The changing face of Australia

Weather-wise, Australia has been seeing something of a wet period recently. Normal to above-normal rains have been observed across much of the country over the past several months, with November being particularly wet. There's ongoing flooding in NW Queensland, and the normally dry Lake Eyre may partially fill this year. The NT's Red Centre has turned green. Further, the Bureau of Meteorology's annual climate summary indicates that 2008 was 'only' the 14^th warmest year on record. Does this spell the end of climate change in Australia? Is K-Rudd doing the right thing by setting such a pathetic target for reduction of CO2 emissions in this country?

This is most likely courtesy of the return of quasi-La Nina conditions in the Pacific, after a brief return to neutral Pacific conditions. A strong La Nina affected the weather during late-2007 and early-2008. Historically, La Nina often mean wet periods in Oz, and overall cooler global temperatures as well. This latter point applies to Australia as well.

Globally, the cooler weather has caused most of the contrarians to downplay the reality of climate change. Hopes and wishes are all well and good, but the power of positive thinking won't change this reality; Anthropogenic climate change is not gone, either in Australia or the rest of the world. What we are experiencing is just weather and interannual climate variability -- by definition short-term. The La Nina likely won't make it much past the end of austral summer, and El Nino will be around again soon enough, when we'll likely see new record high mean temperatures, both in Australia and around the globe. This is not the end of anthropogenic climate change.

Regardless of whether one accepts the reality of the above facts or not, the Great CO2 Enhancement Experiment (~40% and rising) we are running on the planet is dangerous -- full of unintended consequences and unforeseen peril. Warming of the mean global climate is serious, but only one of many of our worries. CO2 presents other dangers as well. Below are a few early results from experiment noted of late in Australia and its territories.

• Recent analysis of the long term patterns of coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef are telling. A 400 year record of banding like tree rings on the giant Porites coral reveals a massive decline in the growth history. Since 1990, a decline in the growth rate has been observed. Previously, the record would undulate, now the decline is consistent. Should current trends continue, the growth rate will be zero by 2050. Ocean acidification as much has rising temperatures are believed to be the culprit.

• In Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, a 40 year study has revealed an increases in woody vegetation on the savanna and in the floodplains of the park. Intially, the increase was hypothesized to be a result of feral buffalo (an invasive species). However, this relationship has proven to be weak as after 1985, the buffalo were nearly eliminated from the park while the vegetation structure continued to change. Instead, the researcher speculate that he change may be related to an increased level of atmospheric CO2, increasing rainfall and changing fire regimes during the study period.

• Heard Island, a sub-Antarctic island some 4000 km southwest of Western Australia is showing a rapidly changing landscape. A portion of the land has split from the mainland, effectively forming a new island. This is a result of changing sea level, possibly from rising temperatures (a 1^oC increase over past 50 years, and it's not an urban heat island!) or from other factors like strong ocean swells and winds. Further, a glacier on the island has likely retreated further and anecdotally, the lagoons at the glaciers terminus have increased in size. Analysis and monitoring are underway.

None of the Earth's 'spheres' remains untouched by Our Way of Life. Climate change and other environmental degradation affects the whole population of the Earth and every nation on its face. Australia's self image as the Lucky Country will not spare it any damage, as the above examples attest. Even without a temperature change, the Experiment has detrimental results -- ocean acidification or enhanced plant growth are but two. The effects run deep and climate change is just the obvious manifestation. And there are may well be surprises we haven;t even considered yet to come.

So yes, it is short-sided for Australia to set such a pathetic emissions reduction target. It's time to stop listening to the neoliberal economists; they are clueless and morally bankrupt. Let's lead instead of being led like sheep following the shepherds of greed. Unchecked, the whole experiment – CO2 enhancement, rampant consumerism, overpopulation -- will catch up to everyone in the end. If we act soon, we have a chance to break the bonds and begin a new way of living. If and when the inevitable crash comes, the considerations which are driving this decision now will be meaningless. The businesses will be gone and the economy will be toast. The world is not ours to exploit to the point of exhaustion. We have a moral obligation --to our fellow denizens of biosphere (human or otherwise), both now and into the future -- to leave the world in the state we inherited it. They are our legacy and our immortality, the standards by which we will be judged.

