Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Through causing panic by telling everyone climate change is making floods worse, Michael Mann may have inadvertently triggered the destruction of hundreds of square miles of pristine protected NSW wilderness.
When the levee breaks
Some say the Warragamba Dam wall needs to be raised to help prevent the devastating floods seen in Sydney this week — but there is a cost upstream too.
By Michael Slezak and Penny Timms
Updated 27 Mar 2021, 9:44am
Published 27 Mar 2021, 4:53amAlmost 150 years ago, a torrent of water poured out of the Blue Mountains and filled western Sydney like a bathtub.
Floodwaters rose to nearly 20 metres in some areas, with the high-water line still marked at some parts.
…
This week was one of the worst ever seen.
…
Almost 100 years later the Warragamba Dam was built.
It was never intended to be a flood mitigation dam. Its purpose to provide 80 per cent of Sydney’s drinking supply.
When not full, it can mitigate floods by catching some of the rainwater that would otherwise flow into parts of western Sydney.
…
So the NSW government is charging ahead with a radical plan — an idea which, in some form or another, dates back at least to the 1990s — to raise the wall of the dam by between 14 and 17 metres.
It says the move will protect lives and property and would have slowed the peak of the floods this week, likely saving some homes and businesses. Some experts disagree.
But to protect those living on the floodplain there is a cost upstream.
With a higher dam wall, thousands of hectares of unique World Heritage bushland will be flooded, and according to government documents obtained by the ABC much of that will be severely damaged.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-27/warragamba-dam-raising-to-save-flooding-cost-others/13226472
I don’t know if a higher wall on the dam will help prevent floods. More likely dam managers will use the greater capacity to improve the stability and resilience of Sydney’s stretched water supply. But it was absurd for greens like Michael Mann to think that all their rhetoric about climate change and flooding would not have consequences.
Normal people act to address perceived threats, and most people would prefer to protect their homes from flooding, even if that means destroying a few hundred square miles of protected wilderness.
If something helps people, most greens will oppose it.
Bang on. The ‘Final Solution to the Environmental Question’ for greens is the extinction of humans. We need to bite the bullet for the planet, from their perspective. We’ve done too much harm already.
All the in-between fixes (like stopping CO2 emissions) are only partial stopgaps until they can mercy kill us all.
Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” was spot on with the attitude of some greens.
As long as the Greenbeaners go first, it’s fine with me. They’re mostly useless, anyway, and their load of CO2 added to the atmosphere must be tremendous.
17 meters is almost 55 feet.
The lake surface covers 75 square Kilometers.
Not adding in the additional increase in surface area, just the current surface area with an increased depth of 17 meters will add in the neighborhood of 1,382,691,915 tons of additional water weight. Hope the base can hold it.
The load on a dam (pressure) is determined by the height of the water, not its volume
pressure per unit m width…… force = 0.5 rho.g.h² (h is depth of water)
and the center of load is raised by 17/3 m increasing the moment rotation force on the dam about its base.
I’m sure they will have done the maths in many different ways including finite element etc.
The volume has everything to do with it. I suggest a course in bssic dam engineering.
.
For yourself.
The force on the wall is dependent on the depth of water and area of the wall.
Its called hydrostatic force.
Volume has nothing to do with it.
google “pressure on dam wall”, and learn some basic engineering
Imagine an aquarium, 1m by 1m height and width but only 10 cm thick. Volume 100 litre. The front glass panel is 3mm thick, more than adequate. Now we enlarge the aquarium and increase the thickness to 10 metre. Volume now 10000 litre. Hydrostatic pressure at bottom is as before. But will the 3mm panel be sufficient to contain the water? That would be an interesting experiment, wouldn’t it? Don’t forget to put on your Wellies.
I’m only mildly educated, but I found this explanation satisfactory: https://www.quora.com/Why-hydrostatic-pressure-only-depends-on-height-from-the-surface-to-object-regardless-to-any-barriers
To your hypothetical, as you increase the volume to 10000 litre, you are just distributing the same force over a larger area. We don’t imagine that the force at 10m depth at ANY point in the volume will change, whether it’s in a lake or an ocean. That’s because the force is equally distributed in all directions — except downwards.
