News of the day

[gemfyre]

The Day After Tomorrow, based on a book called The Coming Global Superstorm. And the news tonight says "superstorm to hit W.A." or something. The forecast for Narrogin tomorrow is 16C, it's the middle of Summer! It SNOWED in Tasmania on Christmas Day! Parts of Australia had their driest year on record while other parts had the wettest on record. The temperature here is on average 1-1.5C hotter than average. Whoever is still denying climate change - whether caused by human activity or not - is delusional.

And of course with the drought comes a water crisis. The more I hear about this "recycled sewage" (whatever media moron let that phrase out needs to be shot) plan the more I like it. This course of action takes treated wastewater and pumps it back into the aquifers we've been drawing from for years, it takes a few more years to percolate through the rock and be brought back up again for drinking water, I think it's great because those aquifers take a few hundred years to fill naturally and we only take a few decades to empty them. The only concern is the chemicals that may not be filtered out by usual techniques (hormones from the contraceptive pill and such), but they seem to have the technology to get rid of those as well (one still wonders where they'll go). They keep going on about how it will need community approval and support. Stuff that! Just do it if the technology is there! The general populace will just think, "Eww, they want me to drink sewage!" and think no further than that and of course it's far from the case. We're in a crisis, do what needs to be done.

A suggestion in a letter to the editor today also made the suggestion to direct water off the thousands of square km of rooftops in industrial areas into reserviors to be used for purposes other than drinking - watering the garden, washing the car, flushing toilets etc. Brilliant idea! Of course he suggested it as an alternative to "drinking sewage". I say do both.

Comments

[stawberi.livejournal.com]

It was freezing cold here today. I stayed in bed with a dressing gown on, it's not meant to be this cold in summer! *pouts* I dislike climate change. Tell it to go away.

[mexicanjewlizrd.livejournal.com]

check out the documentary "an inconvenient truth", with Al Gore. I think you might like it :-) [sits at about 1hr30min]

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Yeah I must see that one.

[natsuchan.livejournal.com]

I agree Coss, personally I think every roof in the country should have a tank attached to it. Plus we should all have at least 1 solar panel and recycle water. No reason why we can't use tank water for the toilet and laundry either. The only issue really is getting over peoples resistance to the idea.

[rodcub.livejournal.com]

I have a problem with pumping the post-recycled water back into the ground. It has been shown that water drawn from potable ground sources sometimes requires treatment to bring it up to scratch. In fact, in the recent Toowoomba debate (as I saw on Catalyst) the water out of recycling was much much cleaner than standard scheme water.

I have a problem pumping it back into underground aquifers, which will actually take extremely good water and add ground impurities to it.

Ew!

I'd rather have it straight from the recycling station's pipe into the main system.

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

i find it saddest that people freak about "hormones in our drinking water!! AHHHHRGH!" and don't even blink about all the hormones in the *food* they eat.. naturally occuring hormones, too.

FYI

[mmcjawa.livejournal.com]

As I recently learned in our paleoenvironmental class, last time the earth went through such a spike in atmospheric CO2 level, we had global rainforests, as in rainforests in the arctic...

Does not bode well for alot of mountain and arctic critters.

[morningglorymlp.livejournal.com]

Pumping used water back into an aquifer is a new idea to me. I haven't heard of that yet.

Wetlands make wonderful natural filters and buffers. They were getting a lot of attention in the late 90s/early 2000, but it seems to have died off for some reason. We need more mitigation for all the natural wetlands we've destroyed, and more protection for the natural ones that still exist (for now).