Global warming is long-term good for Australia
Suppose it’s all true, the planet warms, the icecaps melt and the sea rises. What does this mean for Australia?
This has happened before, several times, quite naturally and without help from industry. During those times, Australia had an inland sea, a big shallow warm inland sea – the world’s biggest estuary, in fact, full of fish, prawns, shellfish, crabs, waterbirds and all the other things that live in estuaries.
Has anyone thought about the commercial value of having the world’s biggest estuary nicely landlocked where foreigners can’t poach? Not to mention the environmental value of a gigantic, freshly minted, unpolluted wildlife habitat.
How about the transport implications? Shallow protected seas like this don’t have big waves: cheap waterborne heavy freight, more or less point to point – a maintenance-free national freight highway.
What about the effect of an inland sea on our climate? Warm, wet air on both sides of the Great Divide means it doesn’t matter which way the wind blows, you get rain. Our climate will be wetter and more temperate. This means we are likely to end up with more arable land than we have now.
Then there’s the fact that a huge warm inland estuary full of fish and prawns will cause crocodile populations to boom, producing vast quantities of lean meat and premium leather, which is hardly a problem.
Of course, all the lawyers, politicians and other parasites who currently own waterfront property will find themselves disenfranchised, whereas Aussie battlers who couldn’t afford the waterfront will find themselves in possession of it anyway.
Not so great for city dwellers, but all you get from cities is vandals, queers, pollution and water shortages (there’d be heaps of water in the Wivenhoe dam if it we didn’t waste so much of it on Brisbane).
So, global warming will feed us, water us, reduce our transport costs, improve our biodiversity, increase the amount of arable land available to us, create new industries and rebalance the distribution of wealth.
You might argue that in the medium term global warming will produce the effects that we are already seeing. Quite right. The deed has been done, the Earth is already tucked in a blanket of dense gas and the temperature is rising as a consequence. We'll just have to deal with it, because the deed is already done. If all of humanity ceased producing greenhouses gases right now the temperature would continue to rise because the blanket of greenhouse gases already exists.
So there you go: we can't stop the rising temperature and no sensible Australian would want to. What we need is accelerated global warming to shorten the period of increased aridity and bring about the return of the inland sea.
From an international perspective a rising sea is likely to seriously weaken the current superpowers right about the time it strengthens Australia. The pressure on Indonesia to move here will be enormous and we will have to be ready to repel boarders without restraint or hesitation. Fortunately the do-gooders in the united nations will be too busy with their own problems to come and interfere so we should be in a position to ignore the UN and do whatever is necessary to prevent them from establishing a foothold.
Far from paying to prevent, we should be doing everything in our power to encourage global warming.
The simplest and most effective way to do this is to exploit our abundance of coal energy for very large scale desalination to see us through the interim. This will solve the short term problems and speed up the return of our inland sea. Ideally we should deplete the low-lying coal reserves first, since these will eventually be inundated. Once the inland sea returns weather patterns should become a lot wetter and the desal plants can be sold off to other nations or simply mothballed against future need. They might even remain in production, since the product water is of very high grade and when MFD or MED desalinators are combined with electricity generation plants there are significant efficiencies to be had, greatly reducing the net energy spend to process the water.