm every few hours from the smoke, and the city constantly smelling like ash.
Rain has never felt sad to me since; after years of summers where dust filled the sky and nearly a decade of constant anxiety about how much water is left in our catchments, rain feels clean and joyful and wholesome. I love the rain now.
I remember all the water saving adverts. People really got into it, Australians tend to become a “hive mind” when there’s a problem and will do what’s needed. Perth now has two desalination plants, and it’s building a third.
they need science !
education
how to make it green again !
It can go the other way just as easily though - see Toowoomba and the failed recycled water proposal
@@lucasrem Yes, plant many trees and bushes and auto water them so temps stay in check and desert doesn't expand.
But do also know an Australian saying is: Aussie Sun kills everything!
South Australia has a desal plant but they're too expensive to turn on
Children 5 years old seeing rain for the first time during the Millenium Drought.
It's hard to overstate how much the big dry changed the country, at least the parts I know, which is Victoria. In the late 90s I would travel between Melbourne and my home town of Ballarat and pass over a large reservoir, maybe every three months or so and over the years watched with growing alarm as it emptied out and old structures started rising from the water. In 2000 I moved to Asia for work and would go back once a year, so the changes were noticeable.
Other than the obvious harsh conditions what was most remarkable was that a lot of the wildlife moved into the cities and towns -- where the water is. When I was growing up it was all sparrows and starlings but now you can see native parrots in the middle of Melbourne. The ibis, bereft of water, moved closer to humans and has become known as the bin-chicken.
Huh, I never related the wildlife migrating with the droughts. It makes sense though.
Bin chickens aren't in the cities for water - they scavenge. And 2 years ago the Murray river reached 50 year high peaks. There is plenty of wild life in he bush, but city folk jsut don't see it,
@@havenmist2216 They didn't come into the city to scavenge before the drought. Yes, I expect there is a lot of wildlife in the bush but it's remarkable how many native bird species have moved into town.
@@chuckygobyebye true... I see birds everywhere at cafes. Not necessarily a bad thing, mean the feel safe and there is available food.
I’m from Ballarat as well. Pykes creek ay. I remember one year when lake Wendouree was completely dried out and they held the annual fire works on Australia Day a few thousand people were sat out on camp chairs in the middle of the dry lake bed.
As an Australian who usually watches this channel for the microprocessor videos, this is amazing content that I didn't know I needed to see.
I remember the big dry as a kid, it was all I knew cause I was born right at the start. We all had to time our showers, not flush the toilet unless we took a shit, couldn't have pools or water the garden in summer. So many of my family and friends families had their entire backyards turn yellow as if the grass were dead from the heat, barely sustained by what little rain did come. I remember seeing pictures of pools as a kid and asking why we weren't allowed to have them. The pool didn't cost that much to get and was still available for purchase as far as I knew, but the cost of the water was so high that it wasn't feasible. On the plus side, that's how I found my love of summer water guns.
As much as it was tough, this drought really changed how a lot of us think of our usage of water. In SA the restrictions were self policing, with neighbours holding each other accountable. Gardening practices also improved, including better and more adaptive plant selection and garden design, the use of mulching to retain moisture and suppress weeds, and drip irrigation systems set on timers for appropriate times of the day to reduce evaporation. Even when the drought ended, I think a lot of people continued to follow these practices.
Yeah, I remember all the public fountains being turned off to preserve water. Overall, I think people did a pretty decent job
So to solve a drought we take more water out of the environment so the evaporation system can't work . Of course if we'd stop growing cotton in this country we may have a bit of extra water
@@James-kv6kbwater should cycle multiple times before it hits the atmosphere. Fountains are a one and done. They are to sustainability as a one night stand is to marriage.
@@j.kaimori3848 I didn't mention fountains . I'm simply saying I believe a million people watering their gardens during a drought would actually help the situation.but switching one or two fountains off is not going to do anything especially when the water is recycled. Those sort of ideas come from silly blonde women that think they're making a difference when they're actually not doing anything
@@James-kv6kbThe water flow of the inland Murray Darling Basin river system is regulated by major dams in the mountains of the Great Divide. The extraction of water from these rivers is also regulated by an interstate share agreement.
Each river system has its own Water Alocation System based on a share of Available Water. An irrigator only sows the area of crop that has Available Water to grow that crop.
