Category — Global warming

Hobart, the capitol city of Australia’s island state, Tasmania, has experienced its driest year on record.

The city’s total rainfall for 2006 was just 343mm, well below the long-term annual average of 619mm, Weatherzone meteorologist Matt Pearce said.

This made it driest year on record, with significantly less rain than in the previous driest year, 1979, when 390mm fell.

“The very dry conditions can be largely put down to the El Nino pattern which was in place during the second half of 2006,” Mr Pearce said.

A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet, one of Britain’s leading climate experts has warned.

As the new year was ushered in with stormy conditions across the UK, the forecast for the next 12 months is of extreme global weather patterns which could bring drought to Indonesia and leave California under a deluge.

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Boston is going to be the first major city in the US to require large commercial buildings to be constructed in an environmentally friendly way.

It’s all part of the effort curb global warming.

Future additions to Boston’s skyline are going to be friendly to the environment. They’ll be green buildings.

Boston will be the first city to require private developers of larger buildings to meet a series of environmental standards.

Marc Breslow of the Climate Action Network thinks this is a great step in the fight against global warming

The US has proposed listing polar bears as a threatened species because of declining Arctic ice levels, reports the BBC.

It is the first time the US has made a direct link between global warming and the threat to a species.

President George W Bush has steadfastly refused to back mandatory controls of emissions of carbon dioxide — believed to be the main gas behind global warming.

There are 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears  across the globe, about 4700 of them in the US state of Alaska.

US Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said polar bears were “one of nature’s ultimate survivors”.

But he added: “We are concerned the polar bears’ habitat may literally be melting.”

Being listed as “threatened” is a rung down from being “endangered”.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.

The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands — in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati — vanished beneath the waves.

The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea.

The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Hollywood has turned them into the cartoon stars of the film Happy Feet, but the real life story of the rockhopper penguin is not such a happy tale, scientists have discovered.

Millions of the birds are disappearing in a “sinister and astonishing” phenomenon that is baffling biologists.

In just six years their numbers have fallen from 600,000 to 420,000 in the Falkland Islands — one of its few remaining strongholds - according to the latest survey by Falklands Conservation.

The decline equates to a drop of about 30 per cent, although the Falklands population is thought to have dipped by about 85 per cent since 1932, when there were more than 1.5 million birds.

It is thought that global warming may be behind its decline, as warmer seas are less productive and the penguins may not be able to find enough food to eat, but researchers admit they have not yet established the reasons.

Extreme autumn temperatures caused unseasonable flowering in the Netherlands.

The mean autumn temperature in 2006 was 13.6°C, which is 3.4°C above the long-term average.

Observers in the Netherlands reported that more than 240 wild plant species were flowering in December, along with more than 200 cultivated species.

According to biologist Arnold van Vliet of Wageningen University, this unseasonable flowering is being caused by extremely high autumn temperatures.

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This year will go down as the driest year in history in many parts of Tasmania. Hobart, Burnie and Devonport are all set to register their driest year on record.

It has also been exceptionally dry in Launceston - but not as dry as in 1972.

Some Northern centres, like Burnie, have received only 40 per cent of their average annual rainfall.

“2006 will stand out in the record books,” Bureau of Meteorology spokesman Ian Barnes-Keaghan said.

“For instance, about 250mm of rain would need to fall in Ulverstone over the next 10 days to even meet that town’s previous driest year on record.

A ski chairlift idle in sunny Kitzbühel, Austria. A new study says the Alps are now the warmest they have been in 1,250 years.

How balmy has it been in the Alps these last few months, asks the New York Times?

At the bottom of the Hahnenkamm, the famously treacherous downhill course in this Austrian ski resort, the slope peters out into a grassy field. And it’s just 10 days before Christmas.

Snow cannons are showering clouds of white crystals over the slopes, but by midmorning each day, the machines have to be turned off because the mercury has risen too far for the fake snow to stick.

“Of course I’m nervous about the snow, but what am I supposed to do?” said Signe Kramheller-Reisch, as she walked in a field outside her family’s hotel, wearing suede shoes and a resigned expression.

“We have classic winters and we have nonclassic winters.”

This season is certainly shaping up as a nonclassic, but it may be a milestone of another kind. The record warmth — in some places autumn temperatures were three degrees Celsius above average — has brought home the profound threat of climate change to Europe’s ski industry.

If venturing outdoors without a jacket is not enough evidence, there are two new studies — one that says the Alps are the warmest they have been in 1,250 years and another that predicts that an increase of a few more degrees would leave most Alpine resorts with too little  snow to survive.

Climate change is causing longer, more aggressive bushfire seasons and must be factored into the state’s firefighting plans, Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner said yesterday.

“We are seeing unprecedented fire behaviour,” Commissioner Bruce Esplin said.

“Conditions are far worse and we need to be able todeal with a far more aggressive, long-lasting and dangerous fireseason.”

Mr Esplin said drought, below average rainfall and bushfires had become the norm. “If we happen to have a wet year, that’s an exception”.

He called for a new attitude to fire management and said climate change was the “missing link” in criticism and debate.

“Too many people are trying to live out the history of the past,” he told The Age.

Mr Esplin’s comments came as Sydney’s Climate Institute warned that Victoria would experience far more frequent bushfires due to global warming.

An institute report predicted that very high or extreme bushfire danger days in Melbourne, Bendigo and Sale would jump by up to 23per cent by 2020 if temperatures rose by 0.9 degrees.