Now to the weather. Real Dirt has been writing about the environment for more than fifteen years and if there is one thing that is certain it is uncertainty. The biggest stories are nearly always the ones that no-one saw coming. But every now and then there is a weather map that looks inexorable. Right now the satellite image from deep space seems pretty bleak and it does look like a perfect storm is forming. What’s interesting though is that the coming tempest is more of the Jupiter Great Red Spot variety that hangs around for centuries or at least decades than the Hurricane Katrina kind, which touches down, wreaks havoc and dissipates after a few days.

First of all there is the rapid cold front that hit Wall Street and then sped off to Europe, Asia and then Australia. It was a deep, fast moving trough – the result of huge volumes of greed being sucked up from the Atlantic Ocean, Sydney’s western suburbs, China’s Industrial belt and all those other places a quick buck could be turned by the armies of Gordon Geckoes. Like every good cold front you can watch it travel across continents long before it actually hits, which is what makes it so interesting that no-one seems to have had their brollies with them.

Then there’s a monsoonal trough called climate change, and another called population growth. Eventually greed, climate change, population growth and another few hundred human foibles will collide and we will get our very own economic and social red spot here on Earth. Sorry to be grim folks…but that’s how it looks.

The Bureau of Meteorology announced this week that the drought gripping Australia was a doozey. As the Australian reported:

Bureau of Meteorology head of climate analysis David Jones said the rainfall figures were similar to the severe drought that lasted from 1939 to 1945, and the Federation drought, which ran from 1895 to 1903.
“Those three droughts, in terms of rainfall, are comparable,” he said. “But this drought is a lot hotter than those two previous droughts. And those two droughts finished, whereas this one is continuing.”
Dr Jones said the rainfall deficiencies for Victoria were the largest on record, with the state effectively missing out on two years of rainfall over the past 12 years.
“Across Victoria as a whole, if you add up how much rainfall has been missed in 12 years, it is now up around 1300mm or 4ft of rainfall — a very, very large rainfall deficit,” he said.
The most dramatic impact has been on Melbourne, which has just recorded its driest September on record.

Meanwhile, the tallest hardwood tree on Earth has been found in Tasmania. It towers some 101 metres. Imagine that for a minute.
Think of the biggest person you have ever seen – a basketballer, an AFL centre or Peter Fitzsimons. And then imagine that person sixty times bigger and with the girth of a big lounge room.
In Tasmania trees over 85 metres are protected from logging….At first glance that sounds like a good idea except when you think about it – weren’t the bigger trees once littler trees?

As the ABC reported:

Environment Tasmania’s Phill Pullinger says the 101 metre tall eucalypt was found in an area due to be logged. Forestry Tasmania protects all trees over 85-metres, so the giant is now safe.

However Dr Pullinger says there’s no protection for other trees and it doesn’t make sense.“They are continuing to log trees across the state up to 85 metres in height which is absolutely crazy because, of course as time goes by, for trees to reach the height that this one has reached they need to be left alone.”

If there is one organization that Real Dirt holds a special cynicism about it is Snowy Hydro. If you ask them, they will tell you: ‘We put the green in chlorophyll’.
And yet time after time they are getting their knuckles rapped. Recently they got busted and fined for polluting the Snowy River, which they supposedly admire and care for…

As the ABC reported last month:

Yellow mud was evident up to 15 kilometres downstream, causing significant turbidity and great concern over the environmental impact within the river communities.

Anyone who has ever seen the mountains of litter that were left behind after the Snowy Scheme was constructed also has to rush for a bucket whenever the corporation professes to be the industrial incarnation of Bob Brown.
Although the public, which owns Snowy Hydro, has made it clear that so much water and so many mountains should stay in public hands, their executives never miss a chance to push for their kingdom to be privatized.

This week they were back at it again, on the ABC :

A big cloud seeding trial is being credited for a positive turn-around in lake levels in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains.
For the first time in five years, water storages are rising after back-to-back droughts that have seen lake levels fall to their lowest levels since the opening of the Hydro Electric Scheme in the 1950s.
Snowy Hydro spokesman Paul Johnson says the expanded cloud seeding program is paying off.

Or maybe it was just a good snow season this year? Cut the crap fellas, release all of the data.