I have some early memories of the latter end of the drought. I grew up with harsh water resrictions, we'd keep buckets under our showers (mandated to 2 mins) to water the garden.
Newspapers would print and report on the levels of our reseviours, and this was in Melbourne, our 2nd largest city. Hope to never go through it again.
We got a big El Nino due to start, might have to keep those buckets on hand.
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr- Not yet. At the end of the ten year millennium drought, Melbourne reserves were at 25%. Now, they are are 95%.
I don't remember showers being mandated at 2 minutes in Melbourne... I'm very sure it was 4 minutes. They even gave out thousands of those little blue plastic hourglasses that were for 4 minutes
@@sylviam6535 You have more people, and the majority are people that are not from Australia compared to 13 years ago. Will they tow the line of timed showers? Will they even understand. It will be an interesting experiment.
@@joel6376 - Many people now live in much smaller blocks or in apartments, so gardens don’t require so much. Also, the desalination plants are online. There’s a few variables moving in different directions. Anyway, it will take a 3-4 years of bad weather before things become if concern. Right now, Australia is coming off a rare triple La Niña event.
I’m from Sea Lake originally, a small town in Northwest Victoria in the middle of the wheat belt. My family still lives there so I witnessed the effects of the drought first hand, and experienced 50°C days there firsthand during the drought.
The drought essentially killed the majority of the town, its biggest draw used to be a small lake that pulled in a small tourist traffic, it dried in the 90s and only was repaired and refilled in the mid 2010s. Losing this led to the majority of the population moving away, alongside the shuttering of major services like banks. The town is still a fraction of the size it used to be, and only a couple years ago land prices were so low that buying a car secondhand was more expensive.
Fortunately after the pickup of the rains the tourist lake refilled, and the nearby salt flats were discovered as a natural beauty spot and became a tourist destination. The town is slowly recovering but will never be the way it was prior to the droughts.
Thank you jonh. I can now stop worrying.
Sadly the largest cause of Australian droughts is unsustainable farming practices. If you look at the historical record Australia has changed much since described by early explorers. The National gallery shows a green country in paintings prior to 1860. Sheep turn the land into bare dirt, on staggeringly large areas. When it rains they crop this bare dirt and have the largest Wheat harvest in history post drought. Wind erosion since white settlement is staggering and 2 or 3% of New Zealand soils are Australia fallout. Indeed in the 1890s peoples laundry got dirty on the line in NZ because so much of Australia was falling on them. Some farmers are responsible and destock some gamble and there is no law preventing this. Historically no one destocked and 30 or 40 000 head dying on your property was normal, with the belief when it rained you would make so much money it did not matter.
yes. And the idiot farmers clearfell the trees too, further destroying the soil ecosystems - and harass their neighbours if they aren't also clearing. To see where this ends, visit the lower parts of Iceland. In more than 100 years of serious reforestation efforts, they've moved the needle by 0.5%. My partner & I spent 10 days there in 2018, driving around in a camper, and it was overwhelmingly like being on Mars.
Not supported by scientific data.
Drought means less rain. Nothing to do with soil.
@@Zackzickel LOW IQ JOKES
LOL !!!
@@Zackzickel it also means subterranean aquifers aren't replenishing, which can be lead to the lack of soil permeability and increased evaporation, a thing occurring when forests and woods have been turned into large pastures and openfield areas instead of landscaping mixed zones like bocage.
In 2002 my family moved to a small sub-tropical town on the east coast of Queensland. It must have been a very dry period when we arrived because I remember thinking we had moved to a desert (due in part to the weird amount of cacti we had, probably the only plants that were able to survive at the time). I can't imagine how bad it got further inland.
I vividly remember Black Saturday and the subsequent wettest year on record. Was a wild time heading back into Melbourne from a stint living in North East Victoria for 15 months, fantastic video! Absolutely love popping in and watching all the videos you have to upload.