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Image: Bureau of Meteorology

Scenes from a dying Earth?

A nice collection of NASA satellite imagery captured this month over at guardian.co.uk. Typical planet doom? -type material. Worth a look if you're in to that sort of thing!

The image shows the diversion of the Kosi River (India) into an unused channel, a result of heavy monsoon rain further upstream. Floods continue in the region.

Other images in the collection show

• 'concerning' cracks forming in the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, generally symbolic of the rapid, human-induced decline of the Arctic in recent years.

• large wildfires in southern Africa, which have resulted in at least 89 deaths.

• hurricane-affected regions of the Caribbean –Cuba and Haiti have been hit particularly hard several hurricanes. Galveston and the rest of SE Texas have also been heavily affected by Hurricane Ike (Cat 2 at US landfall; 4 in Cuba)).

Snapshots of a dying planet, or just run-of-the-mill climate varibility? These images show nothing definitive, no Cataclysms. Just more datapoints documenting a changing environment, driven by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Only time will tell (and that time may well be soon...).

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In other news, posting is likely to continue to be lite-N-fluffy here for the foreseeable future – lots of meatspace obligations and a touch of burnout. I haven't given up, though...just a bit of a break. The 'collection of found items' in the sidebar will continue to be updated regardless of the level of posting activity.

Whirligig 4: Summer 2008 climate report

Another installment of my occasional Weather Whirligig series. The idea here is to highlight reports of unusual and/or extreme or weather and climate events. Inclusion here is not meant by me to imply a cause-and-effect relationship with climate change. Rather, they are merely data points for future consideration...

It's the depth of (boreal) summer and it's hot.

• The warmest day ever in Reykjavik was recorded on Wednesday[30 July] when the mercury reached 25.7 degrees Celsius...Northern Europe is currently enjoying unusually warm temperatures, with Stockholm in Sweden hovering around 30 degrees Celsius for the past week.

• A major national park in Canada's Arctic has been largely closed after record high temperatures caused flooding that washed away hiking trails and forced the evacuation of tourists...The combination of floods, melting permafrost and erosion means that the southern part of the park will remain shut until geologists can examine the damage...

• CIMSS Satellite Blog notes 03 August 2008 marked the 22nd consecutive day of daily high temperatures of 90º F or higher at Denver, Colorado. The old record was 18 consecutive days, set back in 1874 and 1901. The post also illustrates an example of the effects of land use/cover on temperatures and the local climate.

Drought is often another feature of summer. As this example from Ethiopia shows, the timing of the rain is as equally important as the amount.

The green highlands of West Badawacho in south-west Ethiopia are not a place where you would expect to find hunger. The land is fertile and lush...[However,] the lushness of the land masks a near total crop failure across the district...[T]he poor harvests of 2007 and the repeated failure of the crucial March-May rains have spelled disaster.

In recent weeks the rain has arrived but it is too late. While the countryside is transformed into a sea of green, 50% of farmland lies uncultivated. So many livestock died in the recent drought that farmers are struggling to plant maize by hand. For those who have managed to get a crop down, it won't be harvested until September, and then production is expected to be low.

And with heat and drought comes wildfire...

• High levels of fire activity have continued to plague northern California. The Telegraph fire -- near Yosemite National Park -- has burnt ~34 000 acres and is 60% contained. 22 homes have burnt and 33 firefighters have been injured battling the blaze. Suppression costs have run to $24m.

• A wildfire in Turkey (Antalya province) has been burning for five days. One person has died and another is missing... It has also killed livestock and destroyed 60 houses, a school, a mosque, and dozens of farm buildings...4 000 ha of woodland has been burnt.

• Burning season has begun on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. This deliberate burning for agricultural land clearance is producing a worsening haze that has cut visibility in the busy Malacca strait to below 5 km. Officials fear the number of hot spots could exceed last year's record as the current dry season will be marked by less rain than usual (an impact of the nascent Indian Ocean Dipole, perhaps?).

