A decade ago, Melbourne was gripped in drought. Water storages had fallen to below 30% and widespread water restrictions were in place across the city:
Several years of strong rainfall followed and today Melbourne’s dam storages sit at a healthier 69%. However, today The ABC reports that Southern Australia is getting drier, most likely due to climate change:
Winter rains are in decline across southern Australia, and while it is too early to say beyond doubt it is due to climate change, scientists say it is not just about climate variability.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, June was the driest on record for large parts of southern Australia, and the winter as a whole across Australia was the ninth driest on record…
The Sub Tropical Ridge is a climate driver worth paying attention to because over the past few decades, it has been getting stronger in winter.
As a result, winters in the south of the country are drying out…
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, May to July rainfall has reduced by about 19 per cent since 1970 in the south-west of Australia.
There has been a decline of about 11 per cent since the mid-1990s in the April–October growing season rainfall in the continental south-east.
CSIRO Agriculture and Food senior principal research scientist Zvi Hochman said winter rain in Australia’s southern wheatbelt had declined by a whopping 28 per cent since 1990…
“A period of 26 years is not sufficient to say without any doubt that it is climate change. But it is long enough to say without any doubt that it’s not just climate variability.
“There is a one in a hundred billion chance that this trend is by chance alone.”
Since the last drought hit Melbourne a decade ago, the city’s population has ballooned by 965,000 or 26%. The city’s population is also projected to expand by 96,000 people a year for the next 35 years until Melbourne is 73% larger at more than 8 million people:
With Southern Australia getting drier, and the population exploding, the question needs to be asked: how will Melbourne avoid catastrophic drought?
Sure, an expensive $6 billion 1,500 billion litre desalination plant has been built that has added to every Melbournian’s water costs. But even with the desalination plant cranked to full capacity, it cannot hope to ameliorate a 73% increase in demand (via the projected population increase) as well as less water flows into Victoria’s dams.
Will Melbournians be forced to fund more costly desalination plants, as well as be subjected to stiff water restrictions, just so our delinquent ‘Big Australia’ policy makers can stuff an additional 3.4 million people into the city through ongoing mass immigration?
