Heat!

It is hot! Today the temperature is 37 degrees Celsius here in Melton West. Walking outside is like opening an oven door. It is supposed to be Autumn here in Victoria, and I can’t remember the last time we had decent rainfall.

I got up at 0600 this morning, knowing that it would be hot. Working in the morning, before the Sun rises, seems like the only solution. I gave all the remaining vegetables a good soak from the rainwater tank so that they would survive the extremes of the day. I also watered all the pot plants around the outside of the house as they would have died as well. The rainwater tank is now half full and as I use about 150 litres every time I water, that means that I only have 6.66 days of water remaining! Not a good situation to be in.

I worked until about 0800, then came inside. The temperature outside was 25 degrees even at that early hour. All I can say is thank goodness for great insulation in our house. We have taken some pretty drastic measures to keep cool today without consuming vast amounts of electricity. All the outside doors are closed, as are the windows. The vertical blinds are drawn and closed and Kim has put on selected ceiling fans in the main rooms. We have all of the PC’s turned off to reduce heat generation, and are only using laptops where needed. There will be no cooking inside tonight and we are having a BBQ out near the swimming pool, and are hoping that the expected cool change should arrive at about 1900. Lets hope so or I will be cooking the barby in the pool! So with all these measures it is a cool 26 degrees inside without air conditioning. Pretty good I reckon.

As we have a public holiday today, I was going to begin to prepare one of the garden beds for my winter crop of root vegetables. Well, that plan has now been delayed until next weekend as any
seedlings I would have planted today would not have survived until dinner time! It will be all hands on deck over the Easter holidays to get the crop in. I am sure the girls and Ben will help me out. Hopefully we will have cooler weather!

This type of extreme heat just presses home to me that all global citizens need to act now to avert catastrophic climate change. Imagine if this sort of heat became the normal weather pattern. However, I am sure that most people would simply turn on their split system air conditioners and cool down, without giving it a second thought. I can guarantee that all of Victoria’s Brown Coal fired power stations are in overdrive just to keep up with the demand of all those air conditioned homes. I can just visualize all of the tonnes of CO2 leaving each smoke stack right now.

This is the main reason why Australia needs to move to renewable energy sources as fast as we can. We are currently in an ever spiraling road to disaster with our present power generating methods. As I mentioned in my previous post on Peak Oil, I am sure that there must be a peak for coal as well.

Our Federal Government has set a target for reduction of GHG of 20% by 2020. I hope we last that long!