Dear Andrew I love it when ...

[Penn Gwynne <>]

G'day Andrew and all,

I love it when I hear that age olde stupid debate point raised about the cost? for many years now I have lived my life using the L.E.T.S. system have you heard of this? could I send you some info about L.E.T.S. on what it really does? it could work for those that scream out for water? and may I ask on what data have you based your costing?

Please read on cobber.

Andrew Taylor <> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:34:35PM +1000, Lawrie Conole wrote:

Some of the virus-affected PCs around the place must have lots of old Birding-Aus messages stored on them - or are they being harvested from the BA archive? A worm like Bugbear could retrieve e-mail messages from a web archive but I've seen no mention of such behavior from it or previous worms.

Psst my Oxford nerdy nephew in the UK tells me they have welded together klez and bugbear. Nice eh !!!!

On another non-birding topic John Gamblin suggested desalination as the solution to Australia's water problem. It costs roughly $1000/megalitre to desalinate water currently.

Hmm that's 100,000 cents per 1,000,000 litres right?

Irrigators who buy water by the megalitre pay under $50 I believe.

I heard with raised eyebrow what cotton growers pay.

The return per megalitre for the major consumers of water, livestock/pasture/grain, cotton and rice, is said to be in the range $200-600 per megalitre.

Unsuitable livestock for Australian conditions perhaps? no no no you stupid olde JAG you, don't you dare say that to a european thinking fine gentleman like Andrew.

Desalination technology will improve but don't expect it to provide water cheap enough for the above uses in the near future.

Why? and on what do you base this statement? a huge part of the cost factor is conventional power and running out of that power system to run the de~salination plants?

Sydney Water charges us (consumers) ~$1000 per megalitre - although much of this is not the "raw water" cost. As desalination gets cheaper it may be used
to supply Australia's coastal cities particularly if cheap energy is available - similarly it may become viable for high-value agriculture (fruit and grapes) near the coast.

Yessum .... I lub me bunch.

You don't necessarily need to desalinate water to drop it from helitankers such as Elvis, as John suggested.

I didn't want to get into hot water with those that scream about the land/degradation/salt problem being worsened.

Although it won't change the economics much.

Pardon???? new trickle flow low energy demand solar pumps? trickle feeding through an ion type plant?

For those that like arithmetic. The helitankers cost $12000/hour to run, carry 9 kilolitres and under good circumstances can dump a load every 4-5 minutes.

Pssst the more you use something doesn't that affect the cost? ten loads per hour is really going it ...

That's ~$100000 per megalitre delivered to a fire.

So what value to Australia and Australian tourism is it's environment? or it's mammals and birds etc etc? the above cost if compared is infinitesimal?

And to add some token birds - Koels are now present in inner Sydney in numbers There were 3+ "pairs" calling near my street this afternoon. Also heard a Koel (and a Channel-Bill) south of Bateman's Bay last week - near the southern end of their range.

Andrew Taylor

Lots of inland birds are now moving to the coast? :^D>>> wish I knew how to knit a woolen bikini :^D>>> sorry everyone but birds need water for life.

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