I think it was John Howard who once described a conservative as someone who did not believe that everything his grandfather said was necessarily wrong!
Nobody could accuse present day water managers (bureaucrats and attention seeking scientific advocates)of being conservative. They appear to approach current issues from the clear position that their forebears didn’t really have a clue about what they were doing.
So much so, we now have a widespread “conventional wisdom” view that in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) our rivers are all “over allocated” and that this has given rise to their “ill-health”.(They conveniently overlook the fact that the “ill-health” was really the natural result of extreme dryness which Mother Nature has dramatically corrected over recent days.)
The much maligned forebears of these modern “dark green” commentators recognised the massive variability of the inland rivers of temperate Australia and devised a dynamic, adaptive, self correcting management system. Water licenses/entitlements were issued subject to seasonal allocations. Think of it sequentially-it rains, or it doesn’t. Our dams have plenty in storage or they don’t. Our water managers then, guided by long debated Water Management Plans, determine the percentage (if any) of the licensed amount which may be extracted.
This methodology allows account to be taken of environmental and critical human needs before any extractions for irrigation are allowed. It means that in a year when water is in short supply such as in 2008/9 only 3,500GL were extracted in the MDB, not the 13,700GL upper limit which the Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan keeps referring to.
Farmers understand the system and its logic and accept the risks involved. They also recognise the smoke screen of politicians talking about granting certainty. A concept totally foreign to Australian farming!
Likewise, they recognise the nonsense of asking the CSIRO to calculate the Sustainable Diversion Limits for each of the rivers. If “sustainable” means the “annual” amount that can always be extracted, then given the fact that all of our inland rivers,including the mighty Murray, sometimes actually stop flowing, then the limit must be placed at nil.
Faced with these variability issues the modern water managers then revert to using averages. Given the massive spreads around the average such mathematics quickly becomes meaningless.
All of this was well understood by those who devised the system. It is clearly not understood by those who glibly state that our rivers are over-allocated and advocate correcting the perceived problem by having the Government buy up water licenses without ever mentioning the role of seasonal allocations.
Oh for more conservatives!
Read more from David Boyd at http://davidboydsblog.blogspot.com/
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
It would be good if commentators try and limited themselves to one post each day on each thread, and were polite.
Jen thanks for this post from David and I have read other of his posts in recent days
I understand Tony Windsor notwithstanding the floods rushing down the Murray and its tributaries still considers ‘that the river is dying’
I think urbanites have an unreal idea as to what irrigators are extracting and to my mind the most important sentence in David’s post or it might be the post before on his blog says
The Plan Guide constantly refers to the total extraction limit of 13,700GL without explaining that licenses/entitlements without allocations amount to phantom water.
and in drought years there are no allocations as I understand it but I don’t think urbanites appreciate that
now just asking is there a reason for your request to ‘limit our comments’ to one post a day? If there is we will I am sure fulfill your request
and yes, we’ll be polite
Thanks Val. My thinking is that if we each make fewer posts in a rush, there will be more diversity of comment and perhaps comments of a higher quality.
Okay Jen, I accept your thinking but the great thing about blogging to my mind is that the commentators can converse rather than write say an essay to post each day, that is – what I love about blogging is its sponteneity
but it’s your blog of course
A more disciplined structure is best, to attract a wider audience. Also, giving Luke an occasional guest post is a novel idea with great merit because it opens up the debate.
val, I visited Deltoid this morning, but Tim snipped me again for no reason. So if you want to be fully engaged in the science you might have a chat with BJ over there, the poor dear is half starved.
”(They conveniently overlook the fact that the “ill-health” was really the natural result of extreme dryness which Mother Nature has dramatically corrected over recent days.)”
One aspect of the problem is that many people, especially in urban areas, don’t know or take the time to learn about the history of a region. So much has been done, with dams, engineering etc to make the environment more hospitable, and this has become the new normal. But we can’t mitigate every eventuality entirely, and so when we do have floods or drought, people with no historical context see it as abnormal. Historical ignorance does leave them more susceptible to apocalyptic handwringing i.e. it’s unprecedented and it’s all our fault!
Below is a link to a history site I stumbled upon, which gave me some great context and perspective for understanding what is happening with the MDB – when it has stopped flowing completely in the past etc. I especially like the historical newspaper excerpts – they simply describe rather than inferring cause.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html
Thanks for the Post Jen,
And thanks David,
I will highly recommend this post to my friends and family who are being used as scapegoats and political footballs in the debate over the MDB.
Those of us who live and work in the basin actually understand the real, physical, Murray Darling Basin as opposed to the one that is living in the imaginations of politicians, bureaucrats and some academics.
As David points out, reverting to averages and then trying to apply them to our highly volatile system is just not going to work. It can’t work because our Australian environment doesn’t respect averages.
Our rivers can transform from swampy little puddles to raging uncontrollable monsters. They can do that almost overnight.
As David also points out, that’s why our early water managers set up the systems we have now.
They understood how it actually worked. Why don’t our current water managers?
The real shame is that no one has done much to improve and upgrade our systems for at least 50 years, even though much greater demands have been placed on our system.
It was never the fault of irrigators. How could it be their fault? They never had control over allocations. That was always the realm of governments and their bureacrats.
We didn’t take folks!
Our early pioneers saw the need to store and conserve.
We actually gave.
I have mentioned it elsewhere but the real crime is our politicians falling prey to green arguments that have no basis in fact.
The result is they have foisted themselves onto rural Australia and Australian farmers who have struggled and suffered through a crippling drought. These people are vulnerable and more than anything they need some optimism and hope now that it has finally rained.
What have they got instead?
Doom and gloom and a plan to keep them in permanent drought.
This is unforgivable and they need to realise they are exacerbating the already fragile human condition. I would be willing to bet that suicides in the MDB exceed the deaths from the recent dramatic floods.
Some common sense and some common human decency would be highly appreciated.
It is refreshing to see people like David and Jennifer do have both.
We need to explain this need to our current water managers and also to our politicians who are trying to argue about a place that does not exist in the real world.
Thanks again.
One interesting conclusion about the current attitude David notes is that it is basically “progressive” in that knowledge is supposed to progress over time, and the reason why our scientific forbears seem to be dismissed as “old hat” – hence it is the intellectual driving force of “leftism” in all its hues. This has culminated in Post Normal science that now runs our scientific institutions.
Fortunately for the rational among us, post normal science will ultimately be forced to cope with its internal contradictions, the recent flooding being a more poignant event. The problem is to make sure one is not caught in the inevitable post-normal implosion