First Bushfires Of The Year Kick Off Spring In Parched Australia - NYT

[hatrack]

EDIT

On Tuesday, Australia’s most influential scientific research body, the government-financed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, released a report that said a temperature rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit was likely by 2030, along with many more days with temperatures of over 95 degrees and reduced rainfall across much of southern Australia, already the driest part of the driest inhabited continent. “The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past,” the report said.

Recent events have made the subject even more urgent for many Australians. Although the spring season started only a month ago, about 50 separate bush fires, fanned by unseasonably hot weather and strong winds, have burned about 76,000 acres, of bush and national forest and destroyed a house. Large areas of the state of New South Wales, including Sydney, had a total fire ban in force today. “It is very interesting to see how climate change has moved from the environmental field to the security sphere,” said Alan Dupont, who heads the United States Studies Center, referring to the report released today. “Most of the government response has been about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than trying to manage the effects of the change.”

The survey’s results echo comments last week by the head of Australia’s police, Commissioner Mick Keelty, that climate was a growing security concern. “We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water,” Mr. Keelty said. “Crops could fail, disease could be rampant and flooding might be so frequent that people, en masse, would be on the move. Even if only some and not all of this occurs, climate change is going to be the security issue of the 21st century.”

His comments provoked a sharp retort from Prime Minister John Howard, who said that terrorism was a more immediate threat to security than climate change. Mr. Howard was until recently a climate change skeptic, and the opposition Labor Party has said that the new attention he is paying to climate change is driven more by polls than conviction.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/asia/04australia.html

[mike_c]

1. and fire season is just ending up here in the PNW....

eom

[GliderGuider]

2. How many tonnes of Australian wheat has terrorism destroyed in the last year?

God, Howard is an ass.

[hatrack]

3. But now he says he's thinking about ratifying Kyoto!q

How do you spell "naked cynicism"?

:puke: