Listening again to the words of Paul Murray (Sky News) on his own podcast in January:
I just don’t understand why they just don’t pump all that water from the massive rains in Townsville over to where it is needed”
I will try to make this easy for Paul and his listeners: Townsville is at sea level, Charters Towers (behind the Great Dividing Range) is at elevation 300 meters and 134 km from Townsville.
Rick Baek, Democrats campaigner, Qld
Now try and go to your garden hose tap, turn on the water and look at how the water is gushing out… Now go and buy 134 meters of garden hose, roll it out and place the open end 134 meters away, up a 30 cm incline. Go back and turn the water on and have a look at the water not gushing out of the open end. That’s called water head.
Never mind, let’s do it anyway: ok so it rains in Townsville and we want that water stored, short term and then pumped over the Great Dividing Range so it can flow inland and down to where it’s needed. There is only one serious dam near Townsville, Lake Ross, and that supplies the whole region with drinking water, so we would have to build other dams just to hold the water that we want to pump, and then overcome the issue with pumping from 30 to 300 meter over a distance of 130 km.
Now I am not a scientist, (I actually made all the above up, but it is as convincing as Paul Murray) but other people are, and they have, again and again, decided it can’t be done. So why does Paul Murray keep saying this? Ah, wait, there is one more thing. “It can be done easily, but the greenies don’t want it. They want drought and bushfires to fuel their Climate Change agenda.”
So this is cheap name-calling, pub politics. He wants to look like the guy with all the answers.
Conservatives like Paul Murray simply refuse to believe the scientist. This is the new right – the deniers.
We will not advance our country and solve the problems coming for us, without believing the science and let the experts tell us how to solve the problems.