I was just gonna ask if somebody can tell us how many extra tons of water will be rushing down to kill thousands of people when that patch-on with cheap Chinese cement and half-trained millennial labour falls off like a scab from a gangrenous limb.
Now I know, but what I really cannot get my head around, is the 4 downvotes for your very informative post.
The downvotes are for relating volume to the pressure on the dam walls, when in reality is the increase in height which will increase the pressure on the dam walls. I’m pretty sure the engineers will overcompensate the pressure at the base of the dam with the added weight of reinforced concrete
Because its WRONG !
The Greens take so much money from communist governments and dictators around the world they should be required to register as foreign agents in every western country where they are organized.
It’s always fun when you guys get a chance to have a go at this Mann. I’ll come back in a couple of hours. Can’t wait, please be ruthless he deserves it.
Here you go, Notanacademic, hope this makes your day: Mikey Mann, you &%$#”!?=)/&%)(+* flaming $%#!?=)(/#$%&. You’re welcome.
😂 thanks Ron. Wise to obscure the words he does like a good court case when someone has upset him.
deleted, wrong place.
Doctor Mann is the greatest threat to free humanity currently alive.
Anyone who still takes anything Mann says seriously deserves whatever they get.
Only if they get it using their own money, not the funds of others.
I was thinking along the line of “just deserts”. His 1st and most important paper MBH98 came to us dead on arrival, an obvious response for the need to disappear the Medieval Warm Period. It was his claim to “fame” but in fact destroyed his reputation for all time.
lol and people said Fallen Angels wasn’t realistic
How much ‘wild’ acreage would be lost depends on the topography. If steep, not much. If shallow, lots. Near our cabin near Blue Ridge, Georgia, lake Blue Ridge forms behind a ~1935 TVA dam about 50 meters high. The lake reservoir lake is long, skinny, and ‘snakey’, with islands, because the terrain is the mostly steeply sloped southern Appalachian mountains in the Chatahoochee National Forest.
Our 5 acre property is part of an inholding along the Toccoa river feeding the lake (great trout fishing) from when TR originally formed the Chatahoochee National Forest—itself a then thought a joke, because the then all private ‘forest’ had all been clearcut, so TR could buy all the land anyone would sell for cheap. Too steep to farm. 110 years later, what a difference.
Originally Cherokee land. With the Dalonega gold discovery (about a twisty windy motorcycle ride 45 minutes from us literally thru the Southern Terminus Park Center of the famed Appalachian Trail.
The Cherokee were promptly expelled to Oklahoma via the infamous ‘Trail of Tears’, a separate discussion. They didn’t count near as much as gold.
Ants and beavers also do this kind of natural earth renovations for water control. Mankind is not so different than other social creatures of nature. Like George Carlin said, “We’ll be gone in a million years. Nature will shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”
“How much ‘wild’ acreage would be lost depends on the topography.”
Looking at the 360° image from “Burragorang lookout” on google maps of the lake, it seems to have the topography to support such a project, but what do I know.
The Cherokee nation is now offering Wuhan virus vaccinations to anyone, of any race, who shows up at their door.
The Cherokees were abused in the past, but they have come back stronger than before. Now, they donate money to white people in Oklahoma. Of course, Cherokees are so integrated into society that helping the white people also helps the Cherokees, too.
It’s all good.
The extra land in question is steep enough to justify the extra height, and there’s over one million hectares of world heritage bushland there
Poor mickey mann
A mouth without a brain to guide it. !
When did they let that crackpot out of the psychiatric ward ??
Where’s Nurse Ratched when she’s needed?
Following the signing of UN Agenda 21 – Sustainability by the Keating Labor Federal Government of Australia the first state land conversion to National Park was by Labor NSW Government, around early 1990s.
One of the National Parks & Wildlife conversion of state land banned new dams and raising dam walls to increase storage capacity. At least two sites set aside for new dams around Sydney, outside of Sydney, were locked away and cannot be built.
