How do you feel about dams?
I can't answer a question as broad as that. Which dams? But I can usefully mention a couple of things: the most important of these is that there is really no room left for dam building. Name me a river in inland or western Victoria (i.e., the part of the world I live in) that hasn't already been dammed. Well, actually there are a few: the Avoca River, the Richardson, and the Avon - the three main rivers of the country west of Bendigo and east of Horsham. No dams on those three. Ummm... most of the time there is no water in them either, but why should that stop us? Oh, and I forgot to mention that the water is too saline to irrigate with anyway, though you can water stock with it.
What about the rivers next along? Well, there is the Wimmera River, that's not exactly dammed, it has weirs all along it, but then it doesn't have much water ether, and stops flowing every summer. Most of the water in it, if I remember correctly, is actually diverted out of the Upper Glenelg; i.e., water that is supposed to flow south - the Great Divide, once you get west of the Grampians, is more of an idea than a watershed. Oh, and some of its tributaties are dammed and blocked to within an inch of their lives - I'm thinking of Fyans Creek that flows north through Halls Gap now.
The Loddon? (Next river east of the Avoca - flows north from near Dalesford but, like the Avoca, rarely reaches as far north as the Murray.) It's dammed to hell. The Loddon Catchment storages are generous, but the water available is not - so much so that the relevant authority has no plans to do anything about some severe siltation problems in one of them - yup, the dam is almost useless as a water storage now because it's full of mud, but there isn't enough water to fill it up, so why spend the money to dredge it?
The Campaspe (next again to the east) is the same as the Loddon: plenty of storages, not enough water to fill them up, and similarly the countryside roundabout is riddled with channels and irrigation systems, and the productivity of the land is steadily dropping as the long-term effects of irrigation take hold - above all else, salinity. This is, of course, the same process that destroyed the Fertile Cresent thousands upon thousands of years ago: clearing leads to cropping leads to soil exhaustion leads to irrigation leads to salinity leads to wasteland leads to clearing leads to more wasteland and eventually - it doesn't take very long - you wind up with desert. The Fertile Crescent, the place where civilisation began, the place that was humanity's true Garden of Eden, was the most productive place on earth and supported the highest population densities ever known until then. The most productive place on earth .... and within a few hundreds of years they were well on the way to making it into what it is today: a desert. (You know the desert on the borders of Israel, Turkey, Afganistan and Iraq? That's it. Hard to believe when you look at it today, but there is no doubt about it: there are ruins and written records all over the place, and now there is nothing left except the ruins and the wind blowing the sand around.)
Oh, and the place that many ignorant modern people call the fertile crescent, quite incorrectly. This is the Tigris - Euphrates Delta: a large area of swampy land most famous for being fought over during the Iraq - Iran war and for being the scene of Sadam's massacre of the Marsh Arabs. The thing is, this place wasn't even there 10,000 years ago when people were busy founding civilisation in the higher reaches of the twin river valleys: it was just another part of the Red Sea. Get yourself a map: you can see where the delta sticks out into the Red Sea. It's new. It's anthropogenic. It's all that remains of the actual Fertile Crescent: the entire structure consists of the once fertile topsoil of the country upstream: that vast area, once denuded of its natural tree cover and farmed and ploughed and irrigated, washed down the rivers into the sea. A little bit of it pokes up above the waves and still grows crops.
The Goulburn: bigggest river in Victoria, and the unheathiest. Lake Eildon hasn't been full since .... er .... 20 years? Can't remember. A long time. The countryside has worse problems with salinity than the country further west that I just wrote about.
OK, let's try south of the divide. There is the Moorabool - officially rated as the most flow-stressed river in Victoria. It is the main source of water supply for Ballarat and a key minor source for Geelong. But the morons running this state have just decided to double Ballarat's population! Where on earth do they think the water is coming from? The answer is not more water - there isn't any more water - it's less people.
Then there is the Yarrowee / Leigh (it changes name half-way down to its junction with the Barwon). It has all its useful water extracted high upstream above Ballarat, then trickles through the town, gathering extra flow from its many tributaries (the same ones that deposited all that gold that made the town famous in 1861), all of it polluted by city runoff. It's still a tiny trickle until it hits the major source of water for the major length of the river: the Ballarat sewage works. Yup: 10% of the Yarrowee's water is what you and I pissed out yesterday, and in summer that percentage rises to nearly 100%. And even this they are planning to take away from it, under the guise of "recycling".
Finally, the Woady Yaloak River, the poor little land-locked orphan river that flows south but never reaches the sea. No one has bothered damming the Woady - it's too small to bother.
Dams?
Sure. Build lots of them. Be sure to remember to bring your own water, because there isn't any in the rivers.
As for why I write that, I have seen lots of scientific research that indicates (in some cases quite strongly) global warming exists. I have seen nothing reputable that proves it. Most scientists I have spoken to, or seen quoted in reputable journals, say that the evidence points to a warming trend and the theory of global warming is the most likely cause. Ask them off the record, and they will say "yes, it's happening." But the scientific method (ingrained in me) says that until it is proven, it remains a theory.
