Ken Smith, Coordinator-General and Director-General,
Department of Infrastructure, Queensland Government.
A recent publication circulated by your Department, Water for the Future, argued that Queensland is experiencing the worst drought in more than 100 years. It included the following diagram to make this point, and at face value this implies that unforeseeable drought is the major cause of southeast Queensland’s water supply crisis.
However, others observers have offered different explanations, some of which which I have outlined in Structural Incompetence and SE Queensland’s Water Crisis.
In particular, it has been suggested that SE Queensland’s catchments (Wivenhoe in particular) are subject to very infrequent but large water inflows, with low inflows at other times sometimes for long periods. This hypothesis implies that:
The current series of years with low inflows would not be unique and should have been anticipated. If so, institutional incompetence is part of the cause of SE Queensland’s current crisis; and the diagram your Department presented might give a false impression of the situation, as it shows high past inflows averaged over long periods that potentially conceal this problem (ie infrequent large inflows and many years of low inflows).
I would appreciate clarification of the facts of the matter, as this has serious implications for public confidence in the institutions that have been responsible for water supply management in Queensland.
Regards,
John Craig
Centre for Policy and Development Systems
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What cheap cherry-picked useless hindsight. Wivenhoe is performing as expected in an extraordinary ( by any practical criteria) protracted drought. Pre-drought no politician or punter would have gone for expensive options to reduce the risk even further. The SEQ studies at the time showed ‘the region will need additional water sources by 2020’. This assumed of course a ‘normal’ run or mix of seasons. Those patterns in your graph of inflows are simply a reflection of our ENSO-dominated climate, and even hydrologists have known about that for a couple of decades. Pre-drought the sceptics were winning on climate change in terms of blocking sensible risk management. They have a lot to answer for. All of which does not deny that a lot could be done better when it comes to demand management, coordination, contingency planning, mitigating CO2, etc etc.
Haven’t we been through this before. Inflows are way lower for longer than the Federation drought so it is worst on record. Boom. Boom.
And Gazza is right – want to have zero risk – then have lotsa infrastructure unneeded most of the time. Basic economics of managing risk.
And NIMBY syndrome says no dams at my place thanks. With the odd greenie or opposition pollie comment for good measure.
It’s the drought you had to have. Like the power crisis, road crisis, hospitals crisis, defence crisis, ports crisis, and children in crisis crisis you had to have.
Time for all to wake up. But of course your taxes will be higher and then you’ll all whinge. Can’t have it both ways. Economists from both sides have been told not to borrow.
But why worry – you’ll all be on the piss before long – and house prices are going up and plasma TVs cheap. We won the Origin. Who do you think is gonna win Big Brother?
Nonsense Luke this is not the worst drought on record. The droughts of the late 1800’s – early 1900’s were much more severe and the records demostrate this. What is unfortunate is that the records do not cover as wide an area, nor with a comparable number of observations, and are not consistent across sites for method (eg stevenson screen). These are the primary reasons that pre 1910 records are not used for national averages. However there are local records that are long term and consistent and these have clearly demonstrated that the droughts of the late 1800’s were more severe in those areas and of longer duration than the current drought.
As for NIMBY’s, sure but they always need some group to stir them up, whose colour is often green.
However I do agree with you on that all sides of politics seem to have adopted the no borrowing mantra, can’t have debt we’ll leave that for the mum’s and dad’s.
Weve just had flooding rains, with more forecast to come. Interesting to drive along and view the profile of some of the alluvial ground now exposed along creeks and rivers – there must have been some massive floods in the past, much much bigger than what we have just had.
Oh well Peter I suppose you’d know then given you’ve done the above Wivenhoe catchment runoff analysis too. And surely you would have as that’s what we’re talking about – so I’ll let you inform us on the numbers. But maybe a spontaneous negative reality inversion has caused the Maranoa or Fitzroy to flow uphill into the Brissy River in your analysis.
The multi-year inflow sequence into the Brisbane River catchments is worst on European record. That catchment above the dam does not include the greater City of Brisbane or the coastal strip. So for that catchment it’s the worst drought on record.
I think you’ll find the local NIMBYs decidedly brown and National party types. Goss to his misfortune found they can change government all by themselves given suitable seats.
It was a road (the Koala tollway) not a dam that undid Goss and it was the greens not the browns that were the nimbys.
Peter, I agree re droughts of late 1800’s of long duration, and they were interspersed with some savage flooding too. We have rainfall records from family stations in the lower & upper hunter, coolah & quirindi districts going back, in some cases to 1872, with some diary and day book entries on weather going back to 1840. We also have a Weather Bureau book of rainfall and temp. records published in 1950, going back to the 1860’s,which back up family records. The Fed. drought was very sharp, and a bad one but it was preceeded by longer ones and of course the period 1929 to 1949, in most of NSW would have to go down as one of the worst, prolonged dry periods.
The groups manipulating the NIMBY’s would definatly be of a deep green hue. A group of landholders in the Upper Hunter are currently being manipulated by Greenpeace, and in particular by a guy named Ben. Do you know him?
