Turtles in the lower lakes of the Murray are dying because the water is becoming saline bringing an influx of marine tube worms into what was a freshwater system and the poor turtles are becoming a surface for tube worms to grow on so the
There are parts of the ocean, in the centre of gyres of current that resemble minestrone soup. There is more plastic than plankton and the twin problems of plastic are that it does not break down in any sensible time frame and it neither floats nor sinks so there is a mass of plastic suspended in these gyres just blow the surface of the water.
I was watching a documentary of this a one guy trawled the “soup” in the Pacific Ocean and brought up hundreds of umbrella handles, tooth-bushes, plastic bags and six-pack holders. The latter two either look like jelly fish or they trap animals in the holes where the beer cans were.
Some beaches on Pacific islands now have a “sand” that is largely made up of small pieces of plastic.
Almost all of this plastic comes from garbage tossed into the streets, rivers and watercourses. The metalized plastic potato chip bags also featured in large numbers.
The throw away concept of living is increasing.
The Murray at Murray Bridge, in South Australia, is currently 35cm below sea level and is to drop around 50cm lower by the end of April.
Meantime, wheat crops are being planted off the Darling and flood irrigated, cotton and rice which uses enormous amounts of water planted.
60 -70 year old farmers are crawling out over the mud at Lake Albert to extend pipes to keep stock alive and get muddy water for their homes and Lake Albert in parts is receding at 500 m per week.
Meanwhile Victoria refuses to hand control of the system to the Commonwealth 14 months after the $10 billion plan was offered.
So much for the ‘spirit of cooperation’ between States and Commonwealth we were promised with Labour coast to coast. I thought Australia was one country but nonsense things like this sound like squabbling between different nations not states in the same country.
My personal take is that when there is a shortage of water, the Federal Government should share the resources equitably and account should be taken of the $ earned per litre of water used for the various crops and industries. The farmers losing their water allocation should have compensation but as climate change bites, and Australia is one of the worst affected places, it is hard to see how anyone can justify water-wasting crops like cotton and rice, in the upper reaches of the river while the bottom end dries up and whole towns and cities are without water and without the industry and jobs that depend on the river.
Update on 26th March
This week all the State Premiers and the Prime Minister are meeting in Adelaide to the regular talk & argue-fest. In this morning’s paeter, the Victorian Premier was quoted as saying that Victoria has the best managed water resources in the country and he is not going to go anything to dissadvantage any Victorians.
It is easy to have the best managed water (for Victorians only) when Victoria has more rainfall and is on the headwaters of the river.
The management that is of concern, if how they equitably share resources with other states and in particular with South Australia where the river is rapidly drying up.
Victorians are able to go on driving around happily with “Victoria- the Garden State” on their vehicle registration plates. I guess that is what matters to Mr Brumby and his voters.
Technorati Tags: drought, interstate squabbling, River Murray, Adelaide, Victoria, Australia, The Murray, Murray Bridge, Lake Albert, water resources, global warming
The CSIRO has discovered the rise of pollution in the atmosphere is forcing a change in ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere, in turn affecting our region’s weather systems. A report by Dr Wenju Cai said aerosols cool the Northern Hemisphere’s ocean surface and induce a hemispheric imbalance. This causes an increase in the transport of heat from the Southern Hemisphere oceans to the Northern Hemisphere oceans via the south Atlantic. “For the first time, we see that human-generated aerosols are partly responsible for intensifying features such as larger ocean gyres, causing them to shift southward. They also cause the southward movement of maximum sea surface temperature gradients, mid-latitude storms and the westerly jet stream,” said Dr Cai.
Technorati Tags: CSIRO, ride of pollution, pollution, atmosphere, Southern Hemisphere, weather systems, hemispheric imbalance, climate change, global warming
The Australian Minister For Environment, Peter Garret, has suggested that they be banned by the end of the year. Outcry from retailers!
50% of consumers bring their own bags and don’t use the plastic ones. The big issue for me is remembering to carry them up from the car. I keep enough bags in the car to cope with forgetting to take them back to the car from the house.
The waste processors tell us that the bags cause problems in many automated and manual resource recovery systems. They also tell us that the bags do not cause as much problem in landfill as degradable organic waste which generates methane and contribute to the greenhouse effect.
The problem is the litter that they cause when people are irresponsible.
A sensible solution would be to charge a small levy per bag and let the market decide what they feel is the best way for them to move their groceries from shop to home BUT couple this with an education campaign or signage on the bag to remind people about the damage bags cause as litter.
Extending this subject to farming and aquaculture - what about stock feed and fertilizer bags. I am sure lots of my clients would love some helpful comments on how to deal with this problem.
Technorati Tags: plastic bags, resource recovery systems, landfills, degradable organic waste, methane, greenhouse effect
I live in a north facing apartment block and since I erected a canopy over the windows to keep out the summer sun, I seldom have any real desire to use an air-conditioner. The apartments are all very well insulated so that we don’t hear sound from one to another. Really quite environmentally friendly.
