2010 Closes With Yet More Killer Climate Disasters

[cal04]

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/12/31/new-disasters-2010/

As greenhouse pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, 2010 is entering the history books as the hottest year on record. A year of unprecedented extreme weather disasters, 2010 saw tens of thousands of people killed and millions affected by our increasingly dangerous climate. The year is ending with yet more climate disasters, from floods in Australia to winter tornadoes across America:

Parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee were on the lookout for more twisters after several touched down Friday — including one that killed three people in an Arkansas town. Two more people died in southern Missouri. Three people died in Cincinnati, a hamlet of about 100 residents about three miles from the Oklahoma border. An elderly couple died in their home, while a dairy farmer was killed while milking his cows.

The tornadoes are part of an “unusual” storm front fed by “warm, moist air in place over the region.” On the colder edge of the front, “the storm responsible for the deadly tornado is also bringing a dangerous winter storm to the West and Midwest,” with up to three feet of new snow from California to Idaho.

Meanwhile, Australia is being ravaged by unprecedented flooding, following tremendous rainfall for months, compounded by the Christmas Day landfall of Cyclone Tasha. Floods now cover an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced millions of dollars of relief funding as she described the record-breaking floods:

Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they’ve seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before (in) the time that we have been recording floods. For many communities we haven’t even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that’s a number of days away.

“Some sections of coastal Queensland received over four feet of rain from September through November,” meteorologist Jeff Masters reports. The floods, which have wiped out crops, drowned livestock, and disrupted the largest coal ports in the world, are expected to cause at least $1 billion in damage.

“The science is cooked,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told Politico today. Unfortunately, the cold facts of science are that the planet itself is cooking.

[AnnieBW]

1. Brisbane is flood-prone anyway

That's why they developed the "Queenslander" style of house, with the lower level basically empty, and the upper level containing the living area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture)

I love Brisbane and the surrounding area. We visited the Australia Zoo, which is Steve Irwin's zoo, when we were there. If we were to move to Australia, we'd live in Brisbane. There were some really nice people there, and I'm praying to the Goddess for their safety.

[lunatica]

2. We're going to stop thinking of weather as forecastable

Meteorology will become useless since we don't know what the weather 'rules' will be anymore.

[Sal Minella]

3. "Wintry mix" has become a popular prediction among the forecasters

I listen to.

Since we have been going from 50 degrees one day to 5 degrees the next, with sleet and snow, "wintry mix" seems a perfectly reasonable prediction for January.