My family grew up in the Victorian dairy industry until 1996, we were lucky to leave the industry before the drought took hold. Having four sons it was expected that we would remain in the industry, that wasn't going to happen, I was involved in dairy politics for some years and knew that the future was going to be perilous at best. I'm happy to be out of farming, but feeling less of a person for doing so, there is a feeling of belonging when you work the land and are responsible for the animals you breed . I really feel for those who have had to endure the droughts and floods, unimaginable heartache for so many. Neither farms we have owned are going concerns now, the price of water makes it nonviable to irrigate pasture for milk production.
a suggestion for a video topic: rise and fall of italian petrochemical around Venice
I lived through this and even I did not realise Brisbane had recycled water and most of the other desal plants (the Sydney one was a political dust up). At the ATO, drought provisions, especially for farmers, was a constant thing, the intensity waxed and waned over the years
In the cities, people who had tank water to water their gardens had to put up signs “This Garden Watered by Tank”, or else people would yell at them for watering their garden or having a green lawn. By the end of the drought many homeowners had pulled out their lawns and replaced them with tiles, rock gardens, or low water use succulents etc. The small country towns had it BAD. People couldn’t shower at home. Everyone got a once a week shower at a local sports facility with water trucked in for purpose. A few years after the drought broke, many of the low water gardens in the city were reverted back to lawns and shrubberies when houses sold. But a lot of the largest building projects still have clever water saving and water cleaning and reuse systems integrated into the whole building and grounds.
This channel has been my brain food for the past years. Needless to say I enjoyed every single episode, slightly more for topics that's not too technical. And i can see the shift in your content from technical to strategic. While I'd appreciate a video a day (mainly because i drive to work everyday), but i do hope that you can take a break or slow down and not burn out. Keep up the great work, will be nice to meet up when I'm in tw
I love watching an Asianometry video where thousands/millions DON'T die when a country has some kind of issue with food/water.
I live in Australia, I’m 73 yo and have seen government after government play politics with water. It’s big business, and I can assure you there were much better options than the BS desalination plants we were made to buy. Thing is those with the money listen to those that want it and turn deaf ears to those who know better. Now we are caught up in the BS drive to zero emissions, again the politicians, those with the money want more!! From us. It’s got bloody nothing to do with fossil fuel use but if we believe that the taxes can be raised. Climate change may be happening, it has for millennia, but it has nothing to do with fossil fuel use. A far more URGENT issue is deforestation, but wait we can’t tax that cos that would mean our ‘mates’ would have to pay…the developers
This one hits me personally as I was doing from primary school to high school and then to an adults in my early/mid 20s while being in central Victoria during the millennium drought and it's eventual and disastrous ending with the floods. Living on a small far right next to a drinking water supply reservoir , I saw everything from lush wet seasons in my early childhood with fond memories with weekly strong thunder storms during summer, and often some snow in winter.
Then, as the video nailed it on the head, in 1997 things started to changed and I noticed my favorite summer thunderstorms became a thing of the part.
By 2002, in high school I was driving quad bikes on the "desert planes" which I called the bone dry and weed infested 10s of square Km of reservoir lake bottom and once even drove my paddock bomb on there. Spend my holidays exploring this empty lake.
I also remember the land being infested with gauze and thistles, pattisons curse and all kinds of hard to kill noxious weeds, something that I virtually didn't see as a child.
Black Saturday was also close to home in a lot of ways, where I was also had bush fires the same day and I recall the day being dark and it raining ash all day.
Once 2010 hit, we got something like 400mm of rain in 2.5 days and one of the days was close to 200mm. The house and gutters were completely overwhelmed, filling the cavity in between floors of the 2 story farm house until the entire ceiling plaster of the living room collapsed and fell to the floor and 100s of L of water in the living room floor.
There was much difficultly in insurance as much of the state of Vic was underwater and many of the insurance companies went broke. Luckily we eventually pushed them enough to get repairs done.
Also, not anything to do with the millennium drought, but I also was in Melbourne driving home over the Bolte when the thunderstorm asthma even happened. I had asthma as a kid and oddly I was completely unaffected by the intense yellow haze.
One of my work colleagues however got quite sick from it. Many many people died that night and over the next several days.
Australia's climate is unforgiving but it is a way of life here.
Other government responses included installing kilometers of piping for irrigation water, and the subsequent decommissioning of networks of irrigation canals
We are at the point where desalination plants will be a must for all countries with access to the sea
What is is with Australia being perpetually cursed? Like, "hey, we recovered from that drought!" "Great! but like 10% of the country is on fire, and people are reporting literal waves of mice eating everything they can, and we keep taxing everything fun to do"
It's not cursed, it's a land of extremes. Government corruption and plagues of introduced vermin aside, Australia really only works in extremes. If it's hot, we get bushfires and droughts, if it's wet, it will flood. If an animal is dangerous it will be the most dangerous ect.
Science can help them !
Make it Green again !
