Is Australia Making Its Drought Worse by Turning to Desalination Plants for Water?
Our never-ending quest to identify all the amplifying climate feedbacks takes us back to Australia: THE worst drought in a century, especially in Australia’s most populated and fastest growing regions, has forced state governments to make expensive, and in some quarters unpopular, decisions to secure water supply. As rainfall dwindles, new dams are a less-than-promising prospect, so governments have looked to the boundless resource surrounding us — the sea — for an answer. Their solution: desalination…. The Bureau of Meteorology, in its annual climate statement for 2007, “warns of a drying trend in the decades ahead.” I noted last year that one Australian newspaper reported … drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief…. “The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. Peop
