Scary video of rapidly spreading wildfire near LA from someone’s backyard. You can here father and daughter talking about animals running from the flames.

Tough year ahead guys.

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nbcnightlynews:

Southern California wildfire spreads to Naval Base Ventura County

Photo: NBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin

Seriously, it’s going to be a real rough year!

Wildfire yesterday in Saint Cloud, MN near I-94. Usually these start mid to late summer, but the drought has evaporated most of the moisture held in the soils.

It’s going to be a gnarly year.

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colchrishadfield:

Enormous grassland fires in Siberia/Mongolia this morning.

Now, we are facing another rise in sea level of 1 to 4 feet. A rise of just 16 inches would be enough to endanger roads, highways and airports in San Francisco and Oakland. It could contaminate crucial groundwater in Los Angeles. Heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths, and the expected temperature increase will mean longer and hotter heat waves, like the one that killed 164 Californians during a blistering week in 2006.

That’s the bad news contained in the National Climate Assessment. The good news is we can do something to prevent these dire outcomes.

The report should be a wake-up call for leaders in Washington to overcome gridlock and start working on solutions. For models of how to proceed, they need only look to California and other states and cities that have begun to move forward in a bipartisan way.

The first step for policymakers — and for ordinary citizens too — is to understand the situation we face, which means carefully reading the National Climate Assessment. It may not be as gripping to look at or have the provocative appeal of a raging wildfire or another act of God, but the knowledge in this report is crucial to understanding how to change, to adapt, to prevent and to prepare for future disasters.

It’s our duty to pay attention.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s LATimes Op-Ed on the Obama administration’s forthcoming report on climate change called the National Climate Assessment (NCA).

If you can believe it way back in 1990(!), President George HW Bush signed America’s first climate change law called the Global Change Research Act. The act ordered the Federal Government to study the impacts and issues of climate change in America.

There are several elements of the act, but most important is that every four years, the government is supposed to issue a climate change report called the National Climate Assessment. You can read previous NCA reports, here.

The next NCA is due to be published within the next few months.

Anonymous asked: Mate, the reason why it's so hot down here is because it's an El Niño cycle which is causing hot temperatures and dry conditions in the central/northern parts of the country. Due to it being so dry in these parts with no cloud cover it's frighteningly hot in the interior which is normal for deserts. As per a normal Australian summer bands of low pressure move across the central/northern parts and due to their clockwise rotation push this hot air into the southern and eastern states.

Hey Mate!

You’re right, but with a caveat. I wont belabor my readers how the El Niño cycle works. The bottom line is it does create a drier seasonal weather pattern throughout Australia. Droughts, high-temps, clear skies, and bush fires are common, well-established issues.

I did a quick search on Google Scholar for:< “el nino” “climate change” Australia >. I got over 8,000 hits. (I’m too lazy to search PNAS, SSRN, or NASA directly. Plus I have a tasty burger in front of me that deserves my loving attention). (Also, of course many of those hits are results from slushy research projects like, “Influence of El Niño on the giant mud crab.”)

There are hundreds of researchers collecting and scouring climate data to find out how El Niño changes from GHGs.

Here is an interview with climate scientist Kim Cobb of Georgia Tech in the U.S. (press “Play” middle right to listen). She connected climate changes to El Niño in a paper published in Science. (I note that your main newspaper flubbed describing the new paper, stating the exact opposite of what Cobb had written.)

Thanks for the reminder, anon! Now to my burger…

Michael

Wildfires in Tasmania claimed dozens of homes, 100 people are missing. More pics and video at RT.

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Temperatures have changed so much in Australia, that the country’s weather service had to increase the size of it’s thermometer. Australia, now in summer time, is experiencing a record heat wave that’s scorching the land, causing brush fires, habitat destruction, and loss of human life. Around 100 people have died this year from bush fires in Australia (a ‘bush fire’ about the same as a ‘wildfire’ in the U.S.).

So severe is the heat that the Bureau of Meteorology had to update its mapping system to accommodate very high temperatures. They’ve added two new colors to their range of their temperatures, purple and pink. Previously, the map was capped at black, which represented the highest temp at 50c. But temperatures are breaking records on a near daily basis, regularly exceeding those highs. (In fact, climate scientists have warned officials that Australia should prepare for even worse temperature swings.)

You can see the two added colors on the graph on the right of this map.

nationalpost:

Threat level raised to ‘catastrophic’ as wildfires scorch 124,000 acres in Australia
Firefighters battled scores of wildfires Tuesday in southeastern Australia as authorities evacuated national parks and warned that hot, dry and windy conditions were combining to raise the threat to its highest alert level. Temperatures soared to 45 degrees Celsius in some areas.

No deaths have been reported, although officials in Tasmania were still trying to find about 100 people who have been missing since last week when a fire tore through the small town of Dunalley, east of the state capital of Hobart, destroying around 90 homes. On Tuesday, police found no bodies during preliminary checks of the ruined houses. (AP Photos)

Dramatic video of today’s natural gas pipeline explosion in West Virginia by local news, WOWK. No injuries reported but four homes were destroyed and over 77(?) 5 were damaged.

BREAKING: US Coast Guard tells NBC News four injured in oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico ›

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Breezy Point, Queens. 80 Homes were lost to fire caused by Hurricane Sandy.

U.S. runs out of funds to battle wildfires ›

Climate.gov video: September was the 16th straight month(!) of record breaking temperatures.

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Wildfires in Spain still blazing. Spain was not prepared for the number of fires this year - a peak into the future… More here.

nevver:

Everything is going fine