@@lucasrem Yeah, which of the sciences, how and who is going to fund it?
Doesn’t feel cursed at all living here.
If booze and cigarettes are fun, I guess so. There’s always gambling. If we have anything left from smokes and booze we pour the rest into slot machines (pokies).
Lucky we have a mandatory retirement savings scheme I guess. Now at annual GDP and will be double in 2030.
Great video. and well done pronouncing Mel-ben. You didn't mention the effect of the Indian Ocean Dipol (IOD). It can have a significant influence on the north west of the country, and upper level troughs can pull the tropical moisture down through the centre to victoria and southern New South Wales. In 2011 we not only had a strong La Nina, but a negative IOD bringing more tropical moisture into Australia's south east, which contributed to the devastating floods.
Awesome job, id love to see you cover what happened after all this. The level of corruption that went into what was essentially banking stolen water and selling it back to the state and federal governments is insane. The Murray Darling is under extreme stress now because of it and many towns that were along the river further down stream have essentially been abandoned because of the cotton farming industry.
Desalination plants are a great insurance policy. Expensive but the must be available prior to their need.
Wow this is sucha random subject to find here. I remember this period well, the most alarming part was the amount of hyhdrophobic dusty dirt. The dirt in many location is naturally poor only a 20cm of water holding nutrient holding soil. But it got realy thin and dead around 1999-2001. The past few years has been weirdly wet it seems strange to me. if you spend some effort applying compost it's quiet easy to built a thick top soil layer now.
Love how you replaced the deer at the start with a kangaroo :)
Here in Southern California, which is defined as a desert, they are changing their ways. Extremes of weather are the new norm. Dry or wet extremes are the forecast. Efforts to retain the big soaks are now a thing. Example, they are diverting some water off the aqueducts into the desert to percolated into the water table. More dams, a desal. plant in San Diego, largest in the nation, and more. A lot more people in this area than Aussieland in whole. It needs to be figured out big time.
An Australian here. When this video started, with the words '"the millenium drought.... fundamentally changed Australian society'' I thought I was watching an old soviet TV news programme - remember Soviet TV broadcast internationally via satellite in the 1970's? Nice music but their news used to gleefully report things like '"Australian workers are striking again, as they have had enough of the harsh conditions'' and show footage of some protest somewhere that involved a single firm in a single industry, amounting something 0.1% of Australia's workers at most. But without actually telling lies, they would make it sound like the whole country riven with industrial strife.
The millenium drought certainly had NO effect on me, and no noticeable effect on our society generally. Farmers were certainly affected, but very few Australians are farmers. it should be noted that poor farming practices contributed to unnecessary dependence on high rainfall. most wheat farmers have recently adopted a different ploughing regime which better retains soil moisture.
However, this video went on to be generally good.
Asianometry did miss something important - our State governments needed to address water shortage in recent years not because of climate change, and not because of a drought - marked lack of rain periodically has long been understood as a normal part of Australia's climate - but because of considerable population growth. Since the early 1960's the population has exponentially grown from 9 million to 27 million. States ran out of convenient rivers to dam up, and had to turn to desalinating sea water. That's a 3 times increase and naturally the government has had to provide roughly three times as much water. we all drink about the same amount, flush the toilet about the same number of times, water gardens and lawn, etc.
Governments don't like to spend money or accept blame, and like governments worldwide, our State governments have blamed the climate - anything other than themselves - when in fact they should have planned for the population growth and built desalination plants and other measures sooner.
Your description of Russian Sat TV news of Australia sounds awfully like modern BBC in the UK. Misleads massively without (often) telling outright lies. Arguably rivals any totalitarian regime for social engineering.
@@causewaykayak; Yes, I have noticed that in BBC shows repeated on UA-cam. For example, on a prgramme about nuclear power, without actually saying so, they implied that power stations operate teeter-totter and can explode like a nuclear bomb. In fact they can melt down, but they cannot explode.
@@keithammleter3824 Thanks for the support. 👍🏻
Spot on. Like almost every environmental problem in the world, overpopulation is to blame. Australia, however, in its stupidity, has chosen to import a problem it could easily have avoided, but greed’s a hell of a drug!
There has to be a way to build cheap water infrastructure, such as dams, artificial aquifers and so on. The age-old way of winning against floods is canals, not dams. This could create protection against both excessive rain and drought, and without the energy cost that recycling or desalination has.