Finally, there is this from Texas, rarely content to be second-best* at anything: Texas plagued by heat, drought, water parasite, wildfire. Sadly, three have died during the current heat wave, which looks set to continue for the foresee-able future...

The 'good news' of the season is that the polar ice cap isn't going to completely melt away this summer (but it is getting thinner). Not as low as last year, but likely 2nd or 3rd lowest.

Are these events a harbinger of climate instability or merely 'normal' weather? What has to happen to answer this question? to change minds? to act?

*They've had to learn to accept that Alaska thing...

Get on up and testify!

A funky rhythm begins, soon punctuated by a staccato horn section...ba-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH! A figure (right) steps up to the mike:

Brethren, we are gathered here today to hear about a New Thang...Papa's brand new bag!...called climate change. Is it happening? Is it real? Just listen to this 80-year-old farmer as he watches a (much needed) hard rain fall in Queensland. Say it, brother!

I thought I knew something about the weather, but now I'm not so sure.

I had some criteria that I lived by for a lifetime and none of them now with this global warming are worth talking about, they're non-existent.

Normally we get rain in March, April and then some in June, well that didn't happen.

Good Lawd!! The weather's gettin' funky...Just listen to this farmer from Wisconsin tell of the wild weather over the last year! Testify!

The weather turned against us in May of last year. We had a nice rain on Mother's Day, then for nearly three months we watched the pastures dry up, the corn shrivel, and the dust blow...In early August, the rains returned to Southwestern Wisconsin, in some places nearly 20 inches in a week's time...

Unh!

The cows were on good pasture until early December when the snows started and never seemed to let up. Over 100 inches of snow fell from December through April...The snow melted slowly and...we waited for the warm winds of spring. And we waited.

Yeeeoww!

It was an abnormally cool spring and a wet one. Some of the early planted corn didn't come up or came up yellow and stunted. We plant our corn late...Then on June 7-8, we got another hundred-year rain: 10 inches in 36 hours. Flooding was worse than last August.

Help me! -- But tell me, isn't it still Man's World? Don't we still run the show? What have we done wrong? Let's hear from this Maldivian government minister:

Why have the warnings of the past 20 years gone unheeded?

Why does mankind continue to pursue manifestly unsustainable economic growth strategies at the expense of the global ecosphere?"...[H]ow can we change the global debate on climate change? And how can we move the world from an attitude of self-indulgent negligence to one of shared responsibility and global solidarity?

The world has failed to humanise climate change.

Oh Lawd have mercy! Lawd have mercy! ...Fred, let me tell ya something...I don't feel good...Can we just hit it and quit?

As the band groovingly ad-libs along, the disembodied voice of the last witness chides:

...attitude of self-indulgent negligence...

...shared responsibility...global solidarity...

The world has failed to humanise climate change.

Hit it!

ba-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH!

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Image: James Brown in the Blues Brothers, via Google Image. I added the caption.

Africa and the realities of climate change

"There’s a very academic discussion happening in Europe right now still asking 'is the climate already changing' and 'is climate change noticeable today'. Here in Burkina Faso that debate is not happening, because the effects already speak for themselves.”

So begins the diary of the UN Secretary General's Special Advisor on conflict, Jan Egeland, who is traveling through the Sahel this week to draw attention to a region the UN believes is experiencing the worse effects of climate change in the world today. I have previously offered the idea that Africa today provides a living model for a post-Collapse future: grinding poverty coupled with environmental degradation, food insecurity, endemic warfare and disease. A possible future should our environmental concerns remain unchecked.

Large swathes of northern Africa are currently undergoing drought, from the Horn of Africa in the East to the Sahel region in the west. Up to six million children are endangered in Ethiopia from the drought. UNICEF notes, "Widespread drought, poor rainy seasons, heavy loss of livestock, limited food supply and soaring prices of food, fuel and fertilizer linked to the global food crisis are contributing to the troubled outlook for children in Ethiopia."

