Fire authorities are working in hot and windy conditions to gain the upper hand on fires burning out of control across south-east Australia.

The situation remains serious in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, while crews are on standby in Central Australia.

More than 100 bushfires are burning in New South Wales alone, and 18 are uncontained.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-11/authorities-brace-for-renewed-fire-threat/4461864?WT.svl=news0

Picture at top by Gus leonisky: hot centre.dry salt lake...

Future generations of Americans can expect to spend 25 days a year sweltering in temperatures above 100F (38C), with climate change on course to turn the country into a hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone place.

The National Climate Assessment, released in draft form on Friday , provided the fullest picture to date of the real-time effects of climate change on US life, and the most likely consequences for the future.

The 1,000-page report, the work of the more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, was unequivocal on the human causes of climate change, and on the links between climate change and extreme weather.

"Climate change is already affecting the American people," the draft report said. "Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense including heat waves, heavy downpours and in some regions floods and drought. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting."

The report, which is not due for adoption until 2014, was produced to guide federal, state and city governments in America in making long-term plans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/11/climate-change-america-hotter-drier-disaster/print

I will not apologise for harping on the issue of global warming... More than anything humans have experienced before, more than the worse of the worst wars, global warming is going to be the worse of worst... Like deaths from radiation, like death form diseases, like death from accidental weather events., global warming is going to hit harder and harder relentlessly, year after year, decade after decade... In the 22nd century, average temperatures are likely to climb to 12 degrees above what they are now, only god (groups of dills) would not know that beyond this, in the 23rd century temperatures can go higher that 20 degrees above present... As carbon dioxide increases, as natural plant life is being destroyed for crops, as the seas become more acidic, the price to pay will be higher than high... We need to know now...

49.6 degrees Celsius is half way to boiling point... and this is measured in the shade... The hottest place on earth is the Death Valley, USA...

(slanted) views from Miranda devine...

CLIMATE alarmists have waited a while for a good heatwave to press their case that human activities are causing unprecedented catastrophic global warming. This summer the weather delivered.

Right on cue, after a record string of hot days across Australia, the ABC, The Guardian (UK) , the Climate Commission, the CSIRO and the UN's IPCC (coincidentally meeting in bushfire-racked Tasmania) all trotted out scary climate statements.

The Bureau of Meteorology even added an extra colour to its heat scale, even though previous charts have included temperatures over 50C, and there have been hotter days in the past.

Yes there have. There really, really have.

Take the 50.7C at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia on January 2, 1960, or the 50.3C the next day. Hot stuff.

Australia has always had extreme heat, droughts, bushfire and flooding rains.

To prove it, let's go to a contemporaneous source.

Sir John Henniker Heaton kindly recorded it all for us in 1879 in the Australian Dictionary Of Dates, which a reader has provided.

It is an invaluable primary resource, as you will see. (I have translated temperatures from fahrenheit to celsius).

December 27, 1790: "Great heat in Sydney, 39C in the shade. Settlement visited by myriads of flying foxes, birds dropped dead from the trees."

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/aussies-have-weathered-

Sydney is experiencing its hottest day on record, with temperatures above 45 degrees across the greater city area.

The mercury hit 45.8 degrees Celsius at Observatory Hill at 2.55pm, 0.5 above Sydney's previous hottest day in 1939.

Sydney Airport recorded 46.4C at 2.32pm.

Across greater Sydney, the hottest temperatures recorded so far have been at Penrith (46.5C at 2.16pm), Camden (46.1C at 1.57pm) and Richmond (46.0C at 1.55pm).

Aaron Coutts-Smith from the Weather Bureau says the office is keeping a close eye on the temperatures.

"They can still continue to rise this afternoon," he said.

"It's really contingent on the sea breeze and when that decides to kick in and move further inland."

The race meeting at Gosford has also been called off as the mercury there passed 44C.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-18/temperature-in-sydney-soars/4471424?WT.svl=news2

Hot enough for you, Miranda?

