Bruce

The movie tried to be accurate as well as plausible and it sure failed on the second count. AND why did the chinese historians of the day not even notice anything?

The rot set in to the tertiary education system when Labor decided to make it available to everybody, including dumb kids. They might have meant well, but you just have to dumb things down if you want to cater for the mid IQ range. Where I worked, prior to the dumbing down, we went for 20 years without an injury to a student, including on the roads. This was so statistically improbable that I looked into it and found that 90% of road accidents are caused by the lowest 10% of IQ people. ( Such a politically incorrect thing to know, it has been censored since). We had the top 10% and no accidents. On a similar note, Burt Rutan gave up selling kits because he couldn't cope with dumb kit buyers ringing him up. Rod Stiff is similar, and maybe the reason why the Jabiru written stuff is so good is Stiff's attempt to minimize dealing with dumb people.

There was a well-answered call for volunteers to go to KI to feed fauna which would otherwise starve in the aftermath of the fires. I have read that regeneration only happens with a relatively cool fire, so the landscape will permanently change where the fires have been too hot. I agree that imported feral animals like foxes and cats need killing off. What a great use for the army I agree. Does anybody know if rabbits survived the fires in their burrows? Better than koalas did in the trees, I guess.

I agree litespeed. Somewhere I read that educated Chinese do not consider that Australia is very democratic because of this political " donation" business.

I wish you were right Yenn, but the sad fact is that unless you can control birds which may poo on your roof, then the tank water can be deadly. It doesn't happen often, so there are people who have lived their whole lives on untreated tank water.

Sorry OME, but the response does have to be political. We need to rethink a bunch of things, and the labor lot need to change too. On the farm here in western victoria , we were more hamstrung by the green/labor prohibitions against making firebreaks than from the LNP. That's why I am thinking we should pay some blackfellow to come up with a plan for burning off. ( I am off the word "indigenous" since I found that the first indigenous doctor in Australia was a blonde woman )

It's called a sharduf Nev. That see-saw thing to lift water...Or something like that... and yes the very idea of a mummy is stupid huh. As was the idea of putting all your treasure in the most conspicuous place there was. I agree that they didn't want to know the source of the Nile as they already had their religious explanation.

In an extreme case, I can imagine a thunderstorm forming from those clouds. It would be a rare event for sure.

There are some great gliding days in SA when the thermals go over 12,000 ft. On some of these days, clouds form over the scrub area and not the wheat area because that scrub sucks water from 30 ft down and transpires it to the atmosphere.

That tooth fairy was the only thing I ever believed in! When I was a kid, I actually put some teeth from a dead sheep under my pillow.

OME, the trouble with using a small difference in temperature to drive a heat engine is that the efficiency is also very small. This is a consequence of the second law. It explains why diesel engines are more efficient than petrol engines. They combust at a higher temperature. It is a fundamental limitation not effected by the quality of the engine. And Nev is right about what would happen if lake Eyre were filled according to a commission of met men. The evaporated water would need to be lifted somehow to condensation levels to even get a cloud. Most of the time, not even this would happen. There was a theory in about 1890 about how " the rain would follow the plough " and it was believed by enough optimists that it became accepted wisdom. Lots of people went broke as a result of expanding the wheat areas too much. They thought that ploughing the ground would cause more transpiration and therefore more rainfall.

The war of ideas (which had been won by the denier side and which caused Morrison to be pm) has been decisively lost now. There might have been a hint when Abbott lost his seat, but his was an unusually well-off and educated seat. Now we had Greta Thunberg, followed by the fires. It will be interesting to see if those liberals who survive are going to be the ones who promise to attend to climate change. There are hints in Morrison's comments that he has been advised to stop being such a denier, but he has low credibility.

I well remember the Argonauts, and I doubt that anything so obviously sexual as that song " dashing away with the smoothing iron"would have been deemed proper. But, bugger, I missed Mac's last day when he mistakenly thought the session was over and he made a rude remark about the listening " girls and boys " ( no kids on the ABC in those days ). I think he got the sack. In Alice Springs in the 1950's, there was only the ABC. Down in Adelaide, you could listen to bad people like Elvis on the radio... I liked coming to Adelaide.