Regulations, partiality of policy makers, and labour costs are holding back applied engineering and production.
We can't rely on technology alone to solve all our problems, but resolving the above can definitely advance the technology we use.
You should explain that the US system works in Australia: If you leave the land your loan is secured with, you no longer have to pay off the loan: That's a motivation to give up the farming job. In other countries, the bank pays part of the loan by selling the soil, but you still have to pay the rest yourself. A big problem, because then you have nothing left to work with.
I love your videos. It's great to see one about my home country, be it on a difficult issue.
Omegaxero
Difficult issue ? What is it you don't understand ?
The Australian Asianometry logo looks so good 😁
At first I thought this was a drought that lasted from the end of the 19th century into the first decade of the 21st century and I was thinking. "How come I've never heard of this? I guess Australia is still extremely dry and just slightly less extremely dry now.
It is our massive variability that makes it such a tough country to survive in.
The declination plant in Melbourne was also never activated and still sits dormant to this day.
I was born into and grew up through this drought. I don't really have any memories of rain until 2009-10, when it suddenly felt like the entire country was drowning all at once. I'm still not sure I'm used to how much rain we get these days.
Adelaide being levelled by napalm sounds dramatic but the Adelaide Hills aren’t the city proper. They’re a mix of rural and exurban.
How well researched! I as a old geezer recognized them all, yes even the before my time ones as I love history. And best of all, you didn't scream "Climate change" . Our government screams that every time we have wind,rain,drought,fire,snow...whatever
Friendly Jordies did a great piece on the cotton industries misuse of water.
I remember when it broke in 2007/2008 haha. My dad came home to find 10 year old me filling all the waste bins with 100s of Litres of water from the gutter drainage. He joined me in his work clothes and we were just soaked 😂 Ps soon after it was mandatory to have a rainwater tank in every new home.
Snowy River Project to divert water inland.
You forgot about the recent Brisbane River floods including 2011 and 2017.
And Warragamba dam overflowed in early 2021 during the big wet.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me! -Dorothea Mackellar
We have had this on and on for ages.
if you have a natrual energy source like natrual gas, hydro power or geothermal then desalination is viable. I think dumping the slurry into a pond inland and let the sun dehydrate the water will leave minerals that could be recycled.
Na, we already have huge salt lakes in S.A.. Besides, the "environmental effects" of desalination are overstated by opponents. Desal plants pump half the water back out to sea, with double the salt content, which is hardly "hyper saline brine", let alone a slurry. Outfall's are monitered, and dilution occurs immediately.
“..:Murmurs by a few disgruntled people.” That’s a polite way of putting it. To use local terminology, people carried on like pork chops.
All of a sudden “tank water in use” stickers popped up on everyone’s front gardens, whether they had a tank or not! Although these days rainwater collection is compulsory in many places for new builds so it’s far more common than it used to be.
They were upset as farming uses 70% of water supply, some of which goes to rice and cotton farms. Any water restrictions on residential use (20% of total) is wasted effort, collective virtual signalling and a cause of division and anger in thousands of suburban streets.
@@havenmist2216The Southern Murray Basin water allocation system shares the available water resource among water users. General Security water is the least reliable water. NSW Murray River General Security water was Zero for 3 years during the middle of the middle of the Millenium Drought. They ran some water down the bed of a few channels for Town Water which is similar reliability as most of South Australia's water. No rice grown in Southern Riverina for years. Most rice mills moth balled for years. Australia imported rice to keep rice on the supermarket shelves. Food riots in Egypt same time as no rice exports from Australia. No Water, No Food.
@@kevinkelly7078
The water in the Murray and Darling, doesn't come from the Sothern Riverina system. The Murrumbidgee catchment is in the Murray Darlin Basin and feed the Darling which runs to SA. That is where rice and cotton are grown. They have never grown rice in SA.
And YES they are now growing rice in 2O21-22 in the Murray and Murrumbidgee valley due to water allocation, after 2021-22 where the Murray and Darling flooded to the the highest it had in 50 years. Yet it still is the dumbest thing you could grow in Australia.
Without locks the Murray and Darling would dry up much more than they do now, naturally as they have for millennia. Its only human effort that makes growing food in the Riverina possible.
Yes, no water no food - lets stop flushing it out to sea via SA.
