“Bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a massive pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere since August that is equivalent to almost half of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, Guardian Australia can reveal.
“Analysis by Nasa shows the NSW fires have emitted about 195m tonnes of CO2 since 1 August, with Queensland’s fires adding a further 55m tonnes over the same period.
“In 2018, Australia’s entire greenhouse gas footprint was 532m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.”
“Nearly the entire Australian continent could see temperatures of more than 37 degrees next week as a ‘heat dome’ parks itself over the country.
“Meteorologists have blamed a ‘dome of heat parked over southern Australia’ for a long-lasting pattern of very dry and hot weather which will last through next week and the following weekend.”
“For 72 days, but who is counting, residents of the New South Wales town of Tenterfield have been told to boil their drinking water.
“Straight from the tap it reeks of bushfire smoke and heavy doses of chlorine. The community’s filtration system, built in 1932, cannot cope effectively with turbidity levels in the Tenterfield dam that have recently been measured at 60 times the World Health Organisation’s limits.”
“A storm has dumped 128mm [around five inches] of rain on the Gold Coast in just over an hour – a one-in-50-year event, the weather bureau says.
“Rain bucketed down about 1pm on Friday as the severe storm cell hovered over Southport for 90 minutes, while flash flooding closed roads and sporting fields.”
“Scary footage has been obtained of the supercell which tore a path of destruction through the Gympie [Australia] region earlier this afternoon…
““We thought we were going to die,” a Wolvi resident said as she watched her property get smashed by baseball sized hail.”
https://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/videos/watch-scary-footage-of-gympie-regions-supercell/71590/
“Indonesia‘s little-known glaciers are melting so fast they could disappear in a decade, a new study says, underscoring the imminent threat posed by climate change to ice sheets in tropical countries…
“This summer, Iceland mourned the passing of Okjokull, its first glacier lost to climate change, amid warnings that some 400 others on the subarctic island risk the same fate.”
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-glacier-papua-melt-climate-change-12181918
“In Harbin, Heilongjiang province, the highest temperature will be 0 C; in previous mid-December periods, the city’s record was just－9.5 C, the forecast said. Meanwhile, temperatures in North China will reach as high as 10 C on Friday…
“China has been very sensitive to climate change, a green paper jointly released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the meteorological administration last month said.”
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2019-12/13/content_75508473.htm
“A deepening drought in southern Africa is resulting in unprecedented food shortages, leaving millions of people hungry. …
““We are seeing people going two to three days without food, entire herds of livestock wiped out by drought and small-scale farmers with no means to earn money to tide them over a lean season.”
“Zambia risks having to switch off power production completely at the Kariba hydropower dam for the first time…
“…water levels already at the lowest in more than two decades continue to drop, according to the state-owned electricity utility.”
“Namibia‘s dam water levels have almost halved from already low levels as the worst drought in more than 100 years pushes the desert nation closer to famine.
“Dams nationwide were at 19.3% of capacity compared to 35.6% this time last year, water utility Namwater said…”
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/12/12/world/africa/12reuters-namibia-drought.html
“Famine threatens the lives of up to 5.5 million people in South Sudan, where droughts and flooding have destroyed crops and livestock, compounding “intense political instability”, the United Nations warned on Thursday…
“Nearly 1 million people are directly affected by the floods and the waters have not receded in many places.”
“A spokeswoman for Murcia Regional Government has today said it can “not do more” for Los Alcazares, in Spain, which has twice been flooded out in recent months.
“Ana Martinez Vidal, stressed this that the autonomous community has taken all possible measures to alleviate the effects of the DANA storm in the Mar Menor municpalities.”
“Much of Iceland is digging out following a potent blizzard that brought winds topping 100 mph and yards of snow to some areas… As many as 20,000 people are without power as temperatures tumble into the teens and 20s, with a few communities isolated.
“The storm was so severe that it prompted the Icelandic Met Office to issue an unprecedented “red alert.””
“…glaciers and snow patches are rapidly declining around the world, due to human-driven climate change.
“The loss of these important environments is increasing the odds of heat stress and hyperthermia in mountain goats, according to a study published on Wednesday in PLOS One.”
“Worsening booms and busts could mean that it is harder and harder to make a consistent living in the Atlantic Canadian fishery as well.
“But if the experience in the Atlantic fishery in the United States is concerning, what’s happening in the northern Pacific is downright frightening. And we’re not talking about a 16 per cent drop, either.”
“…many caribou herds are in decline as the warming climate changes much of the landscape they depend on.
“Inedible shrubs are rapidly encroaching on the tundra, and more frequent forest fires and disease are destroying the trees that provide caribou with lichen for food.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-caribou-migration-linked-climate-insect.html
“For tens of thousands of years, permafrost has kept 1,460 to 1,600 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion metric tons) of organic matter trapped in the soil. That’s more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere…
“Though the permafrost has been thawing in recent years, the carbon it releases is usually taken up by plant life growing in the summer, so the Arctic has not been a contributor to climate change — until now, that is.”
“This decade people around the world woke up to a grim reality: Climate change is here, it’s happening now, and it could very easily get much, much worse.
“These 10 years were punctuated by a series of deadly, dramatic, devastating events.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/12/the-decade-we-finally-woke-up-to-climate-change/
“Ecosystems, the fabric of life on which we all depend, are declining rapidly because of human actions…
“Over the last 50 years, nature’s capacity to support us has plummeted. Air and water quality are reducing, soils are depleting, crops are short of pollinators, and coasts are less protected from storms.”
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/december/humans-are-causing-life-on-earth-to-vanish.html
Read the previous ‘Climate’ thread here and visit my Patreon page here.