Despite the drought in this region, this news item notes “Twenty-five people have died and over 200 displaced following yesterday's flooding in Jijiga town, Somali State southeastern Ethiopia according to the residents.” (The article diverts from the main topic and describes the history of the region and the massive military presence in the area...).

Similar weather patterns have been noted of late in western Africa, specifically in Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. Egeland's diary notes:

"Climate change in Burkina Faso does not mean there is less rain, it means that rainfall has got less predictable. And weather overall has become much more extreme in the way it comes – the heat, the cold, and the peaks and troughs of rainfall.

"People cannot predict when rain will come. And then when it does, it falls in buckets. Last year in Burkina Faso, there were eight rainfalls over 150mm – that means eight major floods in one four month period.

"The alternative to floods is basically no rainfall – it’s all or nothing, and either way is a crisis for some of the poorest people on earth, in ways that are just completely unpredictable.

These impacts now being seen in Africa (and elsewhere) are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. This is the reality of climate change. The warming to date has been relatively modest. What happens as the warming continues to grow larger and the effects become more pronounced?

A particularly sad fact is that it is not Africa's fault. Egeland again:

"...[T]he average citizen in Burkina Faso is emitting 0.38 tonnes of CO2 every year. While the Chinese emit 10 times more, the British 30 times more and the Americans 75 times more per capita...

"It just proves this enormous moral issue that those who contributed nothing to climate change are bearing the brunt of the changes it is causing, whereas we who caused it all have gotten away with it – the north is getting away with murder basically.

And all for the benefit of our corporate masters, who continue to prevent any meaningful action to be taken to rectify the problem. As the US struggles to pass a semi-meaningful emissions control bill, the coal industry continues to manufacture doubt, treating telly viewers to “visions of a dystopian future where Americans are forced to cook their breakfast over candles, or where thousands of jobs have been lost because of what one opponent called 'economic disarmament' by the US.”

At least we in the Global North have breakfast, while many in the world, particularly Africans, have never even been given a fair chance to become 'economically armed' in the first place. If you are looking for dystopia, turn your eyes towards Africa. There lies our future too, unless we begin to take meaningful action to stop climate change and other environmental degradation now.

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Image: WorldChanging

Myanmar flooding from cyclone Nargis

Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar (Burma) on 2 May 2008. Current NASA MODIS imagery and news reports indicate that this cyclone is an emerging humanitarian disaster.

From an informative Terra Daily news item:

At least 351 people were killed and nearly 100,000 left homeless when tropical cyclone Nargis tore through Myanmar, razing thousands of buildings and knocking out power lines, state media said Sunday.

The meteorological stats of the storm, as gleaned from the news item above...

Nargis made landfall late Friday around the mouth of the Ayeyawaddy (Irrawaddy) river, about 220 kilometres (137 miles) southwest of Yangon, before hitting the country's economic hub...

Electricity supplies and telecommunications in Yangon have been cut since late Friday night as the storm bore down from the Bay of Bengal, packing winds of 190-240 kilometres (120-150 miles) per hour.

These stats put it at the borderline Cat-3/Cat-4, suggesting a storm surge of ~4 m.

The image is a before-and-after comparison of the Ayeyawaddy province of Myanmar.Spatial dimensions of the images are 400x225 km. Yangon (nee Rangoon) is towards the upper right corner. The picture is a false-color image, comprised of visible and short-IR channels. Water appears black here; sediments in the water are dark blue (see here for description). The top panel is from 26 April; the bottom from 5 May, three days after the storm. Judging from the imagery, the area is largely low-lying river delta.

With the aid of this satellite image with the track superimposed, the storm presumably came ashore in the lower left of the image, near the large river. Comparison of the two images suggest the storm surge has been quite extensive. A swath of water is apparent across the peninsula (the storm track, perhaps?). Extended regions of the delta system are underwater –- new islands have formed off the new coastline, albeit temporarily.

The water over the former land is a deep blue hue, suggesting lots of erosion and silt transport out to sea.