Or you could be the brisbane government in 2010 who left water restrictions at level 3, when the dams were at 108%, then we had extereme rainfall to the point of flooding, and they had to let the dams out so they didnt break, adding to the floods of brisbane
So how much farming goes to actually feeding a nation and how much is commodity export.
Australia also imports plenty.
Mostly commodity export. Prices are quite high here because other nations will pay higher prices for our produce than the locals will.
One problem with is Australia city culture is it doesn’t believe in grey water plumbing or devices like wash shower or wash basin to toilet etc Along with instant bathroom copper pipes to save water & to instant heat the water
I remember being in Brisbane around ~’05 and having to take 5 minute showers. Fun times.
Super interesting. thank you.
My hose turned into a solid black mass from heat and lack of use.
We're in a drought now, it's barely rained for months in southern nsw
Looks like we are up for another decade drought. We didn't really learn enough. If anything, our achievements have been negated by population growth.
So, are the El Nino and La Nina events the same effect in both the south and north ends of the pacific, or is it reversed like the seasons? People talking about weather variations up here in Canada often refer to this cycle as well, but all the charts we use cut off around the equator, just like the ones in your video.
El Nino causes drought in South East Asia as well, on both sides of the equator. Basically the whole Western Pacific dries up, while the west coast of South America get floods. La Nina reverses things.
I learnt a lot about my own country. Thank you
There has been of heaps of rain for the last seven days in Australia
I recall Linux Conf Australia 2011 in Brisbane - the show went on with a hasty last minute change of venue after the floods. Was quite surreal walking along the riverwalk in the city seeing the high water mark well over head level
Ah yes I remember that one also. Mark Newton said he was giving a talk in Radelaide 3 days post-LCA so I changed my (motorbike) travel plans to try to go there on the way home to Sydney. 2500km (I turned for home at Mildura for unrelated reasons) in 42C+ weather. Up to 46C in places. I love riding but that was not a fun time
A guy punched a man watering his garden. The man died.
I grew up in Canberra and almost didn't see rain for the first 8 years of my life
Please do a video on saudi ARAMCO
I imagine a good way to make economic use of the desalination and recycling plants is to store that water somewhere so it's stocked up for drought years. Unfortunately, just filling a reservoir requires good geography and would have lots of evaporation losses year to year, and a giant underground cistern would cost immense amounts to construct and maintain. You could have smaller plants operating continuously and build up a reserve for those heavy drought years where even the plants can't keep up with demand. A minimum solution I suppose is at least getting more rainwater to infiltrate and store as groundwater during heavy rainfall years and minimize how much flows out to sea. That require a lot of retention ponds and swales across millions of acres of private property, but it's at least scientifically sound.
Where I live, they attempt to put excess water into the aquafir. I am not sure how well that works. I have often wondered why there aren't lots of solar powered desalination plants. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of seawater, but certainly lots of solar potential.
@@john_in_phoenix Sarcasm.
@@john_in_phoenix Solar panels are filthy to produce. Then try to dispose of them. Landfill?
How about we limit the population.
I personally think they should build pipelines over the Great Dividing Range, so that the desal/recycling plants can pump excess water into the Murray-Darling system, when the coastal cities don't need it. There are plenty of years where the coast gets enough rain, but the inland doesn't. The river water is over-allocated to irrigators, so adding more water to the rivers would allow farmers to get their full allocation, while still keeping the river ecosystems alive.
Running desalination plans when they are not needed is what they call throwing good money after bad.
subtitles haven't loaded yet?
Awesome video mate.. 👍
Great Work as always
Random Margo Robbie lore dropped like a nuke! Cheers, mate!
Do one on the Modified Bradfield Scheme? And CY O'Connor?
Drought and flood will always be part of Australia’s story, though there’s no argument that it is becoming more and more frequent over the past couple of decades. Whether it’s climate change or natural cycles matters not, our approaches have to change. The fact we’re still growing cotton and rice in the Murray-Darling Basin is complete insanity. Those crops have no business beyond the tropics.
Agree see what cotton farming has done to the Aral Sea in the name of fast fashion smh.
Remember droughts in Australia including this one ended with massive flooding rain. It's just the cycles in Australia. Droughts and flooding rains. I hope the next show is the 2011 floods...
You say that watering was self regulating. I can tell you that during times of water regulation if you have a green lawn your neighbours would have harassed you and dobbed you in or shamed you in some way I also notice after going overseas our toilets etc use much less water.