We have a series of recycling bins in the basement – I feel that if they were better labelled for cans, bottles, plastics etc it would be better. Paper is pre-sorted and most of us are good about using these. The household waste has to be bagged and put down a shute with organic waste going into an in-sink-erator that grinds it up which prevent odours in the waste bins but does add to the biological load in the sewer. I use a worm farm on my terrace in winter but the heat on the tiled surface cooks them in summer.
My concern is for bagging the rubbish. Like most council waste, our waste all must be bagged and I have not found a satisfactory biodegradable bin liner bag that I can use that avoids plastic bag use. With the Federal Environment Minister wanting to make plastic shopping bags illegal by the end of the year, it would be great if all the bin liners sold were biodegradable too. In
Technorati Tags: environmentally friendly, environment, recycling, recycling bins, organic waste, biological, biodegradable bin liner bag, avoid plastic bag
Let’s put Global warming into perspective. Sure the earth has warmed and cooled in the past due to variations in intensity of heat from the sun.
Now we have added atmospheric pollution! We have changed the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere. There is now an insulating layer of polluted atmosphere that lets the sun’s rays in but lets less than normal of the reflected rays out.
Pouring excess CO2, Methane, NOX and other gases into the air is pollution and this is putting our children and grand children’s future at risk. We ignore it at THEIR peril.
OK so it means we need to make some changes now. Many of these will actually save us money once we get our head around them and decide that change is ok. If we don’t we risk major economic effects (see Stern Report), political instability and increasing unpredictable weather patterns.
In the diagram, the arrows on the left indicate the situation before we started to seriously pollute our atmosphere and the right hand side shows the greenhouse effect.
I know I seem to keep banging on about this subject but I deeply care about the future for my grandchildren and all their friends. I guess that this is a major motivation for my business. I have two major passions - my deep love of the natural world and my understanding of the way systems help businesses to run more profitably and provide business owners with a less stressful lifestyle.
Technorati Tags: global warming, symptom of atmospheric pollution, atmospheric pollution, pollution, greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide, methane, greenhouse gases, Stern report
I have spoken before about the uses of reed beds and wetlands for improving water quality. A well constructed wetland, like the one in this photo, removes over 90% of the nutrients and 90% of the bacteria from the water as well as allowing for the natural removal of over 90% of sediments from the water before it is discharged in the rivers and sea.
However when I was reading Peter Andrews wonderful book “Back from the Brink” I learned of yet another important natural role for reeds in our river systems. This one should have been obvious. Peter points out that reeds in a river slow the water and spread it out over the flood plain so that the flood plain water table is recharged naturally and very importantly, the river bed does not erode down.
In our greed to have more flood free land we have build on these valuable floodplains and removed to reeds to prevent flooding and our rivers have deepened as they rush the water fast to the sea preventing the aquifer recharge that we so desperately need.
In the cities we have taken this a step further and concreted the creek and river systems so that they get rid of the storm water faster and leave us moaning about why we are facing water shortages and severe restrictions. (more…)
Stormwater is one of our most valuable resources but at present it is often the dogs’ sewage system and it is discharged untreated into out rivers, creeks and the sea. Think about what else goes into stormwater sometimes! In my last house I lived beside a creek (stream in some countries) and what went down that at times was horrific.
For a start the creek bed and walls had been fully concreted. This is the engineering solution to flood prevention with the aim being to get the water to the seas a quickly as possible. Of course this mean that no aquifer recharge happens and all the rubbish and litter left on pavements and in gutters is picked up and whisked out to sea. Some people even deliberately throw waste into creeks to save themselves the trouble of disposing of it. One day I was astounded to see at least 30 huge palm fronds charging down after heavy rain. All that was needed to cause a major local flood would have been a forked branch also washing down and getting stuck under a bridge. The palms would have made a wonderful dam! Something like this happened a few streets upstream a year later causing serious local flooding. (more…)
Runoff to the Barrier Reef comes from, towns (some many kilometers upstream on the rivers as well as the coastal ones), small local industries, cane, bananas, mango and other farms and aquaculture farms. They all contribute to the pollution problems. However, aquaculture and some other industries with a definite outlet pipe have huge remediation and compliance costs. Many others have a diffuse outlet, far greater but they have no monitoring and none of the huge add-on costs.
Off the Adelaide coast there has been very serious loss of the sea-grass meadows and consequent large scale long-shore sand drift resulting in a lowering of the beaches in many places by several metres and very expensive sand trucking and dredging operations. This was caused by a combination of treated sewage effluent outfall and storm-water runoff. The high nutrient water discharged this way encouraged the growth of large amounts of small algae on the sea-grass leaves and the combination of the shading effects of all this algae plus the sediments from the runoff and outfalls shaded the sea-grass so much that it died. Storm-water is very high in nutrients and may contain other many other pollutants. It contains runoff from over watered and over fertilized gardens plus it is the dogs’ sewage system, although this latter is slowly beginning to improve in many places. This damage was clearly a mainly community pollution problem that has seriously impacted on the Adelaide coastal environment.
We all need to be aware of what we throw or pour into drains or onto streets. It is a cumulative community problem and we all need to think where we wash out that paint brush, discharge our swimming pool backwash or where we toss rubbish. It all ends in the sea or in lakes and rivers.
Technorati Tags: marine pollution, marine, marina, pollution, Barrier Reef, Adelaide coast, ISO 14001