Posts Tagged ‘Australia’

Australian Fires Add to CO2 Load

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Besides the immediate death (180) and destruction from the fires raging in south eastern Australia there is this:

VICTORIA’S bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – almost equal to Australia’s industrial emission for an entire year.

Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in the next international agreement.

“Once you are starting to burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon,” Professor Adams said.

Australia’s Hell on Earth

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

The always interesting WunderBlog by Jeff Masters has a good post about the horrific fires in south east Australia.

Spectacular nocturnal heat burst

On the morning of January 29, an exceptional nocturnal heat event occurred in the northern suburbs of Adelaide around 3 a.m. Strong northwesterly winds mixed hot air aloft to the surface. At RAAF Edinburgh, the temperature rose to 107°F (41.7°C) at 3:04 am. Such an event appears to be without known precedent in southern Australia.

Australia: Greatest Natural Disaster – Death Toll Mounts

Monday, February 9th, 2009

australiafire The wildfires that have so far claimed more than 170 lives in Australia highlight vulnerabilities in a country where the population is spilling into rural areas already under stress from sometimes extreme weather conditions.

Police suspect arsonists played a role in starting the blazes in Australia, one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history.

Officials struggled to contain the flames, which obliterated at least two towns over the weekend and continued to burn Monday in grasslands and forests north of Melbourne, the capital of the southeastern state of Victoria.