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October 15, 2006
When I came down to Victor Harbor for the weekend I was shocked at how dry the landscape is. It is just mid-spring and it looks like mid-summer (February). The hot temperatures and north winds have dried out the little moisture that was left in the land after a winter with hardly any rain. I spent a large part of the weekend bucketing water to keep going the young trees in the reserve that I planted several months ago.
As the 'drought' worsens, the weather conditions become ever drier, the heat from the hundreds of bushfires blazing around the country grows more intense, and the ever tightening water restrictions become normal. Climate change is all around us.
Matt Golding
The scorching October weather has left many of us in southern Australia feeling suffocated before summer and feeling rather anxious about the future. Those people existing on water tanks in the Fleurieu Peninsula do not have enough water to get them through summer.
This is the new world of climate change: the warming across Australia has been accompanied by declines in regional rainfall. That is not all. Rising temperatures mean melting icecaps and rising sea levels. Sea levels are already rising (lready risen 20cm and are expected to rise a further half-metre over the next century. Adelaide will be among the worst-hit of Australia's coast-hugging cities and Adelaide's low-lying suburbs face increasing flood risk from stronger winds and storm surges coming off higher sea levels.
Stephen Young, digital elevation model of Australia with the sea level raised 100m, 2006
It's 100metres if Greenland goes the sea levels will rise by 7m.If Antarctica went as well the sea would rise by 80m. Adelaide, faces a double whammy, because areas where we have been pumping out groundwater are now sinking at a rate similar to the rise of sea levels. So hard decisions will need to be made about whether to spend money to protect the coast with things like breakwaters, or sacrifice land and let the coast recede backwards naturally.
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