Between shuttering desalination plants and pulling back on farming, sounds like Australia’s government has been making some questionable long term moves
Questionable for society, but in line with the corrupt neoLiberal ideology both sides of politics adhere to. The amount of corruption in water allocations under the previous government would shock the world.
They overlords want to drive up food prices and to cause shortages.
That's states responsibility.
Why would you run a desalination plant at a loss?
@@TimJBenham Because people need water to survive? There’s a lot of essential services that are run at a loss, desal plants aren’t needed in same places in Australia right now (like Melbourne) because we’ve had a lot of rain, but in places like north-west NSW they’re experiencing a drought
0:30 I see that Kangaroo pic swap! Subtle
Clever - made me smile : )
some think like 90% of Perth's water comes form decel plants
This channel is quickly climbing the list of my favorite subscribed educational channels with the variety of topics, research into them, and unbiased straightforward delivery of the details with some nerdy jokes thrown in here and there. You deserve over a million subs, its a crime that you don't have it already.
Never mind the economics and societal stuff, I like the meteorological info. Eyes out for more of that 👀
Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
"desalination plants are best used all the time for efficiency"
me: "yes, so it's best used to replenish the aquifers?"
gov: "let's turn them off until needed"
Farmers: "we are out of water with the aquifers"
Gov: "we aren't yet experiencing a drought, but we will give the farmers dedicated access to rivers to take as much water as they like"
Gov: "our rivers are running dry and it is not raining, we are in a drought, begin level one conservation and prepare to enable the desal plants again"
me: "hmm... I wonder if they are going to need massive maintenance before being turned on...?"
Excellent report. It's unfortunate that, despite the fact that you mostly only talk about the cyclical drought cycles and don't even touch on climate change and its impact (apart from merely listing that ever more extreme cycles), YT felt the need to inject that disclaimer context - and that acted as a red flag to the usual suspects, many of whom I suspect to not even be Australian. As for ourselves, living on a small farm, we see first hand how things are swinging back and forth ever more violently. After 3 years of "do I need to build an Ark or something?!", we've now had the driest 3 month period ever measured - and that includes long-term data from soil and tree rings, not just weather observations.
The Murray Darling water scheme is a total disgrace.
I'm a Perthian - never been called that, though; I like it!
You'll always be a sandgroper to me 😉
Im stupid and read that as "Australia and the Aluminium drought".
If it's not drought it's flood.
thank you. it appears that desalination plants require some re-thinking and new ideas !
Australia is mostly an urban society. Most Australians only barely know of the millennium drought. People living in rural areas did suffer. West Australia has been experiencing a drought for 30 years. In 2023 it is getting worse and a third desalination plant is under construction in Perth.
It feels odd to hear people prounounce it as "Mur - ray"
I remember the price of a steak shot up from $5 to $17 fair enough but drought finished and steak price never came down 😢 assholes.
Actually, El Nino and La Nina affect Australia's NORTH-east rainfall, not South-east. As you later mentioned, both the Southern Ocean Oscillation and Southern-Indian Ocean Dipole affects the south-west and south-east.
NSW is still south east, most of it's coastal side is definitely affected by La Nina.
Look, Australia is SO urbanised. So with people living on the coast, particularly in the South East, I don't believe we focus on drought as much as you think we do. Australia is 90% city dwellers and then 10% crazy farmers who live in the interior. They can go round naming things as crazy as they want, but if you REALLY want to have a discussion around water management, it begins and ends with corporations using such RIDICULOUS amounts of water on crops that are just held up by the Government. Anyway I'm from Melbourne, so the big natural disasters for us are always bush fires. I will NEVER forget Black Saturday and any Melburnian will remember where they were during that week of 45 degree (celcius) plus weather.
Well done again! Actual facts and stats not ideology!
It is a good summary, thanks.
SA 2007. Man kills his neighbour over water his plants…….
Australianometry?
The irritating thing about the water restrictions, then and now, is that houshold water is less than 5% of water usage in australia.
SO, making people stop using sprinklers was a pretty stupid, minimal, though highly visible thing. kind of like the government trying to put single use plastic back on the public, instead of the industry producing and using it, or like greenhouse gases from personal uses.
Like, every little bit counts, but even if every australian had stopped using all their household water, it would have made no realistic difference...
minor aside, Murray is pronounced more like muh-ree
And Wivenhoe is more like WHY-vin-HO