Careful examination (and guesswork on the navigation!) indicate that the flood waters are very close to Yangon, as well. This is consistent with this statement (from the above news article): “There are also fears that the poorer outlying areas of Yangon, with their flimsy houses, might have been hard hit.”

An as-I-write post at The Intersection is indicating that up to 10 000 may be dead, and the normally reclusive government is appealing for international aid. These rare appeals, supported by the remote sensing data, would suggest that indeed they were hard hit.

Addendum: From Dr Jeff Masters' WunderBlog:

The storm hit the coast of Myanmar Friday night as borderline Category 3/Category 4 cyclone, with winds of 130-135 mph. After passing over the low-lying and densely populated Irrawaddy River delta region, Nargis made a direct hit on the capital city of Rangoon (Yangon), as a Category 1 storm with top winds of 80 mph...

However, it was the storm surge, not the winds, that was the big killer in Nargis. The storm tracked over the low-lying Irrawaddy River delta region, which is highly vulnerable to storm surge deaths due to its low elevation, dense population, and limited hurricane awareness of the people. I could find no records of a major tropical cyclone ever making a direct hit on the Irrawaddy River delta.

Again, as suggested by the imagery.

Addendum 2: Here is the official NASA Natural Hazards version of the picture above. They use a different 'before' picture, and their fancy image processing software and GIS make their image a bit crisper. Here is a MODIS true-color image of the cyclone at landfall.

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Image: compiled by me, from raw material collected at NASA MODIS Rapid Response

Australian stories

A few items of planet doom?-type interest from Down Under. Noted here are the extraordinary heat plaguing the southeast, new measurements documenting a slowdown in growth of the Great Barrier Reef and a follow-up on an ethically questionable appropriation in weather modification research.

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Late summer and early autumn have brought scorching heat to SE Australia. Adelaide has been particularly hard hit, with (as of Friday) 12 days in a row with maximum temperatures above 35 C. The trend is forecast to continue through Tuesday, four days hence. If this verifies, that would make 16 days. The previous record for Adelaide, set in 1934, is 8 days. Tasmania recorded its hottest march day in 68 years. Northwest VIC also recorded an extended run of hot weather during this period as well. Tasmania also beat or tied record highs for March, with 37+ C seen in Hobart. Interestingly, February 2008 was one of Tassie's coolest on record.

As noted previously, several other occurrences of extended heat have been observed this summer. Perth and WA have sweltered. Tennant Creek had an extended heatwave, with 19 consecutive days with a maximum temperature above 40 C.

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That coral reefs are in danger from climate change has been noted previously. According to IPCC, a “significant loss of biodiversity” is projected to occur by 2020 on the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, the degradation of the reef is becoming quantifiable; warming of the Coral Sea has slowed reef growth over the past 16 years.

Worrying signs that warmer seawater combined with a possible change in the ocean’s acid balance may be curtailing the growth of an important reef-building coral species have been documented by a research team from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville.

The paper, published in the journal Global Change Biology, points to a 21 per cent decline in the rate at which Porites corals in two regions of the northern Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have added to their calcium carbonate skeletons over the past 16 years.

The relative contributions of ocean acidification and global warming to the observed decline cannot be fully determined at this time. Not enough is known about the chemistry of the reef and more needs to be done to understand all the implications of the increase in carbon dioxide entering the oceans and to put these preliminary coral growth data into context.

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In an earlier post, I discussed the “bamboozle-ment” of the Australian people through a dodgy ionisation rain enhancement scheme orchestrated by Malcolm Turnbill. The project seems (to me) to be more of a payoff to campaign donors than a serious scientific program and I hoped for further investigation by the new government. Such an investigation has occurred. The timing is still a bit questionable and the amount is five times larger than recommended by his department. But it's okay because “...those conducting the trial, the University of Queensland, wanted $50 million.” Mr. Turnbill says,

"The National Water Commission was more sceptical and they didn't want to have a trial at all - some tests of the scientific theory which would have cost about $2 million,"

"I decided that what we should do is have a thorough trial in one location in south-east Queensland at $10 million, which was one-fifth of what the University of Queensland was recommending."