However, in 2018 the Coalition NSW Government enacted legislation to enable the UN ban to be ignored with a view to building new dams. Ever since greenism has been standing in the way of progress including applications to courts to stop the projects.
and the magic words
world heritage area
why the hell we EVER allowed that crap to be landed on us….
its as bad as heritage listing anything you own
your home your land and your life are at the behest of some bunch of asshats for good
It is of course Green influence and in positions of power, notably in local government councils where permits for land clearing and burning off bushfire fuel on the ground are issued, that resulted in the 2019/20 bushfires and devastation of wildlife and forests, and nearby privately owned lands.
This followed a severe drought, which Australian experiences every twenty years or so and has done for as long as white settlement records have been kept, and earlier, and resulting very dry conditions with poor land management to remove excess bushfire fuel.
Greens tried hard to proclaim a climate emergency situation and to push their creatively accounted warming trend propaganda.
Australia, land of droughts and flooding rains: Dorethea Mackellar 1904 poem.
The solution that I see is as follows … in all constituents held by Green councillors, MP’s and senators … in that order when power goes down brownout and blackout those electoral boundaries, when water is scarce through drought turn them off, support through any catastrophe them last. I’m sure that this is the quality of life that they aspire to as they keep on saying and doing things to foister such calamity upon the rest of the normal people.
An require them to pay the full price of all undependable electrical power. Let the liberal/conservative MP districts only pay the coal/nat gas prices, and the Greens to pay to the Liberal/conservative districts the spot prices when their unreliable power supplies cannot provide what they need.
That sounds fair to me.
No problem. When us in the natural resources industry justify a project, on net benefit to the population, and the project will damage a protected area, wilderness, roadless, wetland, habitat, we need to invest sufficient funds to offset the damage, but constructing or supporting a similar habitat elsewhere. The key ingredients are net benefit to the population and offset damage. Sounds fairly straight-forward in this case.
Yes, like when windmills kill gazillions of birds, bats and insects, the developers provide for habitat elsewhere.
Sounds fairly straight forward, it just NEVER happens.
Yes, like when windmills ki!! gazillions of birds, bats and insects, the developers provide for habitat elsewhere.
Sounds fairly straight forward, it just NEVER happens.
Repeat post, I didn’t use !! first time, sorry moderators.
Tim Flannery – Climate Council Imperator, 2007
Since then, Warragamba has spilled 3 times … and is still spilling today.
If only that dam’s wall had been raised, flood mitigation potential and badly needed additional water storage and supplies for the fast growing population of Sydney.
Population control methodology of the activista.
But do the voters of Sidney deserve additional supply. Asking because I don’t know how they vote. If they support the leftists and greens, they should have to line up at corner water fountains to carry water back to their hovels so they won’t waste water. Crap into a bucket, not use the precious resource for transport of human waste, etc. Lets give them what they want. Indoor plumbing is the curse of modern times, it must be eliminated. Only where leftists live I mean. In the US like SF, oh, the already crap in the streets there!
Green leftist thinking is shallow and selfish. They’ll start squealing how it’s governments job to provide for them regardless of their role in creating the crisis
Plans to raise Tallowa Dam, (effectively doubling capacity iirc)
and to construct a bigger Cordeaux Dam downstream, that will eventually flood the old dam.
See if either eventuates.
Drake, It’s hard for me to be civil about “greenies”. I understand they are believers in population control, and wind mill generators can do a good job “at no extra cost”. I use “wind mill” , because, to my understanding, a turbine is always in a housing, be it a pelton (sp?) wheel (an early form of water turbine), modern water turbines, steam turbines, gas turbines, and so on. I like the idea that the greenies use their own money, not ours, to make up the higher costs of “green/renewable energy”, from finding raw materials, through all intermediary steps through installation and recycling, and include the costs caused by reliability problems. Question: Why are wind and solar called “renewable energy sources” when the source is the external, self consuming sun?
He also predicted that ocean level rising would by year 2000 result in the Sydney Opera House going underwater.
It remains high and dry in 2021.
But he purchased two waterfront properties on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney.
Perhaps he could have moved his house to below the top of the level of the dam wall. To show that he has some skin in the game.
