Skeptics are a "tiny right wing fring group"

That depends on the size of the lake and what you call, "local."

 

I didn't other members of this forum did. They were intent on trying to convince us that Australia could solve the predicted desertification by filling Lake Eyre with salt water

Pity this was first mooted in 1920 - and disproved THEN

 

Yes, well, proposals for flying to the moon were also disproved in 1920...

 

Lakes can create precipitation, if the air is cool and moist enough. Lake effect snow shows that. But from what I read about Lake Eyre, the air there is hot and dry all the time, so the lake can't evaporate enough water to saturate the air and create precipitation.

 

That and the fact it is SHALLOW - deepest is 15 metres below sea level. It would be different if there were a decent amount of vegetation surrounding the lake but there is not.

http://www.k26.com/eyre/The_Lake/Ideas/Fill_Lake_Eyre_/fill_t

 

I just took an internet tour of lake Eyre and looked up the climate.

Hot and dry year round is a real bugger.

And it is a very large area.

 

You can choose to defer to scientists and other experts that agree that humans were/are the major cause of global warming and that if we stop/decrease dramatically the use of fossil fuels we can reverse the warming OR you can defer to scientists and other experts that have the opposite view. The fact is that there is currently no proof and therefore no majority consensus amoungst those studing Global Warming. There is however consensus that no matter how much we decrease our CO2 emissions or the use of fossil fuels it will have little substantial effect on stopping of reducing Global Warming and that due to the financial implications on our current cost of energy and negative financial effect on individuals and families, the reduction in CO2 and warming is simply not worth increasing our energy costs at this time or anytime in the near or distant future.

 

Which opposite view? Opposite view being 1)humans are not a major cause of GW or
2)decreasing use of FF will not reverse the warming?

Look up and understand the definition of "fact"
"currently no proof" of what?

I'd really, really like to read about this "consensus". Care to share?
"negative financial effects" like these:

from http://www.sciencenews.org

And I have posted this to you before, but you have ignored it and just continued repeating the lies of the anti-AGW blogs:

Seacoastonline

How is a 10% reduction in CO2 not worth $ 0.46 a month? How is $0.46 a month a catastrophic "negative financial effect on individuals and families"?

 

Stopping natural global warming is impossible...Mitigating humanities contribution if possible. Also, the shift to other forms of energy is essential.

 

They plowed differently. Instead of plowing up and down hills they followed the contour of the land.
They also planted trees as windbreaks to slow the wind.

And as they followed the contour of the land they left a strip of native grasses in the field to slow erosion. They would plant an area, leave a strip of grass, and plant another area.


They did not suddenly go out and buy new plows, tractors, and disks....they were broke.
What new varieties of grasses wre avaliable in the late thirties and early fourties?

 

Errr - from where?? Georgina is probably the most active waterway feeding into Lake Eyre

The 2009 Lake Eyre flood peaked at 1.5 m (5 ft) deep in late May which is a quarter of its maximum recorded depth of 6 m (20 ft). 9 km3 (2 cu mi) of water crossed the Queensland–South Australian border with most of it coming from massive floods in the Georgina River. However the greater proportion soaked into the desert or evaporated en route to the lake leaving less than 4 km3 (0.24 cu mi) in the lake which covered an area of 800 km2 (309 sq mi) or 12% of the lake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre#Floods

Thank the Gods!! Because everything around it was so soggy we would have had another inland Tsunami like the one that wiped out Grantham

.

Let me see if I can give you some idea of scale here



The headwaters of the Georgina River - where most of the rain fell is around about Iowa - Lake Eyre then would be around about Arkansaw - on a rough guess



In other words not much smaller than the Mississippi basin - now tell me does increasing the amount of water in Louisianna increase precipitation in Iowa??

I certainly do - and I know what I am talking about because I live here. It is my experience though that most Americans do not understand the size of Australia

 

Nope. Your ignorance is comprehensive. Contour plowing is for sloping land. The Great Plains aren't sloping land. Contour plowing is to control rain erosion, not wind erosion. The erosion problem in the 30s was from drought + wind, not rain.

They'd already been doing that for decades.

Actually, they had often already bought tractors in the boom years of the 1920s, and then in the 1930s bought (or sometimes made) diskers, which cost far less than a tractor. If you think farmers were all broke all through the 30s, you are a fool. Some of them prospered. Farmers who adopted the new technologies gained an advantage, and often bought up the land of their less forward-thinking neighbors.

Hybrids. Read and learn:

"The demand for hybrid seed in 1935 in the Corn Belt exceeded production, and the hybrid seed industry developed rapidly."

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/timeline/corn.htm

How many more times do I have to prove you wrong before you will become willing to consider the possibility that you actually ARE wrong?

 

Err, from the (*)(*)(*)(*)ing dam you claimed couldn't possibly have been built to handle that much water.

Err, I already told you, that's a different kind of project.

You are trying to change the subject.

And did you even see your source's math error?

Only if other Australians are also so blinkered and technophobic they refuse to consider building adequate hydrological infrastructure to take advantage of the increased rainfall from global warming.

Translation: let's see if you can change the subject again.

<yawn> It's "Arkansas," and you are spewing irrelevancies.

In what you are no doubt pleased to call your, "mind," how is that relevant to anything I said?

For one thing, Louisiana is already pretty wet, so adding water won't make much difference to the hydrological cycle there -- unlike in Australia. For another, you are ignoring the prevailing wind patterns. You are pretty good at ignoring relevant facts and substituting stupid, dishonest noise about irrelevant ones.