I think he should have listened to the National Water Commission...I suppose nothing will really come of this in the end. Business as usual...

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And so it goes. We're beginning to experience our future climates now – earlier springs, extended summers, lengthy runs of hot weather. Such events will only grow more frequent in the future; the Whirligig spins faster and faster. The final decline of the Reef is beginning. Go see it while there is still time. Governments play economic shell games while the environmental crises looms larger. The crises we face are largely the result of market failure – a failure of the dominant economic system to value environmental concerns. You want to have hope, but despair can easily come. Lovelock's 'enjoy life while you can'...for tomorrow you die attitude is a tempting lure. Doing nothing is easy; instead we must say 'Zero, Now' and take account of ourselves and our actions. It is the only way forward.

Weather whirligig 3

Another spin on the Weather Whirligig. This is an occasional series where the idea here is to note extreme or unusual weather events that occur globally. As usual, inclusion here is not meant to imply some sort of direct cause-and-effect with climate change. Individual weather events cannot be attributed to climate change.

Europe has seen some unusual weather during February. The UK saw periods of icy cold interspersed with near-record high temperatures. Many spring flowers there bloomed early, only to be thwarted by the cold. Further south in Greece, Athens received a rare 10-15 cm of snow resulting in school closures and transport disruption. A strong windstorm -- so-called Hurricane Emma – roared through central Europe in early March, killing 9 people. This wasn't a tropical cyclone, rather a deep mid-latitude cyclone (<970 hPa).

Madagascar was affected by a tropical cyclone (Ivan). At least 60 have been a killed as a result of the storm. From the story (my emphasis)

Ivan, one of the biggest cyclones ever to hit Madagascar, was packing winds that topped 125 mph (200 kph) when it swept onto the giant Indian Ocean island's east coast early last week.

In a particularly strange event, torrential rain and floods have left 16 dead in Peru. This has apparently been ongoing since January. Here is the strange part:

The La Nina weather phenomenon, characterized by cooler than normal sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, has been blamed for exacerbating rainy seasons in the Andes region this year.

This is nearly unprecedented. Rainy weather over South America is expected during the El Nino phase. La Nina brings cooler than normal sea temperatures to the Eastern Pacific. Something unexpected is certainly going on. Ocean temperatures have only recently returned to normal in the region as the La Nina begins to decay

Finally, several anomalous wildfires have been noted around the globe.

• From the Firefighter Blog, an early start to the fire season has been noted in Oklahoma and Texas. In Texas, the fires may have reached 500 000 acres in size.

• In Africa, about a third of one of Kenya's most popular wildlife parks have been ravaged in a multi-day fire event. The fire was started accidentally. Much of the wildlife has been spared. [more photos here]
  

• A wildfire also destroyed 7400 acres of forest in the Patagonia region of Argentina. 1000-year old trees in a nearby national park were not threatened. The fire was initially started by arsonists, but was driven by strong winds combined with unusually hot, dry weather conditions.

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Image: Spiegel Online International

Weather Whirligig 2

Another edition of the Weather Whirligig. As before, the basic idea of these posts is to note the occurrence of unusual or extreme weather events. Since the last post, there have been a few more weather events to report on; some are eerily similar to before.

• China remains gripped by extreme winter weather. Freezing weather and heavy snowfalls have disrupted millions in China over a major holiday period. Further, the weather has damaged crops. Heavy snowfall was reported around the globe in the North. It is the middle of winter there, so we shouldn't be too surprised.

• More surprising is the tornado outbreak in the southern US which killed at least 50 people across 4 states. “Strange” winter tornadoes are all the rage this year.

• While winter marches on, the UK (maybe more?) should get ready for an early start to spring., according to Woodland Trust research. This consistent an apparent trend towards earlier spring since 1970, particularly noticeable over the past few years. (OK, so it's not an event, but a forecast...and it's not weather, but ecology/climate...Interesting nonetheless)

• Meanwhile, large portions of Australia have endured the hottest January on record. Tennant Creek, NT broke a record with 19 consecutive days above 40C. Perth has experienced a long hot summer, along with the rest of WA. In the Pilbara, temperatures were in the upper 40s (49+ in some cases) earlier in January (sorry, no link...).