That is the problem with so many of them, they have no skin in the game, if their predictions are wrong (which they almost always are), there is no consequence to them. Many are happy to spend every penny of other peoples money to achieve their goals.
As an old-school, traditional environmentalist, I really have to marvel at all of the environmental destruction that mitigating an invisible trace-gas is doing to the planet:
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.
A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation — and a huge spike in carbon emissions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html
The progressive Left and their financial and corporate allies have completely co-opted the environmental movement and none are the wiser (until it is too late).
But there is an interesting pattern that emerges, which looks to me like Promote and Protest. First promote the thing (eg LNG use as a transition fuel) then scoop up tons of donor money by protesting the practicalities (Fracking and Arctic exploration.). And it is the same pattern with biofuels, biomass, etc.
Electrification will no doubt follow the same path, once it is discovered that lithium and rare earth metals come from mines.
I have to add the silliness of MTBE. At first it was praised as a better solution to oxygenated gasoline as it did not hurt volatility and increased octane, then it was damned for giving a metallic taste to contaminated water when the problem was actually leaking old gasoline tanks that had to be replaced anyway. The left went apoplectic over the harmless MTBE molecule and banned it only to allow ethanol which causes multiple problems in gasoline including wasting useful blend components that could be in gas but are not allowed due to the high vapor pressure that ethanol causes.
And then you need to realize that ethanol only reduces some emissions from much older carbureted cars and has no impact (real or meaningful) on current vehicle emissions. But we mandate conversion of food (mostly corn, but also sugar beets and other starchy feedstocks) into fuel to meet government requirements (from EISA 2007) but cause higher food costs in third world countries that could benefit from growing crops for food instead of fuel.
Such is life in Green Hell.
Yes, but beware of leaving petrol/gasoline in a tank even if the Ethanol content is only 10 per cent.
Unless the engine the tank supplies has seals and tubes resistant to Ethanol, including fuel pump, there can be extensive and expensive damage resulting if left for more than a month or two.
Thank you for reminding us of the MTBE fiasco.
The tort lawyers had a field day with that bit of stupidity. If there were any justice in this world, the tort lawyers should have been allowed to sue the promoters and the actual perpetrators of that bit of legislative blundering.
Promoter? Start with US Senator Dianne Feinstein (Born:1933, Senator:1992 – to date).
“Get the lead out.” It was about five years ago that she admitted that MTBE was “a mistake”.
and Gore pushed some additive that turned out to be WAY more toxic than lead at huge cost
they pulled it n shut chat down pdq i remember
oh and of course HE had financial interests in it as usual
Biofuels: In 2014 I purchased a Toyota Hilux diesel truck here in Thailand. One of my main reasons for diesel was that I thought, “They will never ban diesel in Thailand like they did “standard” unleaded petrol–too many commercial trucks rely on it.” I was wrong. To help subsidize the country’s biofuel suppliers, the Thai government did this last year. Standard diesel here is now 10% biofuel mix. The purest I can get is a 7% mix. And to think that I was young and naïve to protest the Franklin River dam back in the 80s!
if Climate change is the most important threat facing the planet, all options must be considered.
Dams can provide hydroelectricity and pumped storage for Climate mitigation and extra water storage and flood management for Climate adaptation.
This is something that the public can understand but will tear the radical greens apart.
Continuously pushing hydro and nuclear is a successful strategy in this climate war.
Tim Blair has sound, proven advice regarding Green ideas –
Another way to put it is: The Left destroys everything it touches.
What happened to Earth Hour? Wasn’t it supposed to be this evening? I guess we’ll never be flood-free now.
/sarc
Yes, 8.30 to 9.30 pm.
I parked my vehicles in the shed with the lights out and engine stopped.
sarc.
Just be thankful you don’t have grizzly bears to protect or wolf packs. Would you like some?
ta but we have drop bears and a myriad of venomous spiders n snakes instead
“pristine wilderness”
Who Are You Kidding
What use is wilderness to anybody or any thing apart from self important w4nkers
That place was ‘pristine’ circa 40 and 50 thousand years ago, when it was jungle rainforest.
