posted January 17, 2014 11:28 AM            

Blazing temperatures have hit athletes and fans at the Australian Open in Melbourne, in what forecasters said could be the hottest stretch of weather in a century for the city. So what's causing the inferno?

"Almost all heat waves form due to unusually strong areas of high pressure at high altitudes — or a so-called ridge in the jet stream," said Jason Samenow, weather editor at The Washington Post. "This one is no different." [The 9 Hottest Places on Earth]

Samenow said the heat wave is already Australia's second this year, following record heat earlier in January. The country had its hottest year on record in 2013.

Beware of bushfires

Authorities have issued bushfire warnings for much of the southern part of the continent, calling it the worst fire danger since "Black Saturday" in 2009, when a firestorm in Victoria state killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

"The forecast weather patterns are quite reminiscent of conditions before Black Saturday, with severe and expansive high temperatures across the southern part of the continent and the presence of low pressure cells on either side of the country in the tropics," bushfire specialist Jason Sharples of the University of New South Wales in Canberra told Agence France-Presse. Due to the high temperatures and low relative-humidity, the vegetation will be very dry, so a bushfire would spread more quickly than usual, Sharples added.

Heat and wildfires are common during December through February (Australian summer), but the heat is unusual this year. That's because the El Nino — a band of unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific — is supposed to be in a neutral period. When it's active, El Nino tends to bring hot, dry conditions to Australia, so seeing them during the neutral period is surprising.

Climate change to blame?

Debate exists over whether climate change has played a role in this or other extreme heat waves in recent years.

James Hansen, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, co-authored a report in 2012 that made a close connection between climate change and the increasing occurrence of heat waves since 2000. Hansen's team wrote, "It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small."

Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., on the other hand, says that climate change has not affected the frequency of heat waves, which are part of normal weather patterns. However the maximum temperatures of those heat waves have increased as average global temperatures have risen over the past century or so.

"There is no evidence that the patterns are becoming more energetic or more frequent. It's simply that when those weather patterns occur, they now occur in a warmer climate," Hoerling told LiveScience.

The features of the atmosphere that drive large-scale air currents related to heat waves are seated deep in the atmosphere, Hoerling said. The warming planet's current warming is occurring lower down in the atmosphere, and therefore has not yet deeply affected the atmospheric patterns that drive large-scale weather and climate patterns.

posted January 17, 2014 11:28 AM            

quote:

---

Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., on the other hand, says that climate change has not affected the frequency of heat waves, which are part of normal weather patterns.

"There is no evidence that the patterns are becoming more energetic or more frequent. It's simply that when those weather patterns occur, they now occur in a warmer climate," Hoerling told LiveScience.

The features of the atmosphere that drive large-scale air currents related to heat waves are seated deep in the atmosphere, Hoerling said. The warming planet's current warming is occurring lower down in the atmosphere, and therefore has not yet deeply affected the atmospheric patterns that drive large-scale weather and climate patterns.

---

posted January 17, 2014 07:32 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by AcousticGod:
He didn't come across as an "alarmist" to me. He came across as a diligent proponent of rationally assessing the available information. I was pleasantly surprised my his mentions of people's psychological anchoring. Here's not just a man that wants to follow the information strictly, but is also aware of the cognitive failures people have in assessing the climate.

---

------------------
Want To Ask Any Question About Bible Prophecy? Go For it. It is Free, of course.

posted January 17, 2014 08:12 PM            

Two goats butting heads !

posted January 17, 2014 09:09 PM            

On the morning of Jan. 9, residents complained about a licorice-like odor wafting from the site, operated by a chemical company with the unlikely name of Freedom Industries. When state inspectors arrived to investigate, they discovered that one of the tanks had ruptured and dumped the little-known chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, known as MCHM, into the river.

The inspectors also discovered something else: Freedom Industries had not taken action to stop the leak or report it to authorities, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. As it turned out, there are virtually no regulations governing inspection and maintenance of the storage tanks.

or this
http://www.thenation.com/article/174155/fracking-ourselves-death-pennsylvania

Sixty percent of Pennsylvania lies over a huge shale sprawl called the Marcellus, and that has been in the fracking industry’s sights since 2008. The corporations that are exploiting the shale come to the state with lavish federal entitlements: exemptions from the Clean Air, Clean Water and Clean Drinking Water Acts, as well as the Superfund Act, which requires cleanup of hazardous substances. The industry doesn’t have to call its trillions of gallons of annual waste “hazardous.” Instead, it uses euphemisms like “residual waste.” In addition, fracking companies are allowed to keep secret many of the chemicals they use

or how about this
http://grist.org/news/nuclear-waste-leaking-at-hanford-site-in-washington-again/
A tank storing radioactive waste at America’s most contaminated nuclear site appears to have sprung a leak, leaching yet more cancer-causing isotopes into soil some five miles from the Columbia River in Washington state.The Hanford site produced plutonium that was used to manufacture the bomb that blew up Hiroshima. Now it’s home to a different kind of horror: It’s used to store nuclear waste while a plant is built on site to treat that waste. But the Department of Energy treatment plant project has been plagued by delays, and tanks that were designed to hold the waste temporarily keep falling apart.

posted January 17, 2014 10:21 PM            

Hanford is just a few miles from the Columbia river. If it gets contaminated the farms and businesses for hundreds of miles around...belly up and local residents health and wealth too. Washington, the apple capital of the world...

And be it warming or ice age or just increasing earthquake action from fracking, bye bye all those businesses and huge portions of America.

France just banned fracking as has, i believe, Dallas! It doesn't matter what sealevels if all our potable water is destroyed.

In Canada huge numbers of books on environmental subjectd are being BURNED by the lovely "conservative" Harper, and the last vestiges of First Nations rights and lands thrown out the window.