LOL! Yeah, like Sarah Palin knows what she is talking about in international relations because you can see Russia from Alaska.

 

Where did I claim that?

No, really trying to explain things - although since you will not specify what kind of "project" then I am done with trying to explain why things will not work here?

Take it up with Wiki

Come on then please enlighten us as to where we are going wrong - I mean we have to be sooooo backward over here that we can't build dams to mitigate floods - even though the dams we HAVE built as flood mitigation were swamped by rainfall so far outside the predicted norms that nothing would have contained them - something that is being denied again and again

Translation: Australia is THAT big?

Could be tomato paste for all I care - I was making the point and while I am at it want to explain how you would go about these mythical hydrological engineering feats. Easy to sit back and say "Australia should just wave a magic wand"

Doesn't work that way and all the personal insults thrown on an internet board will not make it work

So - tell me how the prevailing winds will cause an increase in precipitation if you filled Lake Eyre?

 

I really don't think the depth of the lake would have an influence on evaporation as much as the surface area of the lake. If the lake is shallow and the weather warm, then the evaporation rate of the water should be increased because the water itself would be warmer. This would take less energy imput to evaporate the water.

But if the lake is dry not much water evaporates from dry salt.

I looked at a map of North Australia and it seems that most of the precipitation falls in the north. I don't know the direction of the wind but the water from the lake could be falling in the north. It has to go somewhere.


Australia is also spending 10 billion on water the Australian water task force.


The thing that drives me nuts about Australia is everthing that counts is backwards. It is warm in the north, summer is winter, spring is fall, and fall is spring.

 

Except for the very southern parts of OZ.

I guess they get the best rain.

 

YuP! And because we are "Downunder" we have to tie on our hats to stop them from falling upwards

It is actually a bit more complicated even than that - the Lake Eyre Basin is HUGE (about 1/6 of the whole area of Australia - which is why I compared it to the Mississippi Basin) and it is in the middle of a desert so when it floods it does rapidly evaporate but also a lot of it soaks into the desert itself. But because it is sitting in the middle of dry air - a very large area of very dry air - all that happens is that the dry air becomes a little moister but never reaches "wet enough to rain" and one of the reasons for that is that it is HOT. For precipitation to occur it has to be cooler - and that is often what happens over forests. It would be different if we could get enough forestry growing out there because that DOES create it's own microclimate - and could increase the rainfall by altering the temperature but it would be a real feat to get enough trees growing. The other issue is the feed in from the "rivers" - the flow is simply too intermittent and since the slope of the land is so low the flows are so slow that a majority is lost to soaking into the ground before it even gets there

We don't call the river area the "channel country" for nothing lols!

 

From what I have read (I did a little research) the soil in Oz is very poor. Besides not having enough rain there are too many heavy metals, salt, hard clay, and very little rain. The soil needs organic matter in the worst way, but it is difficult to add organic matter to the soil when you get no rain.

Erosion is also a problem. I can see why food is so expensive there.

If I were to farm in OZ I would probably try to farm hay with land near a river and use no chemical fertilizers because they add salt to the land and eat organic matter. I would probably try to improve small plots (one or two acres) and irrigate. Iwould alway be on the lookout for anything organic. Spoiled hay, seaweed, sawdust, uneaten vegies for compost....anything.

Yall have real problems down under. It is very hard to farm with bad soil and no rain.

Have you heard of the Groasis waterbox?

I love low tech solutions to very difficult problems.


Please look into the waterbox.....it may help.

 

Thats Groasis Waterboxx....with 2 x's

 

I don't see us doing anything with that country any time soon other than mine it. Waterboxes are nice and they look great for those countries with high populations and low technical ability - we have low populations and while the interior is desert the rest is pretty fertile so we do OK. Plus a lot of that land will soon be handed back to the indigenous people of Australia - it is their country and I swear those that are still living traditionally - they can find food on a billiard ball

 

I think this waterboxx is the best thing in agriculture since the turn plow.

If the world got together and planted enough trees the climate change problem would be a thing of the past with no carbon taxes.

The world needs trees and a billion acres of trees would buffer the climate, absorb CO2, increase the avalibility of water in dry places and feed the world.

Even a stone cold denier should find no objection to reforestation.

It has worked in Spain, California, Nevada, Bahrain, Morrocco, Peru, and many other places.

It can be used to grow fruit trees, nut trees, grapes, corn,and many other plants.

Maybe, when the natives realise they can make money with it.... they will invest in their future.

 

I can only hope - but I agree about the re-greening of many parts and here we have done something fairly simple - used Satellite views and put a moratorium on on tree felling leading to an increase in trees and more importantly saving old growth forest trees.

 

The beauty of a tree in an arid lanscape is the fact that the roots find water. They take up the water and it evaporates through the leaves. The leaves shade the ground and lower the temperature of the ground so less energy is avalible for surface evaporation.

A large tree can pump up to five hundred gallons of water a day.

The tide can be turned...by those amazing factories called trees.

Where trees grow creeks run, rivers flow, and wildlife thrives.

 

No argument!! However our lack is PEOPLE. This is labour intensive and I live on the edge of the dessert, the health care area we service is bigger than New Zealand and has only 22,000 people, roughly - we aren't currently counting the "Fly in Fly out" populations at the mines

Meanwhile

http://www.cilr.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=179633&pid=165550

 

As a stone cold denier, a tree climber and a tree hugger and an eater off a tree since early childhood I fully support this idea, especially fruit trees, nut trees, grapes, corn!

Would you join me in my denialism? Shouldn't we keep producing CO2 to help nature a bit? Do you love nature? I as all cold stone deniers do.