Almost as soon as the discussion got started in Australia, the forces of denial and ignorance sprang back into life. On 9 January acting Opposition Leader, Warren Truss, was quoted thus:

This is, indeed, only his guess with no numbers or data to back it up. This off-the-cuff statement of belief was comprehensively pulled apart by Philip Gibbons, senior lecturer at the Australian National University, in The Conversation. Gibbons showed, in fact, that the amount of carbon released by the current bushfires is around 2 per cent of the annual emissions from Australia's coal-fired power stations. To equal those annual power station emissions would require incinerating a forest the size of Tasmania.

Other media outlets maintained the business as usual climate denial. In The Weekend Australian on 12 January, the environment editor, Graham Lloyd, wrote a rather confused piece taking some details that have been changed in climate outlook predictions to cast doubt on the credibility of climate science.

It included a statement that, "The jury is out on the cause of the round of heatwaves hitting Australia", with no clear idea who that 'jury' is. Ever fussing in the cracks trying to obfuscate a clear picture of what is actually going on, once again our national paper gets it hopelessly wrong on this issue. And this was after The Australian published this piece on 3 January covering predictions from the Bureau of Meteorology for an increase in both the frequency and intensity of future heatwaves. A rather confused agenda.

Let us hope that future discussions around climate change and what to do about it will be free of invented factoids and misinformation. It's time to take the science seriously. We are witnessing the consequences of ignoring that science and pretending that climate change isn't occurring. It's a heavy price we are paying and that debt is only going to increase if we don't wise up.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/17/3670931.htm

We expect extreme warm weather events will occur more often

Future warming of the climate due to greenhouse gas emissions will very likely lead to further increases in the frequency of unusually hot days and nights and continued declines in unusually cold days and nights.

These changes will result in weather events which are increasingly beyond our prior experiences.

And it’s not just temperature extremes. Climate model projections indicate that the frequency of many different types of extreme weather will change as the planet warms.

(This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.)

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/environment/weather/whats-causing-australias-heat-wave/

For so many years growing up in the small country town of Coonabarabran in central west NSW, I wanted Coona to be a place people had heard of, where exciting things happened. Life always seemed to happen elsewhere when I was a girl.

But this week, every day and every hour I have heard the name of my birthplace on the news. There is Coonabarabran on the front page of the papers, describing a ferocious fire and the loss of 42,000 hectares and 52 homes, and rising.

Every journalist in Australia was on the radio mangling the name of our neighbouring little town Bugaldie ("Bugle-Die"). The Prime Minister has visited. All eyes are on Coona since the lightning hit Split Rock on Sunday and it is enough to break my heart.

Now we wait for the wind to change or not and pray for containment lines to hold and save the town.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4473596.html

From Mungo Wentworth MacCallum

The fires and the heatwave that provoked them have inevitably reopened the debate on global warming and climate change, and it has brought out the sceptics and the deniers in plague proportions, writes Mungo MacCallum.

On Saturday night the Heat beat the Scorchers. It was only Big Bash cricket, but it seemed a fitting finale to a week in which the bushfires had not only dominated the news, but - directly and indirectly - the climate change debate that flowed from it.

And of course, the politicians got in on it. The previous week Tony Abbott, firefighter extraordinaire, had paraded across the front page of the Sydney Daily Telegraph in a pristine protective outfit, preparing to go on standby. The Housing Minister Brendan O'Connor branded it a stunt, but later withdrew and Abbott was in fact filmed going into action on the South Coast.

Someone who described himself as "the firefighter on duty" tweeted that Abbott's spotless uniform was clearly untouched by action and someone else claimed that while it was nice to see him back, it was in fact the first time he had fronted for an actual fire (as opposed to a branch meeting) in 13 years; but Abbott fans were entranced by yet further proof of his macho.

The best Julia Gillard could do in response was to go feminine and compassionate, which she had already done with some success on the Tasman peninsula and now repeated in the Warrumbungles. Her detractors dismissed her appearance as a cynical ploy to prop up votes and a second-rate attempt to emulate former premier Anna Bligh's bravura but ultimately unsuccessful performance after the Queensland floods.