Until some sweet little butter-wouldn’t-melt 2-legged little rats came along and burned it not ‘to’ but into the ground
First, Get rid of the sheep and control the rabbits
Next, do as beavers do:
Dig deep holes all along the lines of creeks and use the spoil to create dams
(just little ones, this is not a willy measuring contest)
Build terraces on ground with a slope of more that 5 degrees
Whatever organic matter you can get hold of, dump it into the holes you’ve dug along the creek-beds.
Any organics: old paper, card, demolition wood, old furniture, sawmill residues, old clothes and the final few sheep-shearings.
If your houses are burning from wildfires, gather up that ‘fuel stuff’ and put it in the holes. As Donald said, Rake the forest.
(Howzabout swapping coal for all the 9 million tonnes per years of wood pellets presently coming to the UK. That’d be epic)
Make some of your coal into coke and toss that in too, along with some nice-n-tasty ground-up rock, basalt for example. Cruched up old concrete might be useful, not if it was made with heavy metals in it, like the usual villains of chromium, cadmium, arsenic etc
The cleared out shells of a few old cars would be brilliant, something to anchor the stew together in the bottom of the ponds.
Then you will control the floods
Then you will get a steady stream of drinking water
Then you will get a ‘pristine place’ that actually is useful for you, critters of all shapes and sizes and the climate
Building bigger and better dams is just the same for the landscape & climate as is giving Insulin to a Type 2 diabetic.
It covers up the symptoms certainly, but destroys the patient.
The edges, sides and banks of the creeks will start turning green, then and only then, bring in some cows or buffalo and as best you can, let them run wild.
NO horses, NO sheep. NO goats. Keep the roos out too
This is all stuff Michael Mann should be saying, if he’d ever received any proper education or had even a slightest clue of the subject he is supposed to be a professor of
Yeah half of it is probably useless scrub. But the greens think it is pristine 😉
peta the rabbits n foxes could go
but the sheep n horses arent the problem wild pigs n feral goats are far bigger issues they dont mention
and as for wilderness
its over rated
While I don’t know the specifics of Warragamba Dam, I do support properly engineered water control structures and part of a broader effort to continuously improve resilience of the infrastructure .
This is essentially what Drive-by Mosher is claiming when he pithily observed, “We don’t even plan for the past.”
Professional Civil Engineers have actually been doing that for 150+ years. The problem is we now have the man-children like Mike Mann and junk engineers like Mark Jacobsen claiming they know how to save us with wind mills and solar panels made in China.
Mosher hasn’t driven by recently to my recollection. Did perfluoroalkyl substances shrink him out of existence?
He is clutching his climate and contract tracing data while mining Bitcoin
His brain started shrinking when he was hired by BEST as a mouthpiece.
Now akin to that of a Capuchina
I think all those charts you show of various parts of the world that disagree with the Best Hockey Stick chart is keeping him from responding.
How can Mosher refute actual temperature readings? He can’t, so he says nothing. He doesn’t defend the Best Hockey Stick chart because there is no defense.
If he tries, Fred will hit him with a chart showing it was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today, totally refuting the “hotter and hotter” bogus, bastardized, instrument-era Hockey Stick chart.
The Hockey Stick chart is an outliar that does not represent reality. It is a computer-generated lie meant to promote the Human-caused Climate Change narrative.
It’s the ONLY chart that shows a “hotter and hotter” temperature profile. All the regional surface temperature charts from around the world show it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today and refutes the “hotter and hotter” temperature profile of the bogus Hockey Stick chart.
And every climate scientist that deals with the Earth’s temperatures have seen these discrepancies between the bogus Hockey Stick chart and regional temperature charts. Yet some still push the Hockey Stick chart lie. Deliberately, it seems, because they should know better.
Fred250 should collate all his graphs somewhere for us evil “Deniers” to use as a resource when arguing with Warmunists.
Just make sure you are happy for the source data to be unavailable.
Poor effeminate gee makes another totally useless and pointless post.
Gee, what a total lack of substance.
I think Fat Boy Kim recruited him to mine Bitcoin for NorK’s money laundering machine and getting a 50-50 cut of the action.
