Summary: FRYING AUSTRALIA Do you want to know what the future looks like? Try Australia, where bats falls dead out of the sky, and tennis players drop like flies in the heat. Coming right up: a report from the hot front with Cam Walker, Friends of Earth Australia. Cam Walker is Friends of the Earth (FoE) Australia’s campaigns coordinator and has been active on environment and climate justice issues for more than 20 years. How hot is it? When pavement melts and eggs fry on shovels, it must be Australia at the start of 2014. Its affecting the economy down-under. A lot of outdoor work has been cancelled as it's just too dangerous when temperatures are above 35 degrees C, hotter than 110 Fahrenheit. Some downtown streets look like a ghost-town, as people stay home, "hunkered down" against the heat. Download/listen to this Radio Ecoshock Show 140122 in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) The wildlife is taking it hard. No doubt you've heard about the tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands of bats who fell dead out of the sky. Animals from lemurs to Kangaroos are in trouble - as are cattle on farms. Water is so hard to come by in some places, the local governments advise people to put buckets of water out in the back yard for wildlife. Wildfires have multiplied rapidly in the past week. Thankfully they haven't killed a lot of people yet, as in years past. But it's hot dangerous work fighting them, and the next tragedy may be waiting as all vegetation becomes tinder under the burning sun. Cam Walker relays reports of "heat storms" - lightning (that starts fires) and wind without any rain. Like a dry thunderstorm. This all comes after Australia had it's hottest year ever in 2013 . The research on causes of this incredible string of heat waves in Australia isn't complete. There are so many factors, ranging from the record hot ocean temperatures, through changes in the Monsoon and Indian Ocean, to the same distortions of the jet stream seen in the Northern Hemisphere. All in all, as James Hansen says, the dice are loaded. This extreme weather would not be happening without climate change. Amazing to me: Australians just voted in a government of climate change deniers. Tony Abbott is dismantling all the good climate work done by previous governments. Things like the carbon tax and environmental regulations are dumped overboard, as Abbott goes for a suicidal expansion of coal mining and exports! Let's see how hot we can make the world, and Australia, and how fast! There's lots of money in that, mate. Until the bill comes due. Download/listen to just the Cam Walker interview on Australia in CD Quality or Lo-Fi ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS DROWN THE LAND Then we're back to sky science. Atmospheric rivers move below the Jet Stream, carrying more water than the Amazon, and dumping it suddenly causing floods below. Expert David Lavers explains. Why have there been so many strange floods lately in many parts of the world? Will this get worse as Earth's climate warms? Dr. David A. Lavers is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar, formerly at the University of Redding in the United Kingdom, and now in the Hydroscience and Engineering department at the University of Iowa. His paper "Future Changes in atmospheric rivers and their implications for winter flooding in Britain" says we can expect more damaging floods to come. We talk about why atmospheric rivers love to land in Britain. But really they hit the whole of Europe, from Spain through France and even Scandinavia. Americans usually get more than their fair share of atmospheric river action. Just one of these giant wet streams in the air, as much as 1,000 miles long, and often only one to two hundred miles wide, can carry more water than the whole Amazon River. If the weather pattern sticks, delivering an AR to California for example, it can dump a foot or more of rain in one or two days. California could sure use one now, as they go into the biggest drought in recorded history! There is scientific speculati