You are an expert on grapes I reckon Nev. Personally, I just like to drink the stuff. I didn't know about a commercial failure for viticulture in the centre, could you tell us some more please? I can tell you that there was a failure with dates... there was too much rain!

All these things will be summarized in the cost of food. All my life, food has been so cheap that it has almost been free. Now if the "no climate change " people are right, then the price of food will continue to fall. On the other hand, if the warming people are right, the cost of food will rise. I reckon the warmists are winning in this last decade. And a good thing too, the price of food has been far too cheap, says me with my farmers hat on. The next ten years will be the telling thing. If the price of food drops, it means that climate change is not making much of a difference after all.

I tried to check the flow figures in this thread, and found a reference to the whole thing . Kotwicki (1986) gives the figure of 18.9 cubic km per year evap from a full lake Eyre. This is in agreement with 9,500 sq km and 2000mm a year. A channel of 40 m wide and 4m deep would have to run at about 4 m/sec to supply this. If this were seawater coming in, it would introduce 25 million tonnes of new salt per year. The committee of met people came to the conclusion that there would not be much effect on rainfall in the inland. You would get sea-breezes around the lake though. I'd do it if I could just for the fun.

There is an idea about how reflectors in space could either shade or concentrate sunlight on chosen areas to tip weather systems to our advantage. Remember how a butterfly can trigger a hurricane weeks later? BUT, the legal system would have a field day, with everybody who didn't like the weather suing the reflector operators. Returning to the lake,I would like a good bunch of climate modellers to say what they think would happen if it (lake Eyre) were to be connected to the ocean. Personally, I don't think it would do much for the rainfall but I like the idea anyway.

But I still like Bradfield's main idea, and so what if the water will cost more than it's worth. Better than those stupid submarines, say I.

There was a time not so long age when there was significant water in Lake Eyre. ( 30 years ago?) There was no increase in rain to the east of Lake Eyre. This was a big disapointment to me, but looking at weather charts, it is obviously true. Bugger huh.

Onetrack, what would have happened if they had not gone chasing starving Japs up the Kokoda track? What if they just garrisoned a ridge or two near Port Moresby, and left the Japanese alone till they surrendered? My answer is that nothing bad would have happened and lots of soldiers would not have been killed . There were 100,000 Japanese on Rabaul and this is what happened there. Singapore comes to mind too.

PMC, coal is pure carbon and it produces more CO2 for energy released than hydrogen-containing hydrocarbons. For example, methane CH4, produces one molecule of CO2 and 2 molecules of H2O . I reckon you have known this stuff for many years. Maybe the cheapest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to char and bury organic matter, this being the exact opposite of coal mining. You are right in that all fossil fuels do release CO2 though. I like the report that Lithium-sulphur batteries will store 4 times as much as current Lithium batteries, and cheaper too. Gosh, cars and planes too will use them in preference to petroleum. We will run suburbs with them, and charge them up during the day. Right now, the whole thing is in the " too good to be true " category for me.

There is likely to be a royal commission into the bushfires. What's the betting Tony Abbot will be given the job? Is he not unemployed at the moment?

How's this for an idea: Suppose I hire an indigenous consultant and get him to tell me to burn the scrub beginning as soon as possible in the spring and use multiple small fires just like the aborigines used to have. ( This might be possible, on the other hand it may be that a fire will either not start or get out of control, what with the non-burning for many years.) Will this indigenous card checkmate the politically correct powers that be, who are currently saying I can do nothing? Well actually they are not saying that right now as they are not replying to my emails. But the law says I can do nothing.

Maybe we should embrace the blackfellow way of burning as much as possible. This mainly ( but not always ) means small fires because there is not much to burn. The wildlife escape easily from the small burns. I bet those aborigines didn't have to apply for permits before they started a fire.

Another amazing thing was that as the world's superpower, they never sent an expedition up the Nile. The source of the Nile was discovered by the English, thousands of years later. Dr Livingstone was there somewhere I think.