Storm floods Australia as bushfires burn
January 20 2007 at 12:16PM
By Michael Perry
Sydney - Australia is living up to its iconic image as a sunburnt country of droughts and flooding rains, with a huge outback storm causing flooding in three states on Saturday as drought-fuelled bushfires continued burning.
Monsoon rains over the country's vast interior have caused the usually dry Todd River in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory to come to life and flooded outback South Australia state and parts of Victoria and New South Wales states.
The small rural town of Oodnadatta in South Australia was flooded and most major roads leading to it closed to traffic by rising waters, emergency service officials said.
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Megafires
Sister Joan Wilson at the Oodnadatta Hospital said medical supplies were running low.
"If we don't get the supplies through in the next couple of days, some people may be in a bit of pain," she told reporters.
The flooding prevented the Royal Flying Doctor service, the outback's medical lifeline, from reaching the town.
Many remote cattle properties in South Australia were also cut off, but farmers battling the worst drought in 100 years welcomed the rains.
"I am sure there will be a lot of pastoralists around here rubbing their hands together with glee," said Trevor McLeod, a local government officer in the opal mining centre of Coober Pedy, another flooded South Australian town.
Cattle property owner Dean Rasheed said the rain was the heaviest to hit South Australia's Flinders Ranges in living memory and would bring his dry land back to life.
"I'm looking at the largest flood I've seen in my lifetime and I'm getting on in years, so it's very significant," Rasheed told Australian Associated Press news agency.
"The water is 200 metres wide and four metres deep."
As the outback storm moved east across Australia it caused flooding in Victoria, which has been battling bushfires for more than 50 days, and also the state of New South Wales.
Fires have struck five of Australia's six states since November, blackening more than 1,2 million hectares of bushland, killing one and gutting dozens of homes.
Some have been "megafires", created in part by global warming and a drought which has provided an abundance of fuel, stretching thousands of kilometres.
Rain in Victoria's north and east on Saturday eased bushfire threats, but failed to douse the large fires, and left the Victorian towns of Mildura and Stawell flooded, with rising waters inundating shops and stranding motorists.
Weather forecaster Ward Rooney said he could not remember when Victoria last reported such contrasting extreme weather conditions. "It's a large bundle of warnings altogether, a combination you wouldn't see too often," said Rooney.
Across the border in New South Wales, favourable weather conditions on Saturday saved the alpine resort of Thredbo from a nearby bushfire, with lower temperatures and rain from the outback storm expected on Sunday.
But in the far west of New South Wales, rain caused flooding in the mining town of Broken Hill, forcing residents to sandbag homes to stop water entering. Roads around the town were cut.
Australia's weather bureau said this month that the country appeared to be suffering from an accelerated climate change brought about by global warming.
While the heavily populated southeast experiences its worst drought for a generation, the tropics and remote northwest are receiving unseasonally heavy rains accounting for more than Australia's yearly total average.
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'These fires can't be controlled'
January 19 2007 at 11:24AM
By Rob Taylor
Canberra - They burn like fire hurricanes on fronts stretching sometimes thousands of kilometres and with a ferocity that explodes trees and makes them impossible to extinguish short of rain or divine intervention.
Bushfires like those which have raged through Australia's Southeast for two months and which struck Europe, Canada and the western United States in 2003 are a new type of "megafire" never seen until recently, a top Australian fire expert said on Friday.
"They basically burn until there is a substantial break in the weather, or they hit a coastline," Kevin O'Loughlin, chief executive of Australia's government-backed Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, told Reuters.
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"These fires can't be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world."
Wildfires have struck five of Australia's six states since November, blackening more than 1,2 million hectares of bushland, killing one and gutting dozens of homes.
Firefighters were being airdropped on Friday into the country's rugged southeastern alps to try to control a blaze threatening the upmarket ski resort of Thredbo, just 150km south of the capital, Canberra.
An army of 15 000 Australian volunteers was being assisted by firefighters from Canada and New Zealand, with more teams from the United States expected to arrive next week.
O'Loughlin said international experience pointed to megafires becoming usual in many parts of the world, driven in part by global warming and by laws protecting national parks, which provided a source of fuel to megafire fronts.
Huge fires devastated large parts of Portugal, Spain and France in 2003, and also struck Canada and the United States as well as Australia, which is the world's most fire-prone country.
"Even in the United States, which has quite substantial suppression resources - helicopters, the army, fleets of planes - they still cannot control them," O'Loughlin said.
Megafires are created when separate fires link and create one "super-front". Some of Australia's fires this summer have borders stretching thousands of kilometres, although authorities have been fortunate in that most have been in remote mountain ranges.
The fires are so fierce they create their own weather and winds, sucking in air from all directions.
"Once you get to a certain size the fire takes on a life of its own and, for example in Canberra in 2003, you got fire tornadoes," O'Loughlin said, referring to blazes which swallowed entire suburbs in Australia's capital four years ago.
To tackle megafires amid global warming, O'Loughlin said, governments worldwide might have to consider unlocking protected parklands and rejecting environmentalist arguments against intentionally burning dry timber littering the forest floor.
Climate change was also playing a part, reducing seasonal rains in some areas and drying out forests.
"The forests now form a major fire hazard. In the US they are starting to reintroduce fire to forested areas, but that is a very sensitive topic and you need to bring people along, especially parts of the conservation movement," O'Loughlin said.
Experts from Australia and around the world will gather in Canberra on February 27 to consider how to tackle megafires.
"It's to do with land management, water resources, forestry resources, and it will require political decisions to be made," O'Loughlin said.
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Climate model shows UK can expect hot days
January 19 2007 at 02:56AM
By Jeremy Lovell
London - Britain will regularly be crippled by heatwaves and floods this century, the first results of the world's biggest climate prediction experiment show.
The experiment by the BBC and Oxford University began in February last year with an appeal for people to download a climate prediction programme which would run in the background when their computers were idle.
About 200 000 people from across the world signed up and 50 000 have now run the programme - which plots the global climate from 1920 to 2080 - long enough for the results to be statistically significant.
Each programme was slightly different, so that a very broad range of possible outcomes was covered.
"People need to understand this is not a worst-case scenario. This is what we are increasingly confident will happen in the absence of substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions," said project co-ordinator Nick Faull of Oxford University.
The initial results will be presented by renowned wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough in a BBC programme - Climate Change: Britain Under Threat - on Sunday, giving snapshots of Britain in 2020, 2050 and 2080.
They show flooding will become widespread and regular and that heatwaves like the one which struck Europe in 2003 killing thousands of people will become the norm, making conditions in millions of homes and London's creaking underground system unbearable.
"By using the computers of many tens of thousands of people around the world, all of whom will be affected by climate change in some way or another, we have created the largest "virtual" supercomputer dedicated to climate change that the world has ever seen," said Bob Spicer, chief academic for the programme.
"We have been able to do calculations that even on a normal supercomputer would have taken decades to complete," he added.
Most scientists agree temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius this century, mainly because of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, putting millions of lives at risk from flood and famine.
