Welcome to the Equinox!

[Greg]

So, we have the equator targeted directly on the sun. What are we going to do about it?

[Zirconia Wolf]

Start crying because it's time to say "so long" to there being light outside past 5 PM?

Well, that's what I'm gonna do anyway...

[Miros1]

Wait for the ocean to start to boil and make tea?

It'll be T-day before it's dark at 5PM. It was nice to have twilight until 10 pm tho...

[shorty943]

Originally Posted by Zirconia Wolf

Start crying because it's time to say "so long" to there being light outside past 5 PM?

Well, that's what I'm gonna do anyway...

Down here at 36 south, it's Hellooo, Bush-fire season. It will be bad this year.
Our winter rains failed, we have had no rain at all for 8 weeks.
Our State Government has just announced, Total Fire-bans, will be brought forward to next month. 6 weeks early.

[Greg]

I shall make a point of being very careful not to light any fires in South Australia. In fact, I'll put it at the top of my action items list!

[shorty943]

Thank you.

Last night's news, 2\3 of Australia's farming lands, are still in the grip of the worst drought in recorded history.
Our Federal Government have just announced the increase of another 750 million dollars in farm relief aid. The rains have failed again, 5 years in a row, crops are dying in the paddocks, young farmers are shooting themselves.
More blood on the plows.

[Greg]

I don't suppose the blood is a suitable substitute for the missing moisture, eh?

[shorty943]

Sadly, no.

Silver Nitrate only works if you have clouds in the first place.

Winter has just finished, we are 4 weeks into spring, and the ground is as dry as bone. Crops can be seen drying and yellowing off, day by day it gets drier.
And still the wind blows the clouds, and the topsoil away.
Even our grazing paddocks are already looking bad.

Roll on those lazy, dust hazy days of summer.

[Greg]

I'm still surprised that nobody is using irrigation. It ain't exactly a new technology.

[Miros1]

Shorty said something about the water coming out of the ground is saltier than sea water, so the soil is developing a salt crust and the runoff kills the freshwater fish in the bodies of water.

[Greg]

In which case, maybe a salt water fish farm is the answer!

[shorty943]

Originally Posted by Greg

In which case, maybe a salt water fish farm is the answer!

That is already covered by the original Tuna fishermen out of Port Lincoln in SA.
Yellow fin is caught young, and farm fattened in sea-pens. Sold to Japan for a couple of thousand dollars per fish.
Same with the northern game perch known as "Barramundi", and the giant western fresh water crayfish known as the "Maron". Ocean Trout and Salmon.

Sadly, the irrigation techniques adopted from Europe and America, and the lack of understanding, about the true nature of the country, have combined to make a pretty big mess.
The native trees are deep rooting and salt tolerant, used to cyclic flood and drought. The river was locked with weirs and gates to control flow levels for navigation and irrigation. This brought the water table up, and the deep salt from the old ocean bed up with it. Most of the native trees were cleared to make room for the cash crop fruit and vines. The rest are either drowning because the river no longer dries out in the bed, or dying from lack of water, because they no longer get the big floods they need.
100 or so years later, we are finding some really worrying stuff happening.
When just 1 paddock, on just 1 farm, measures over 1,000 acres, that was only 100 years ago, virgin unexplored wilderness.

Trees make rain.

Trees wave their branches, that makes the wind come, the wind brings the clouds, and the clouds bring the rain. TREES MAKE RAIN.

We got next to no trees left.

[Miros1]

Do you have Arbor Day? Maybe you should a) plant some native trees and b) start Arbor Day there to get other people to plant some!

[Greg]

So that explains why it rains so hard in Houston! It's all these furshlugginer trees!

[shorty943]

Originally Posted by Miros1

Do you have Arbor Day? Maybe you should a) plant some native trees and b) start Arbor Day there to get other people to plant some!

Yep. At least we used to have a half day off from school to go plant trees and such when I was a lad.

I think it has been renamed to "Tree Day" or some stupidly simpleton thing like that, because nobody knows the base Latin anymore. I really don't like our government public servants. They seem almost uneducated in there desperation to rationalise their need to change the way we do things. So they try to institute laws that are already in place, they just haven't read the damned book properly. They don't do that, we do, and they obey.

So yes, in a way we still do. It's just been bastardised, like a lot of things in this country over the last couple of decades.

Mr. Robert J Hawke, former Prime Minister, once vowed "we will plant 1 billion trees before the millenium, blah blah blah". And we did, then the bloody drought hit really hard, and the poor little buggers died.
In some places you can see the salt forming crystals from month to month.
Boffins from all over the world are trying to figure something out, but all their head scratching so far has only resulted in splinters in their fingers.
Bloody wooden headed boffins.

Watcha gonna do.

[Miros1]

That usually means the wrong varieties of trees got planted or they were planted in the wrong places.

[Greg]

Golly, Shorty, it sounds like your class of politicians is no better than ours!

Hmm... maybe we should ship some of our trees down therel. We have lots of plants around here that like to grow in salt water.

[shorty943]

Originally Posted by Miros1

That usually means the wrong varieties of trees got planted or they were planted in the wrong places.

Nope, the right trees. Exactly the right trees. Endemic, only the local natives can survive the local conditions. To the extent that our native orchids and so forth are almost impossible to propagate if disturbed in any way.
The same genus and sub-genus of tree from another region will not flourish.
Really tough nut to crack, yet our good old "Gum trees' are almost weeds, and noxious weeds, at that in the Hollywood hills. And in places in China where they have been grown.

Originally Posted by Greg

Golly, Shorty, it sounds like your class of politicians is no better than ours!

Hmm... maybe we should ship some of our trees down therel. We have lots of plants around here that like to grow in salt water.

So do we, it is just very difficult to get them started. I think there is a cyclic nature trigger that the botanists haven't thought about yet.
This drought certainly hasn't helped. Met figures in for last month.
A total of 21.3 millimeters of rain for September. The long range forecast is not good for the next 3 months. Yep, just over 3\4 of an inch of rain, for the first month of spring, and she only gets drier and hotter from here on, until about March or April.
The entire nation, has been on water restrictions for over 2 years now.
Not good.

As for politicians, my favourite vegetable. Mashed.
Hmm, mashed politician, the best kind there is.

[Greg]

What do you call two dozen politicians at the bottom of Sydney Harbor?

[shorty943]

A good nights work.