Ouch, the "end" of Australia sounds a bit much .. :) .. gollygeewhizithgtwtf! .. hardly know what to say .. just on what you have posted .. first time i've seen a possible 9 degree rise this century .. yup, that would cause havoc everywhere .. no doubt Australia is in the firing line with a large part of the continent designated as desert, and that ain't apple pie .. obviously more droughts with higher evaporation rates, more fire dnger and rising sea levels .. homes lost on the Gold Coast? .. i've read of danger of, but haven't heard of and can't find anything on homes lost.
There has been much talk and action re salinity in the Murray Darling .. http://www.mdba.gov.au/ .. SHORT TERM at least that situation is improved .. one bit ..
Storages
The total volume of water in most of Victoria’s major storages increased during August. By the end of August, Victoria’s major storages had risen to 85.5% of total capacity. The total volume of water in Victoria’s major regional storages increased to 89.7% and Melbourne’s storage levels rose to 61.2%. Restrictions on Urban Water Supplies
During August, Lower Murray Water introduced Stage 3 restrictions for Robinvale urban customers. At the end of the month, 33 Victorian towns were still on restrictions. This is the lowest number of towns on restrictions for almost a decade. http://www.water.vic.gov.au/monitoring/monthly
SHORT TERM again ..
World's hungry for our record grain crop
JASON MURPHY, AFR .. 03 Oct, 2011 08:45 AM
ABOUT a metre above the well-watered soils of Western Australia, a record grain crop is swaying in the breeze.
Higher than average rainfall in September will help production in the state exceed 9 million tons for only the third time in history, reports The Australian Financial Review. .. http://www.afr.com/ ..
Wheat farmers are happy. Well-timed rains mean high-protein grains which will be sold into a world market with a shortage of basic crops.
"A couple of fronts have come through that have finished things off to a T," WA Farmers Federation president Mike Norton said.
Very healthy production around Geraldton would lead to a bottleneck at that port if growers did not make early sales, he said.
Other elements in the supply chain would run smoothly.
"Our handling systems over here, while we do complain a bit at times, are head and shoulders above what you have over east," he said.
The national wheat harvest is looking good, if not as healthy as WA's, according to Cargill Australia general manager Mitch Morison.
"The fundamental picture is still pretty bright, which should underpin grain prices for the next eight months."
Mr Morison believes Australia will be one of only a few grain powerhouses this year because Europe's crop is slender and the corn market in the US is suffering a shortage.
"The corn crop is expected to be a lot smaller than initially forecast so wheat is being put into the feed ration instead of exported for milling purposes," he said.
The only hitch is getting the crops out of the country.
"There is enough capacity at the ports but the biggest issue is we can't get the bloody stuff to the ports," Mr Morison said.
"A big part of it is the inefficient rail industry in Australia. Our infrastructure is so outdated," he said, pointing to rail wagons in parts of the state that reach their top safe speed at 10 km/h.
"The NSW government is not going to spend any money on upgrading rail and hasn't done for the last 25 years."
ANZ senior agricultural economist Paul Deane, in research released on Friday, said WA exports were so strong they would fill demand in the traditional markets of Japan, Korea and south-east Asia. Wheat would have to be sold to "less predictable" markets in China, India the Middle East and North Africa.
Mr Deane argued that North Africa was the hardest market to crack and doing so could discourage planting in the future.
These all look based on the 2-3 degrees, i thought was more the norm ..
Effects of global warming on Australia .. Wikipedia bits ..
Extreme weather events
Australian annual land temperature anomalies from 1910 to 2009 [...]
The CSIRO predicts that a temperature rise of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius on the Australian continent could incur some of the following extreme weather occurrences, in addition to standard patterns:
Wind speeds of tropical cyclones could intensify by 5 to 10%.
Tropical cyclone rainfall could increase by 20-30%.
In 100 years, strong tides would increase by 12-16% along eastern Victoria's coast.
The forest fire danger index in NSW and WA would grow by 10%., and forest fire danger indexes in S, Central and NE Australia would increase more than 10
One more on the suggestion we may not be able to feed ourselves .. again this is on 2-3 degree, not 9 degree ..
[...]
Biodiversity and ecosystems
Australia has some of the world's most diverse ecosystems and natural habitats, and it may be this variety that makes them the Earth's most fragile and at-risk when exposed to climate change. The Great Barrier Reef is a prime example. Over the past 20 years it has experienced unparalleled rates of bleaching. Additional warming of 1°C is expected to cause substantial losses of species and of associated coral communities.
The CSIRO predicts that the additional results in Australia of a temperature rise of between 2 and 3 degrees celsius will be:
97% of the Great Barrier Reef bleached annually.
10–40% loss of principal habitat for Victoria and montane tropical vertebrate species.
92% decrease in butterfly species’ primary habitats.
98% reduction in Bowerbird habitat in Northern Australia.
A bacteria can stop Dengue-fever-carrying Aedes aegytpi mosquitoes from transmitting the virus.James Gathany/CDC
A common bacterium that infects mosquitoes is showing promise as a way to control the spread of dengue fever.
Transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, dengue fever kills around 12,500 people a year. Unlike for malaria, bed nets are not effective in combating dengue as A. aegypti is active during the day. And concerns about rising resistance to insecticides has spurred the search for alternatives.
A team led by Scott O'Neill, Dean of Science at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, believe they may have the answer. In work published in Nature1,2 today, they reveal a strain of the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis that can stop the dengue virus from replicating in its mosquito host. They go on to show that this bacterium can rapidly spread through wild A. aegypti populations, suggesting it could be a viable control mechanism for dengue fever.
"The presence of Wolbachia in mosquitoes completely blocks the ability of the dengue virus to grow in mosquitoes," O'Neill says. First principles
In previous work, O'Neill and his colleagues showed that infecting female mosquitoes with the Wolbachia strain wMelPop-CLA could cut their lifespan by half. The aim was to fight dengue fever by killing infected mosquitoes early, before the virus could mature enough to be passed on to people. But this approach, which also reduces infected mosquitoes' rate of reproduction by 56%, is problematic, as it also limits infected mosquitoes' ability to pass the bacterium on.
The solution, the group reports today, could lie in wMel. In caged field experiments, mosquitoes infected with this strain had lifespans, reproductive rates and offspring viability similar to that of uninfected controls.
Further, the team did not find virus in the saliva of wMel-infected females, suggesting that the bacterium could block transmission of the disease. And, because it does not harm mosquitoes, the bacterium is more likely than its predecessor to spread successfully through wild populations.
"It's an environmentally friendly approach that does not affect the mosquitoes, just the virus," says Flaminia Catteruccia, a molecular entomologist at Imperial College London, whose work has focused on controlling the malaria-carrying mosquitoes Anopheles gambiae.
How wMel stops the virus from replicating is "not fully understood", says O'Neill. But he says mounting evidence suggests that the bacteria "compete for limited sub-cellular resources required by the virus for replication". Into the wild
In an open field trial in two relatively remote areas in Australia, the team released more than 300,000 adult mosquitoes infected with the wMel Wolbachia strain into wild A. aegypti populations over a period of 9–10 weeks. Five weeks later, nearly all the wild mosquitoes tested were infected.
"This is the first case where wild insect populations have been transformed to reduce their ability to act as vectors of human disease agents," the authors write. They now plan to run large trials over the next 2–3 years to test the approach in countries where dengue fever is endemic. If the trials go well, their method could be implemented as a control mechanism "immediately afterwards", says O'Neill.
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