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| Down Under | |||||
| Farmers advised to | |||||
| 2005-06-21 | |||||
OWNERS of big farms struggling with debt across Australia's drought-ravaged southern states should leave the land as the weather worsens, a climate expert says. Australia was fast becoming a desert with changing weather patterns making fewer areas across the southern part of the country suitable for farming, University of Newcastle lecturer and meteorologist Martin Babakhan said today. By 2070, he said, the environmental catastrophe as outlined in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow would become a reality.
Mr Babakhan said he would leave the land if he were a farmer on a big farm struggling with debt in the eastern and western wheatbelts. "I reckon the time is right," he said. "Just start doing it now because there isn't any hope.
Northern states were helped by monsoonal rains — the best falls in the desert regions of north-western Australia, Mr Babakhan said. The industrial expansion of northern hemisphere countries such as China had resulted in a huge increase in carbon dioxide in the southern hemisphere, he said. This in turn had led to the warming of Antarctica, affected the hole in the ozone layer above the frozen continent, and resulted in changed weather conditions for Australia. "The end product will be we are going to get less rain and our temperature starts rising, the number of days exceeding 35C are going to increase by 60-70 per cent, and the water evaporation will increase because of the high temperatures," Mr Babakhan said. "The continent will dry up."
He also advocated a change from coal to nuclear power, and he suggested Australia export uranium to countries such as China so they followed suit. A further measure to ease the pain was to exploit the 31 billion cubic metres of water that fell during the wet season in northern Australia. Mr Babakhan said the water could flow down the Murray-Darling basin to southern states. "We have got a lifeline in Australia today, we could tap into that water in the north and feed it into dams," he said."This would provide one-and-a-half to two years of water supply a season. "This is the idea we would like to float." At present, NSW is in the grip of one of the worst droughts in history, with June figures showing 91 per cent of the state drought declared, five per cent only marginal and only four per cent satisfactory. A spokeswoman for Primary Industries minister Ian Macdonald said showers last week had allowed farmers to plant some crops but much more rain was needed if those crops were to prosper. The New South Wales Government has pumped $160 million into drought assistance since July 2002, when the problem first became apparent on a wide-scale basis. But some regions have been in drought for four years. | |||||
| Posted by:Spavirt Pheng6042 |
| #10 I like a good disaster movie as much as the next person, and am willing to ignore a lot of crap in order to watch one, but I could never bring myself to watch The Day After Tomorrow, just based on the previews. It's so ridiculous I'd be screaming at the screen. What the hell happened to Roland Emmerich? He must have taken as looooong drink of leftist kool-aid. :-( I'm with #9 tu3031. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-06-21 14:35 |
| #9 Wow. You're using The Day After Tomorrow to back up your position huh, Marty? Yeah, your credibility with me went way WAY up when I saw that... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2005-06-21 13:30 |
| #8 He also advocated a change from coal to nuclear power, and he suggested Australia export uranium to countries such as China so they followed suit. Export uranium to countries like China? Hahahahahahahahahaha! What a moroon! |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2005-06-21 11:18 |
| #7 The industrial expansion of northern hemisphere countries such as China had resulted in a huge increase in carbon dioxide in the southern hemisphere, he (Babakhan) said. So tell me again why China along with India and some other so called developing nations are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol. Even this "the sky is falling" Moonbat recognizes the fallacy of that clause. |
| Posted by: GK 2005-06-21 11:16 |
| #6 another Kyoto effect - logic doesn't apply, raptor |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-06-21 10:01 |
| #5 "...if the polar ice caps melted, triggering a new ice age." I am not a Climatoligist,but that statement makes no sense at all.Correct me if I'm wrong,but wouldn't an iceage mean the icecaps are growing? |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-06-21 09:47 |
| #4 Jackal, I've really had that happen to me. Amazing what urban idiots DON'T know. Like Reagan used to say, "It's not that they don't know anything, it's that they know so much that isn't true!" |
| Posted by: BA 2005-06-21 09:20 |
| #3 Well, as a typical urban idiot would say: "That's too bad about the farmers, but it doesn't affect me; I get my food from the supermarket." |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-06-21 09:09 |
| #2 I saw the title and thought it'd be about ZimBOBwe! |
| Posted by: BA 2005-06-21 09:00 |
| #1 Oldest trick in the book. Somebody might want to check to see if Mr Babakhan has a straw man out there who is quielty buying up that same land at a discounted price. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-06-21 07:55 |