Stay safe Australia

Richard_P

I've been reading that you have been having some of the hottest weather every recorded:

"Australia has just sweltered through at least five of its 10 warmest days on record, authorities estimate.

An extreme heatwave has afflicted the nation since Saturday, causing wildlife deaths, bushfires and an increase in hospital admissions.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said preliminary readings showed daily national temperature highs of 40C.

The town of Noona in New South Wales meanwhile recorded a night-time temperature of 35.9C.

Temperatures on Friday will soar above 42C in "broad areas", the bureau predicted."

Just want to say Stay Safe and try to get some respite from the heat. I'm sure it's not doing the extended drying times in your paints any good..

Julianna

Oh wow, I thought the tourists from hell left New Zealand and were headed that way - those tourists would find themselves "disappeared" if they tried some their crap in the South - have you heard about them?  A family of about 12 are wreaking havoc on that country - trashing places, stealing, being disruptive, cursing at people, being vile and they can't deport them for another 2 weeks...  At least if it is hot as hell, they hopefully will be miserable.   

Sorry that Australia and NZ good people are having a bad time.

Boudicca

Forgiveness

This is quite similar to us in parts of Canada, where I live specifically, last summer. Keep yourselves well at all cost!
 This winter weekend we are heading to -50 cold for the next 3 to 4 days at least, very windy, very dangerous, frostbite in 2 to 3 minutes. I hope none of our water pipes burst.

dencal

Folks

The inland is nudging 50c or 122f. It’s so dry the cows are giving powdered milk.

Denis

Summer

Good one Denis! 

tassieguy

Not so bad here in Tassie (apart from a lot of smoke from forest fires) - it's only in the 20s - but my sister who lives in inland Oz said the birds are dropping dead from the sky, the rivers are drying up and there are massive fish kills. It's why I came to Tassie. Summers are just too cruel on the mainland for this old bloke. And they're only going to get worse.
@Julianna,  I hope those delightful tourists stay away from Tassie. 

PaulB

-16C and a foot of snow here tomorrow, if you Aussies need a change of pace.

Boudicca

I think the inland, top end and east coast hit hardest. On the south west coast not so bad warming up today  38c (100f) and tomorrow 40c (104f) but cooling down again. 
Painted the second coat of foundation stain on 15 canvases last night. Dry now.

dencal

Folks

A farmer speaking on radio about the heat said that 46c was too hot to go out to the shed to tidy up a few things. But tomorrow was forecast to be cooler at 41c. He said he might need to take a jacket.

Denis

Roxy

Thanks for thinking of us @Richard_P. Damn hot here in Canberra - four days in a row over 40c for the first time ever. I'm off to the beach next week to seek some relief. Our spare room is a sauna so no imminent re-start on painting activity yet either. Rob - I had a couple of days in Launceston this week - although it felt cooler, it was still over 30c there too.

Richard_P

Rob: Doesn't Tassie get very cold in the winter though? We have mild winters and summers here, though that seems to be changing in the last few years.

tassieguy

Yes, it snows here, @Richard_P but rarely settles at sea level where we are - every few years we'll get a dusting here.  In summer it can get to 40 degrees but it never stays hot enough for long enough to become bothersome and it always cools down at night. Unlike on the mainland.

Hope you aren't getting too cold up there.  

Richard_P

Seems like I have to revive this thread 

Hope everyone down under is ok..

Dianna

@Richard_P  What do you mean 'the extended drying time" of our paints?  I currently have a painting in the boot of my car to try and speed the drying up because I'm sick of waiting six months to varnish a painting.  Is there some reason I shouldn't do this?  (It doesn't actually BAKE in the boot, it just has periods of a couple of hours during the day where it gets quite hot - and also it's the least dusty place I can put a painting)

Dianna

And yes, it's bloody hot on the Gold Coast too......

Richard_P

Hi Dianna,

I meant that the heat reduces the extended drying time so you have less time before the paints dry when painting.

Dianna

Oh, @Richard_P  I see what you mean --- that's OK then. I don't have a problem with heat in the studio because the room is air-conditioned. Thanks.

tassieguy

Slow start to summer in Tassie this year. We had some really hot 32 degree Celsius days in spring but then it fizzled out and it's been freezing rain the last two weeks with snow in the hills. But the rest of Australia is baking hot and burning. It's crazy weather. Huge forest fires seem to be happening every year now. Global warming. We'd better get used to it. It's going to get to 30 degrees in Tassie again this week.

BOB73

85f in Texas today. 40F tonight and high of 55f tomorrow. If we could get a handle on those wild fires (California, Canada, China S. A. and Oz) maybe there wouldn't be as much Global Warming.

tassieguy

49.9 degrees C or122 F in parts of South Australia in the last couple of days and in the mid 40s elsewhere. Horrible forest fires in four states. 

