Australia’s small ski industry is obviously doomed, but there could soon (by 2050) be no white stuff at all in the land of the Man from Snowy River, which is really bad news for the water supplies of Melbourne and Adelaide (and I would expect for the hydro-electric scheme that runs in the area).

The CSIRO reported this week that climate change could all but wipe out snow falls by 2050. The resulting loss of run-off from melting snow would seriously reduce water levels in the Snowy and Murrumbidgee rivers.
… As the snow vanished, Professor Adams said, about half a million hectares of forest that acts as a key rainwater catchment at the head of the river would dry out, leading to massive bushfires that would destroy huge areas of mature trees.
New trees would begin growing to replace those burnt out. But, the professor said, growing trees suck up far more water than mature ones. The thirst of the regrowing forest would “sharply reduce” mountain water running into key rivers and dams, including Lake Eucumbene and Lake Jindabyne, for 30 years.

But there might be some good news in Australia’s current drought – according to this piece it might follow a historic pattern in seeing off, finally, the dreadful John Howard, Prime Minister of the 1950s who has somehow held power in Australia for the past decade and done an awful lot to take the country back half a century.

A small, traditionally poor area, the Cinque Terre is being transformed, apparently against the odds.

…so successful is it becoming, that in recent years the residents of Riomaggiore and the other hamlets strung out along the Ligurian coast have been enjoying a lifestyle their predecessors could only have dreamed of.
Courtesy of the National Park, they now receive free natural medicine, massage treatments and health screenings.
There is a free shopping service for elderly residents and subsidised child care for working parents. Cars are banned – replaced by electric buses.
It has become a farming utopia; a place where tourists and others from outside are in the front line of conservation.

The meterologists reckon this year will be even hotter than the world’s last record year:

The scorching predictions for 2007 are due partly to global warming and partly to a moderate El Niño event. … The previous hottest year, 1998, was also a strong El Niño year with a global average temperature of 14.52C. The Met Office is predicting that this year will be 0.02 degrees higher.

That comes with confirmation that 2006 was an all-time record year for Britain, “average temperature of 9.7C – 1.1 degrees celsius above average”.

US environmentalist Edward Abbey: ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’.

Found in a nice piece on Gaian Economics explaining the Green argument against so-called economic growth.

I got into trouble last time I got into this, but nontheless I’m going to applaud a piece in today’s Guardian urging architects to plan to encourage, rather than discourage exercise.

“Using the stairs is not seen as normal,” says Amelia Lake, a research fellow who works with Townshend. “In most [new] buildings it’s very difficult to find a staircase. The focal point when you enter tends to be the lift. In certain buildings, you’ll even find that using the stairs will set off the fire alarm.”

And it provides some stats on the well-known fact of how sprawling suburbs encourage slobbish, car-filled lives.