But the reality was that she, like Abbott, was damned if she did and damned if she didn't. Prime ministers are expected to attend the sites of disasters, both natural and man-made: if they don't, they are accused of being hard-hearted and uncaring.

And Gillard's appearance did give her a chance to draw attention to one very salient fact: while the cost of the fires has been appalling in terms of losses to property, farm stock and wildlife, to date there has been only two confirmed human deaths. And this is not a result of divine providence or any other form of sheer blind luck but of diligent, even brilliant preparation, effective and heroic efforts from the firefighters and a sensible and disciplined response from their supporters and, importantly the general public. It was a tremendous effort all round, and just as well: because there's going to be plenty more where that came from.

The fires and the heatwave that provoked them have inevitably reopened the debate, if it can be dignified with the title, on global warming and climate change, and it has brought out the sceptics and the deniers in plague proportions.

Undoubtedly the silliest has been the Liberal member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, who dismissed any suggestion that a new and dangerous trend was emerging. Why, it was just a hot spell, he scoffed. There had been plenty like it before; back in 1790 Watkin Tench, the celebrated First Fleet diarist, noted that the heat was intolerable. So this proved that there was no global warming, QED.

Others noted that Dorothea Mackellar had written of droughts and flooding rains in a sunburnt country so what did we expect. An international researcher revealed that it was also bloody cold in parts of Europe at the moment: no global warming there. The cautious rejoinder from the senior principal research scientist of the Bureau of Meteorology, Scott Power, that while it was unwise to attribute any single instance to climate change, it was quite clear that the world, including Australia, was warming and that as a result extreme events such as those of the last week would become more common and more severe, was relegated to a footnote.

But the most sustained attack on the science came, as usual, from The Australian and it was led by, of all people, its environment editor, Graham Lloyd. On Tuesday Lloyd gave us a breathless front page "exclusive" headed: Sea rise 'not linked to warming'.

It quoted a paper from the Journal of Climate co-authored by John Church, described as Australia's pre-eminent sea level scientist, and claimed that it said that sea level rises were not accelerating.

(Lloyd's report also had a pointer to a story sneering at the ABC for running a report that sea level rise was already having an effect on coastal properties because the ultimate source was a real estate agent. This from the paper that applauds the use of practical, hands-on research and gives reams of space to unqualified deniers. But we digress.)

When he saw Lloyd's report, Church gave a press conference to say he had been verballed and that in fact the paper said precisely the opposite: of course sea level rise was accelerating and the cause was anthropogenic. Undeterred Lloyd wrote another piece calling it a "War of Words" and headed: Scientists split on the question of sea level rise.

In fact, as the chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, pointed out, they're not; there is certainly argument over just how quickly the rate is accelerating, but the basic fact is indisputable.

Lloyd, in a desperate spirit of overkill, also ran a turgid feature claiming there was a "Rising Tide of Discord". But on Thursday The Australian felt constrained to publish a belated correction to Lloyd's original story, even if the editor did his best to bury it by printing it in an unobtrusive spot on page 2. Lloyd, as insouciant as ever, wrote another tedious piece of self-justification on Saturday headed: Rising uncertainty about sea level increases (paywalled). Well, there is in his mind, at least.

But he was effortlessly upstaged by a retired political scientist called Don Aitkin, who has joined The Australian's jihad against the ABC. Truth and balance, thundered Aitkin, are important values and they ought to prevail. And at the ABC, he did not think that this was the case. His evidence?

"To me, the ABC seems committed to the view that anthropogenic global warming (AGW, now transmuted into 'climate change') is a real and present threat to humanity."

Well, yes, and also to the view that the world is round and revolves around the sun. But oh, dear, the science is far from settled about any of this. No doubt he and Graham Lloyd could write a joint feature on the subject.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4474058.html?WT.svl=theDrum