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Tuesday 8 December 2009

Long time between drinks

It's got to rain soon.

If it doesn't, I don't know what we'll do with the animals. It hasn't been this bad since we've been here, or maybe it has and I've repressed it. Here, in the middle of the rainiest part of the SE, barely a drop has fallen in our valley. All the pasture is dried brown, crunchy as sticks underfoot, and the cows have become fractious. We had them in the tree paddock yesterday becasue the dam there is just about empty, so that field will be useless when the water is completely gone. But there's bugger all in there for a cow to eat, and they let us know, at every opportunity. They'd congregate at the gate and start bellowing their disapproval whenever the G-man or I could be seen, which was pretty much all day since the paddock is opposite our house.

Barbed wire is no match of a hungry ton of beef and if they really had a mind to push through into the neighbor's paddock across the road, they would. So I bit the bullet and rang, asking if we could let our cows into their property. They are cattle people from Rocky and understand the concept of starving animals, and I'm that grateful to them for their generosity. We've got a heap of nursing mothers and they are just bags of bones from lack of nutrition.

I even had to let the garden fall into ruin this year - no water to keep it alive, and if it doesn't rain soon, we'll be on dam water ourselves until it shrinks to a puddle of mud, a potential problem of bogged cattle.

So, a pox on you Tony Abbott and all your business as usual climate change denying cronies. It is happening, it is real, it is clear and present danger. Come to think of it - a pox on you too Ruddster and your bullshit carbon trading scheme. No invisible market hand is going to be able to arrest it. It is already underway. It is bigger than you and your desperate three year cycle of electioneering vote buying crap.

What we need is a survival plan, not a business plan. Bastards.

13 comments:

  1. Amen.

    I hope it gets better for you, and soon.

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  2. Whilst I could well be shot for suggesting that I am not entirely convinced of CLIMATE change, like the so called , we have your interests at mind scientists, or because of the fact we do have LONG bad droughts, I do see a need for other things.

    Such as you mention, the ETS is Full to the brim with shit, the lack of spine successive gummits have displayed on dams, the inability to harvest vast flows of water..straight out to the ocean..its all rather..not depressing, infuriating is more the camp i am in.

    funnily enough, we have had more rainfall this month already when cobbled together with last months, than possibly the previous two, its DECEMBER! FFS.. rather odd.

    I am curious just how much impact the supposed WARMING of the sun has had on the planet..is it true, is this more of the issue than emission. I know emissions must be reduced, but I want too know about the other as well.

    Hope to hell you get some rain soon.

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  3. A pox on all their houses if you ask me.

    We've never had a plan to cope for the fact that our country has been drying up now for millions of years anyway.

    pasture and feilds need to be seeded with suitable trees and we need to act on water, Gas and leccy demand by moving to better designs.

    The Guvmnt could generate thousands of permenant 'green' jobs that way rather than the spins based temp positons/'apprentiships' that the Ruddbot is proposing.

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  4. First thing that needs to be done is pull all those marginal graziers off the desert fringe - which is pretty much actual desert most of the time.
    Replace the livestock with roo and harvest them for consumption. The meat is better for you anyway. Then just bloody well leave it alone to regenerate, like they have around Uluru.

    Then if you want to farm beef, half your property has to go under trees and you only carry as many cattle as the worst conditions can support. We're going to have to reduce even our small herd. Then beef will become scarce and farmers will get a decent price for their husbandry, instead of the mad sell offs we get in the dry seasons which make beef less than worthless in terms of the inputs necessary to keep the buggers alive and healthy.

    No export market allowed - just a domestic market. Every carcass that gets loaded onto a ship is exported water, and quite frankly, there isn't enough of that to be sending it half way across the world. Primary production has to become as 'national interest' as the bloody car industry that they keep propping up for 'defence' reasons.

    I don't think it matters what particular brand of get rich quick scheme one 'believes' in - the fact is that it's already hotter and dryer for longer periods. The seasons are in flux, and regardless of what has or is causing it, no one seems interested in looking at ways to adapt our population to the new climate conditions.

    The only certainty we can have about anything under the sun, apart from death and taxes, is that everything changes. Organisms that fail to adapt (including our own good selves) will become extinct. If we fail to start demanding long term survival strategies from the people who demand taxes of us, then really, we've only got ourselves to blame.

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  5. I wrote a blog piece about climate change and my disaster management plan was to 'run for the hills', but on reading your blog I think that may not be the best plan. For people who don't believe that humans have a place in global warming, let me just say this. If the evidence wasn't strong on this point than why would Governments (and insurance companies) be bothering at all. I agree Annette that we need a survival plan because it is looking a bit too late for us stupid humans to act in an intelligent manner on this catastrophic situation.

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  6. Havock - the sun isn't getting warmer.

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  7. Still, I am rather looking forward to a bit of shadenfreud when Kawana Waters and all those other disastrous canal developments sink beneath the waves. Which part of 'the wise man built his house upon the rock didn't they understand at Sunday school?

    Incidentally, the carbon trading scheme was thought up by a bunch of greed heads back in the early seventies when they realised that they could forget about trading the futures of orange juice and pork bellies and make a shitload of profit by just trading the future.

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  8. I heard an interesting theory that infact the ball of rock we are spinning around on is gettting warmer, melting the ice caps from below. Who knows, but when the Torres Strait aboriginal old people can't predict the seasons like they used to, we're in deep shit.

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  9. Hughsey, very good plan re the agrig turnaround. I like it alot.The ALP would become almost like heroes in the regions if they took the agrig sector seriously and turned it around, the big boys would hurt but who cares.

    I'm very worried about the decreasing pH of sea water due to increased CO2 levels. Also increased water run off from the polar regions will screw up alot of things convection wise which as has been so quaintly shown could mean temp drops.

    Bottom line is weather patterns are more screwed than they usually are. And it's not rocket science to undertsnad that we should pollute less.

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  10. I think Annette's right, we need to have drastically more expensive meat. Why not cut out all the intensive farming stuff and do it all light on the earth and as free range as possible....

    I've been forcing myself to buy free range farm chooks for a couple of years here in France, after being sickened by the conditions (which Ive know about for years, but...) so once every 2 weeks we treat ourselves- a quality farm free-range chook from a local farmer here is about 11 euros each, that's about 20 dollars Australian for a chicken.

    So we eat much less meat but its better for us and better for the earth too...and better for local farmers.

    How much meat is normal anyway? In Oz I got the feeling we all ate heaps of it..here in Europe I eat much less (it's much more expensive and I can't bear the oddly coloured Lidl/Leader Price/Aldi meat)

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  11. I am so sorry for whats happening.

    I promise something will change in the way we do things. I just fear how much more worse it get before things will be done.

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  12. Barnes, why have yuo taken it upon yourself to be responsible? Unless of course you are Him! God, you're not, are you?

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