Richard_P

  

Dianna

the sun was huge and the most glorious color at sunset on the Gold Coast today, - trouble is the glorious color was from smoke   .   It always makes me feel sad because of the animals - I know humans are suffering too, but somehow animals seem helpless.

kaustavM

My God! A few more degrees ahead of India's temperature. 

tassieguy

These temperatures have been breaking all time records for Australia. Again. Seems every year is a record breaker now. Earth's climate is broken. Future generations will curse us. 

Forgiveness

I fear that the very same just may come to us here in parts of Canada next spring and summer seasons and on. Our winter here has become increasingly more severe in cold too. This means more frequent days of -30C to -45C with very strong winds and increased amounts of snow and ice in winter for longer durations. And more frequent days of high 30'sC up to 45C and frequent strong hot winds, and a much shorter summer season. Our fall season was only 2 weeks long this past season, ordinarily used to be 6-8 weeks of beautiful fall colors and pleasant temperatures. This is in the easterly part of Canada, even more severe precipitation when closer to the east coast. The ice up north of us, thousands of years old, is melting at quite an increased rate too, alarming! And we are loosing a tremendous amount of fish all around us here.

tassieguy

Yes, the climate models have predicted this, @Forgiveness. As Greenland's ice melts a blob of cold meltwater forms in the N Atlantic disrupting the Gulf Stream and bringing more extreme weather to E North America and Western Europe. Harder winters, hotter summers.  This is exacerbated by a distortion of the polar jet stream as the Arctic warms.  This distortion drags warm air into the Arctic and still relatively cold air from the Arctic down into N America. Rough times ahead.  

In recent years Tasmania has experienced an influx of climate refugees who are fleeing the heat of mainland Australia. I'm one of them. This has pushed up population and land values down here. This is a tiny foretaste in a farflung corner of the world of the wordlwide climate refugee crisis ahead.

If we'd taken action to cut CO2 emissions 20 years ago the worst could have been avoided. Now, it's too late. We've reached a tipping point and earth's climate is flipping over into a new state not seen on earth since the Eocene.. The Anthropocene will not be congenial.

GTO

And yet there are still some who claim it’s not caused by human activity.  I was talking to Someone the other day and I brought up the record temps in Aussie.  He still doesn’t believe in climate change or that humans are affecting the climate.  Just incredible.

tassieguy

I know, @GTO. The science is rock-solid and has been for decades. Those people don't want to believe it so they come up with all sorts of looney conspiracy theories about greenie extraterrestrial  leftie communist tree huggers altering our thermometers to trick us into not burning our god-given fossil fuels. "Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!. No one's gonna change our way of life!"

With the help of Faux News and the billions of advertising dollars of lying multi-national polluting fossil fuel companies they are cajoled into disputing the reality of anthropogenic climate change, denying responsibility for it and putting their heads in the sand so as not to see how awfuly this is going to end.

What can you do? 

Richard_P

That idea seems quite common in the US unfortunately..

It does't help that Australia's current government is pro-coal, and against curbing emissions.

tassieguy

Yup, you're on the money there, @Richard_P. Australia's responsibility for this climate crisis is shameful. We continue to dig up millions of tons of coal and sell it cheaply to the world to burn and pump into the air as CO2 as the Great Barrier Reef is dying, as our tropical rainforests burn, as our farms are parched, as our deserts expand and now, again this year, as what little remains of our temperate forests is going up in flames around the big cities of the south east. Our people are dying in this disaster but our Prime Minister, an evangelical, happy-clapping climate change denier, is on vacation in Hawaii as our country burns. Science counts for nothing with his ilk. Future generations will curse us.
What can one do? 
The art of the Anthropocene, if there is any, will be an accusatory, hot, firery red, refreshed only by the cool spirit of Greta Thunberg who will be its diminuative, saintly,  young hero. Her plaintive cry will echo down through the swealtering, struggling,  generations. If there are any. 

CJD

I feel lucky to be where I am. It doesn't seem like Victoria BC will be affected by droughts or rising sea levels or forest fires or hurricanes any time soon, although in the past few summers we've been getting more smoke from forest fires up island and on the mainland. A few days have been pretty bad but nothing comparable to the mainland. Terrible smoke and bad fires throughout the province.

Forgiveness

I'm concerned also about the fact that I live in a very old building that has not been professionally well maintained in the heart of downtown, and very quickly deteriorating, very dry brittle rotted woods throughout, the electrical  wiring is in shambles, the roof's structure underneath the shingles is not sound. That was just a little insight for the beginning of the severity of the situation. It is slowly becoming a painful eyesore and a point of neighborly anxieties and fear of the near future in the neighborhood. The local fire department has this building on their watch list.
 My point is, as the weather becomes even warmer, this structure will catch fire in a similar fashion as any tree would, spontaneous combustion. We have no control over it, and Canadian weather over all is quite harsh and taxing on such places long before globing warming. And we occasional suffer small earthquakes strong enough to take down the building, we experience tremors regularly. I know I am not alone at all on this matter, everyone who are similar everywhere, are vulnerable. Thank goodness for non smoking in designated buildings too.