The droughts of last century didn’t have warmer temperatures, either, which contribute to dessication, which affects inflows.
Anyway, for a more thoughtful attitude to Global Warming, the greenhouse issue as risk management.
http://blogs.theage.com.au/managementline/greenhouseliability.pdf
I am getting rather sick of the shonkascenti talking about risk management when they know jack crap about the concept. For a start, any risk management strategy that is based on anything but detailed understanding of the facts is actually a risk creation strategy.
Risk and realistic probability are inseparable. And the very last thing one would associate the EUPCC scarenarios with is realistic probability.
In fact, the dumb turds have not even bothered to provide a range of projected outcomes where the key variables can be identified, let alone link them in a proper probability tree.
A proper risk management strategy would, at least run, 5 or 6 different development levels for developing nations over the next century. They would load up a range of oil and coal supply levels and a range of technology improvement rates, fuel efficiency improvement rates, alternative utilisation rates, price mechanism adjustments and related behavioural modification rates.
This would then produce anywhere from 50 or more different outcomes that can then be weighted and then bunched into primary groupings in a fully transparent manner that allows both scrutiny and detailed discussion on current weightings, additional variables etc.
But what did we get? We got some smarmy little pommie climate pimp who discounted future costs of climate abatement at half the rate used to calculate future costs of non-abatement. And the punk didn’t even consider the possibility of beneficial climate changes.
Risk management indeed. Where’s my garrotte?
On the Koala highway – you’ll find a carefully funded campaign by the brown types that used the greens to have “no road !” through their place. Who was it that said when it was all over “yep I bankrolled it”, “it was I”.
Risk management is pretty basic with reservoirs and rainfall. Reservoirs in South Africa and Australia need to be 2-3x the rest of the world for the same levels of reliability. More climate variation from things like ENSO to contend with.
But if you want really really really really reliable water supplies that protect against the most heinous droughts you have to be prepared in good times to have surplus infrastructure and resources sitting around. That’s OK if you want to pay for it.
So as usual it’s not probability after all – it’s expected value. Probability of the event multiplied by the cost of it happening. Presumably by the tirades like we have above in the introduction we’ve now decided we do want to pay for it and be really really really safe.
Looks like Mottsa has personally invented the SRES process. Wow.
“On the Koala highway – you’ll find a carefully funded campaign….”
Where will I find this carefully funded campaign….
I know the key contributors to the Koala Campaign and they are what I would call “true greens”.
Did anyone notice the recent reports that only 2% of those who got the water tank subsidy actually connected the tank to household systems. The rest of them used their $1500 subsidy to maintain their gardens over and above the water restrictions. That is, only 2% of the beneficiaries actually saved mains water.
And after all this time they have only just begun to collect information on the households that exceed the average use. This far into the “crisis” and the dumb turds have only just discovered variance analysis.
And while all this was not happening, what did our dear leader bring in? He implemented a regional plan that effectively precluded any new housing lots on acreage land where water tanks are the norm. Yep, all new housing in the capital of the “Smart State” now takes place on mains dependent developments.
Aren’t they clever. Don’t tell me this isn’t a crisis of management competence.
Rog – there was a major newspaper expose and interview with those concerned in the apres election washup of the day. It was most enlightening. I guess I could dig it out. You see – things are not always as they seem. These things need financing. Who pays for Courier Mail advertisements?
On the face of it it was about koalas and those groups were used to effect. But in reality it was pure NIMBYism – who wants a bloody big road through their pleasant rural retreat. Not most.
Strangely many people may also not like a bloody big dam covering their family farm.
You can add a bit more greenie chilli in to spice up the political curry to taste.
When Bligh and Beattie were abused for 3-4 hours straight at Gympie meeting some months ago – check out the audience. Didn’t see any greenies. All Mums and Dads.
If your property is about submerged maybe those annoying greenie types can suddenly help?
The old enemy of my enemy becoming your friend stuff (well for a while).
Ah well, if its in the Courier Mail it must be right…
Well it’s more reliable than a smarmy lone-liner pers comm from you.
The Journal of Regional Australian Politics also has a peer reviewed paper on it I can send you.
rog24b2@yahoo.com.au
Rog – I’m sorry – I have misled you but not intentionally. It was an attempt at humour in response to your need for quantitative substantiation. There is no such journal. The newspaper business though was serious. It may have been the Sunday Mail but same media stable.
Welcome, rog24b2@yahoo.com.au!
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As I thought, when push comes to shove…”I have misled you but not intentionally…”
I knew that there is no such Journal of Regional Australian Politics
I have a poster produced by the Queensland Dept of Natural Resources consisting of 100 maps of Australia, showing Australia wide rainfall distribution for the past 100 years.
There is no pattern to the rainfall distribution, it is random.
Me too Dan. But my poster shows ENSO patterns as well and they account for some of the variability. So cant be random. For example the 8 years with lowest Australian wheat yields have all been El Nino. Just shows it is the melancholy lot of humans to see patterns where there are none and miss the bleeding obvious as was mostly done with ENSO for the first half of the last century as on your map. Of course without that melancholy lot, sites like this could not survive.