I live in the Clarence catchment area we hadn’t seen a major flood since 2013 when Grafton reached 8.8 m at the Prince St gauge. This current flood went 6.2. The NSW government and SES state emergency services were issuing alerts and evacuation orders well before actually known hights possible to warrant an actual evacuation. All these experts are telling people to leave their homes have no local knowledge, are not from the area and are in command from Sydney and Woolangong taking 4 to 6 hrs to issue information on river hights far to long and inaccurate. I was told to leave even though my farm is out of flooding but on the flood plane and that warning was issued at 4 m a minor rise. The most insane alert issued I saw was for Baryulgil 80 km west from Grafton at the base of the Great Dividing Range they where told to leave the village because the river went to 11m, the village is 4 km and a couple hundred meters higher then the Clarence river.
Thank you Frank for the on scene report. Be safe as Monsoon flooding season has not peaked yet.
monsoons dont go that low and theres maybe one to come and thats WAY up nth top end NT if it manages to occur at all
Too many experts, too little knowledge
Eric,
“Through causing panic by telling everyone climate change is making floods worse, Michael Man may have inadvertently triggered the destruction of hundreds of square miles of pristine protected NSW wilderness.”
You accidently called him a “Man”.
(Can’t wait to hear he’s been fixed! 😎
Ha – fixed the typo, thanks 🙂
Dams intentionally or unintentionally are flood control measures when properly operated especially that today cheap telemetry to monitor rainfall across the watershed on real time and good computer models of the watershed are available. It is true, dams have to overflow or water will have to spill to protect the integrity of the dams. The water flow will not be instantaneous on the dam as it takes time for the surface runoff to flow and collect at the edge of the reservoir. With the large reservoir area of the dam, the increase on the reservoir water level is also dampened. An ideal situation would be a reservoir that is almost full, if the predicted water inflow is q, the water release could be set at q or the water release from the dam is equal to the flow downstream without the dam. Good practice would be to start the release or opening the sluice gates when the water level is slightly below the maximum as it is not possible to open the sluice gates to instantaneously respond to the fluctuation of the inflow. From what I read in the newspaper (internet edition) the water release was something like twice the incoming flow or something like the flow downstream was twice if there was no dam. Seems to be some panic. This just my observation as I dont have full access to the technical information.
It was never supposed to rain again /sarc
If it’s a good idea, it’s doomed.
hundreds of square miles of pristine protected NSW wilderness
Think of it from the fish perspective, best to be underwater!
After this years flood here is what will happen in NSW, and Australia as a whole; Nothing. Sure, there will be a royal commission, which will cost millions, and out of that will come recommendations in a report that will be “shelved”, until the next time when the cycle starts again. Same with bush fires. It’s been the same since the 60’s, possibly before, where green rot has set in.
Every time I see that image of Mann I always think that he’s missing his clowns outfit.
Mann overboard .
Again.
‘With a higher dam wall, thousands of hectares of unique World Heritage bushland will be flooded, and according to government documents obtained by the ABC much of that will be severely damaged. ‘
and they don’t even agree if it would stop flooding
Rain does not always fall in catchment areas and Warragamba wasn’t originally built as a flood mitigation dam either.
yup aunty abc found a couple of women aboriginals one a wanna be lawyer… and one whos granny “used to live there” before they flooded it hmm?
moaning about the loss of..-.fill in any wild claim they choose..cos heritage culture etc etc
and the greentards reckon billions of damage to – again- fill in any damned thing they can think of,
was amused that one comment DID say it appeared to smack of abuse of “science” to make the mega bil money claims;-))
“With a higher dam wall, thousands of hectares of unique World Heritage bushland will be flooded…”
Gee, is there a shortage of bushland in Australia?
What do the hydrologists say? They are the ones who know how to manage runoff. If you can’t build higher you dig. An alternative to taking a greater chance on dam failure might be to divert the runoff to save a city.
I would rather trust a hydrologist solution than an environmentalist for saving people and the environment. Certainly consider environmental damage but first consider human life.
if it is intended to catch extreme events won’t it be at current depths most of the time?