BOB73

climate change for sure. there's no doubt about it. but it's been on again off again for at least a billion years that the geologists tell us. It's hard to believe that humans could be responsible for this when we've only been here for a little over 10,000 years. Putting this all in perspective; you could take all the humans in the world (7.7 b) with all their manufacturing and farming and move them to an area about the size of Texas and have a population density the same as New York City so when you look at that on a globe it's difficult to believe that any human activity could cause an upset of the atmosphere. I think the recent lack of sunspots and solar flares is a more likely source for our climate change. Another thing that gets me is how many times IPCC and NOAA and even NASA have corrupted weather data and why the gold standard for CO2 for the world is measured within 30 miles of an active volcano. It also disturbs me that many social activists became scientists to blame big business and capitalism for climate change. I'm a conservationist my answer to the CO2 dilemma is to cut down old over-mature trees with reduced oxygen production and plant new young trees that convert more CO2 to oxygen. Manage forests to reduce wild fires and produce more trees. This Earth is going to do what it does; with us or without us.

tassieguy

I'll go with the science. The rest is nonsense.

Dianna

Me to.......

Forgiveness

Up until the past few years it was common throughout our life here to make frequent mention of just how dirty the city snow becomes and the unattractiveness as a focus point. This has shifted more recently to observing the overwhelming amounts that we receive with rarely any mention of the latter. The frequency of precipitation has kept it quite white for longer periods of time. We seem to be experiencing increasingly less days of bright sunshine in winter which may or may not be further contributing to a longer and colder season.

tassieguy

As mentioned above, @Forgiveness, certain areas like the NE of North American and NW Europe are expected, for a time,  to experience cooler winters and more volatile weather for the reasons touched on but the global average temp goes up. When we look at global average temperatures since industrialisation we see that they rise in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas concentrations. And those rises in greenhouse gasses come from our activities.  The air samples that are taken to measure atmospheric composition are taken from "gold standard" sampling stations like Cape Grim in Tasmania which are about as far from active volcanoes as it's possible to get. The argument from sunspots is ass-about  Fewer sunspots correlate with cooling, not warming. And as for chopping down the trees, old growth forests ...  I'm just dumbfoundeded!   That's got to be the ...

No, I'm not doing this. The science is rigorous and available for all who can (and care to) read it.   Those with vested interests in fossil fuel extraction, and conspiracy theorists, will ignore/try to distort the science but the facts remain the facts. And those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s have personal experience of a warming climate that reinforces the science. The world is warming and doing so because we've changed the composition of the atmosphere.   And why this warming happens with a rise in greenhouse gasses is comprehensible with basic high school physics. 

Future generations will curse us and we'll not rest in peace.

Forgiveness

Point of interest for me is to observe just how it all affects and changes the inside of a person as I am already experiencing my own revelations upon my internal self as it continues to unfold. The strongest impact has been with my more personal expections and the shift in outlook when I go outdoors now, scouting for photos for paintings. For instance, I am not so free to spend time outdoors during the warmer seasons and enjoy it in my area of our country any longer. It's better to be continuously active outdoors, but not so for being still for too long at all. Living in large areas of concrete reduces some risks related to challenges regarding certain insects for the moment so far.

Richard_P

Well, that went well.

BOB73

"97% of scientists believe climate change is manmade." Find the source of that study and the scientists' actual response to it.
Naomi Oreskes
John Cook
Maggie Kendall Zimmerman and Peter Doran 
Finally, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the[97%] consensus. Its latest report claims (2014) that "human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems." Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing "anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing." Joesph Bast and Roy Spencer  WSJ May 26, 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joseph-bast-and-roy-spencer-the-myth-of-the-climate-change-97-1401145980
Mr. Bast is president of the Heartland Institute. Dr. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite.
So I agree with @tassieguy I'll go with the science (but the real science) The rest is nonsense. I'm still for reducing emissions and the carbon footprint I just don't think we need to give up beef, lawnmowers and air travel to accomplish it. The part of climate change that bothers me most is that drinking water is getting scarce. We need to start building saltwater desalination plants along our coasts and a network of pipelines to carry the fresh water to the interior. Railroad beds could be used as right-of-ways for the pipes.

tassieguy

The Heartland Institute? You've got to be kidding! You couldn't find a more biased organization. It's the leading promoter of climate change denial. It rejects the scientific consensus on global warming just as it rejected the science liking cancer and smoking. It’s the world’s most evil lobbying organization.

PaulB

I hope Australia stays safe, but I don't want to risk any fights.  Thread closed.