ABC _ Canberra has experienced its coldest winter daytime temperatures in 10 years. Daytime temperatures averaged 12.6 degrees while overnight minimums averaged 2 degrees. Meteorologist Brett Dutschke says excessive cloud cover over the past three months did not allow many nights to become cold or days to warm up. Winter has also been wetter than average for the first time in five years, with a total of 130 millimetres recorded. Read Article
Sydney Morning Herald – Adelaide has shivered thought the chilliest winter in 13 years. The South Australian city experienced the coldest winter since 1997, the longest run of cold nights since 1982 and the wettest winter in five years, The Weather Channel says. Read Article
ScienceDaily – The ozone layer, which protects humans, plants, and animals from potentially damaging ultraviolet (UV) light from the Sun, develops a hole above Antarctica in September that typically lasts until early December. However, in November 2009, that hole shifted its position, leaving the southern tip of South America exposed to UV light at levels much greater than normal -Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Last month was the coldest August for 17 years, recording the chilliest average temperatures since 1993 without a single “hot day”, figures show. Read Article
Herald Sun – NSW shivered through its coldest winter in 12 years, while daytime temperatures in August hit their lowest since 1990. NSW experienced average daytime temperatures of 15.9C, making it the coldest winter since 1998 and the 16th nippiest winter on record. Climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), Shannon Symons says widespread rainfall also resulted in the wettest winter since 2005. Read Article
BBC-The UN’s climate science body needs stricter checks to prevent damage to the organisation’s credibility, an independent review has concluded. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has faced mounting pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007. The review said guidelines were needed to ensure IPCC leaders were not seen as advocating specific climate policies -Read Article
Nature-With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins -Read Article
BBC-Fresh flooding in southern Pakistan has displaced almost a million people in the past 48 hours, the UN has said. In Sindh province, 70% of the 300,000 residents of the town of Thatta have been forced to flee to safer areas after the Indus river burst its banks. A UN spokeswoman said teams in the south were working around the clock. Further north, floodwaters are starting to recede, revealing the full extent of the damage caused by the disaster that has affected some 17 million people -Read Article
NPR-About 800,000 people have been cut off by floods in Pakistan and are reachable only by air, the United Nations said Tuesday, adding it needs at least 40 more helicopters to ferry lifesaving aid to increasingly desperate people. The appeal was an indication of the massive problems facing the relief effort in Pakistan more than three weeks after the floods hit the country, affecting more than 17 million people and raising concerns about possible social unrest and political instability -Read Article
New Scientist-Almost all the technologies for geoengineering our way out of climate change fail a key test: they can’t stop the sea from rising and swamping low-lying countries. “You can’t slap the brakes on sea levels now,” says John Moore of Beijing Normal University in China. “There’s too much inertia in the system.” Moore and colleagues modelled the effects of deploying five different geoengineering techniques during the 21st century, and combined each one with three scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions: continuing to grow at current rates, cutting back dramatically, or cutting only slightly -Read Article
Reuters- Poor farming practices, lack of water management, deforestation and climate change are turning vast stretches of the Earth into barren deserts, the United Nations said on Monday. Launching a 10-year campaign to halt the advance of deserts, the U.N. environment programme (UNEP) said land degradation in dry places had affected 3.6 billion hectares (8.9 billion acres) — a quarter of the world’s land area — and a billion people -Read Article
Our recent editorial on the real moral debate that is not being discussed around the theory of Anthropogenic Climate Change has been re-published on Australia’s premier e-journal, Online Opinion.
CLICK HERE to read the article and also please do leave comments (hopefully positive) on the comments forum too
BBC- More than 50,000 people have been moved from their homes in northern China after heavy rain caused the Yalu river to burst its banks. Some 200 houses have been destroyed in the city of Dandong, and three people are reported missing, state media says. Flooding has also been reported across the border in North Korea, with the city of Sinuiju severely affected -Read Article
Nature-Marathon flights test models with first pole-to-pole snapshot of trace gases. If only they could cash in the air miles. By flying nearly 50,000 kilometres between the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic coast and repeatedly sampling the air at a broad range of altitudes, scientists are building the most detailed profile of the atmosphere yet -Read Article
Rferl-As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries. In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.” -Read Article
Dailymail-Taxes to pay for contentious climate change policies are set to treble over the next decade, soaring to more than £16billion a year. The hike is the equivalent of 4p on the current rate of income tax, a report from think tank Policy Exchange claimed. By 2020 the tax take from green levies will be roughly equivalent to total public spending in England on both the police and fire services, the figures show -Read Article
Voa News-Heat waves, droughts and floods have been wreaking havoc across the globe in recent weeks, and now scientists say a 250 square kilometer island of ice has broken off from a glacier in Greenland. Some are blaming this huge chunk of ice on global warming, while others say such breaks in the Arctic ice are a normal occurrence -Read Article
The Guardian-Two weeks into the worst natural disaster in its history, Pakistan is braced for further flooding as waters in the upper reaches of the swollen Indus river reach critical levels. With more than 1,600 people confirmed dead and as many as 20 million made homeless, the country is reeling from the scale of the catastrophe wrought by torrential monsoon rains -Read Article
The Age – STANDING on the man-made wall that runs through sodden fields from his village of Myet Kone to the river, U Aung Htu surveys the darkening skies. Two years after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, killing at least 140,000 people and displacing up to 2.4 million, the grey clouds still bring foreboding. “We had such a bad experience, the people here do not trust the weather, do not know they will be safe,” he says. ”When the clouds come, they worry about another cyclone.” Read article
BBC-Flood levels in Pakistan are expected to surge even higher along parts of the already dangerously swollen Indus river. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said “major peaks” were expected on Friday and next week in Punjab and Sindh provinces. The region’s worst flooding in 80 years has affected 14 million people and killed 1,600, according to the UN -Read Article
Daily Mail -A massive heatwave in Russia and the current devastating floods in Pakistan could be linked by the unusual behaviour of the jetstream, scientists believe. The jetstream is the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain.
But meteorologists who study the phenomenon say that it is producing unusual holding patterns which keep weather systems in one place and produce freak conditions -Read Article
The Telegraph-A highly-charged jet stream is contributing to the worse floods Pakistan has seen in decades, meteorologists have said. The jet stream, a massive ring of high speed winds, is moving quicker than usual over north western Pakistan, causing wet monsoon air to be sucked faster and higher into the atmosphere. The stream, which is normally too high to affect every day weather but does influence large scale weather patterns by shifting the atmosphere around, is “supercharging” the monsoon, leading to some of the heaviest rainfall in memory -Read Article
AFP-As Russia battles wildfires triggered by an unprecedented heatwave, flood waters surge across a drenched Pakistan leaving millions of people homeless, and questions are asked about global warming. Extreme weather has been a feature of the summer of 2010, with floods in Pakistan, China and Eastern Europe seemingly matched by heatwaves in Western Europe and Russia -Read Article
BBC- The cost to the taxpayer of meeting Scotland’s climate change target has been put at about £8bn by 2020. The costs would include changes to energy and transport use by public service workers, and adaptation of public buildings. The figures were given to the Independent Budget Review Panel by the Scottish government -Read Article
With the article that we published yesterday that the UN Climate Change Panel calling for $100bn a year in new taxes for a climate fund, it is pertinent to bring to the attention of Open Your Eyes News readers the findings of some of the most recent peer reviewed papers on this subject, as well as a broader picture of the huge financial and moral issues at stake. CLICK HERE TO READ EDITORIAL
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