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Image: EO Natural Hazards

Weather Whirligig 1

This is the first in what will be an informal series of posts with the aim of providing quasi-periodic updates of the unusual weather which (seemingly) occurs with ever-increasing frequency. The posts will be somewhat 'bare-boned', a simple record of unusual, high-impact and/or disastrous weather events provided for future reference. My commentary will be minimal in these posts. I will aim for a weekly/fortnightly time scale.

I am not trying to make any claim that any particular event included is a response to climate change. Rather, I think the record will speak for itself. A log of events such as this will help to ascertain the validity of such claims. Agencies such as the Red Cross and Munich Re are already making such claim. I have made them myself.

• Seasonal Floods begin early in Southern Africa – EO Natural Hazards

By February or March during the typical rainy season [in southern Africa], the intense rain puddles on the saturated ground and pushes brimming rivers, reservoirs, and lakes over their banks. In 2008, the floods began in January. These floods killed 6 people in Mozambique and are the worst since 2000-1. Image above is a before/after set from these floods.

• Heavy rains flood drought-hit Australian farmers – Reuters

Heavy rains and flooding in northeast Australia have been both a blessing and a curse for drought-hit farmers, but more rain is needed to break a seven-year drought. The floods are continuing in central Queensland (two weeks after this story initially ran), as remnants of a tropical cyclone moved southward over the continent. The flooding and heavy rain in eastern Australia are historically associated with mature La Nina conditions similar to those being currently observed.

• Mideast cold snap causes deaths, crop damage – ABC News (Australia)

There have been a number of deaths and considerable damage to crops in the Middle East as temperatures in the region fall to exceptional lows...In Syria, temperatures have dropped to minus 16 degrees Celsius [and t]here has been widespread damage to crops in Syria, Jordan and Israel.

• Heavy snow in China causes deaths and damage – Reuters

Cold weather and heavy snow have struck unusually large swathes of central and eastern China, causing fatal accidents, bringing down power lines and destroying crops.

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Image: EO Natural Hazards

Nice weather we're having...

Just a few reports of some of the more interesting weather observed recently.

• Snow in Baghdad -- Snow has fallen in Baghdad for the first time in memory, and delighted residents are declaring it an omen of peace.

• Winter Tornadoes –- Tornadoes were reported or suspected Monday [7 Jan 08] in southwest Missouri, southeastern Wisconsin, Arkansas , Illinois, and Oklahoma. Two people were killed in Missouri.

• Latin America Natural Disasters -- There were the rains in November that left most of the southern Mexican state of Tabasco under water for weeks, including large parts of the city of Villahermosa. In October, Tropical Storm Noel triggered flash floods in the Dominican Republic that killed dozens. In September, Honduras faced the category five Hurricane Felix, just as Jamaica and Belize had been battered by the similarly strong Hurricane Dean the month before.

This is just a smattering of extreme weather events being observed around the globe on a regular basis. It's not hard to discover just how unusual 2007 was weather-wise. The news is full of severe droughts, record high temperatures and the like.

Such events are no longer unusual, they are the new normal. But if you attribute these events to climate change, you get accused of being alarmist; an “availability entrepreneur”. True, you can't ascribe any single event to climate change...But how widespread and how often do such events have to occur before we accept the reality of our situation? The re-insurers already know the truth and are taking it into account. To wit (emphasis added):

"The figures confirm our expectations," said Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek. "The trend in respect of weather extremes shows that climate change is already taking effect and that more such extremes are to be expected in the future."

"We should not be misled by the absence of megacatastrophes in 2007," he added in the report.

When big business truly gets involved, things may actually begin to change. Still, given the amount of greenwashing out there, and the general tepidness of the Bali agreement, we have a long way to go before any real progress is made, cheery outlooks notwithstanding.

But hey, maybe things are about to change for the better because snow in Iraq is awfully close to Hell freezing over...

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Image from NASA MODIS Rapid Response Realtime Archive