[Data analyzed on Wednesday by the government-run Bureau of
Meteorology indicated that national heat records had again been set – Tuesday
was the third hottest day on record at 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and the mean
national temperature average was the highest in history, breaking a record set
just the day before, on Monday. Meteorologists have taken the extraordinary
step of adding two new colors to its temperature charts to extend their range
to 54 C(129 F) from the previous cap of 50 degrees C (122 F) to account
for the climbing temperatures.]
By Matt Siegel
 |
Lukas
Coch/European Pressphoto Agency
Firefighters
battled a grass fire in Oura, near Wagga Wagga, Australia, on Tuesday.
On
Monday, Australia’s hottest day on record, the national
average was 104.59 degrees. |
Four months of record-breaking
temperatures stretching back to September of last year have combined over the
past week with widespread drought conditions and high winds to create what the
government had labeled “catastrophic” fire conditions along the heavily
populated eastern and southeastern coasts of the country, where much of the
population is centered.
Data analyzed on Wednesday by the
government-run Bureau of Meteorology indicated that national heat records had
again been set – Tuesday was the third hottest day on record at 40 Celsius (104
Fahrenheit) and the mean national temperature average was the highest in
history, breaking a record set just the day before, on Monday. Meteorologists
have taken the extraordinary step of adding two new colors to its temperature
charts to extend their range to 54 C(129 F) from the previous cap of 50
degrees C (122 F) to account for the climbing temperatures.
“If you look at yesterday, at Australia as
a whole, it was the hottest day in our records going back to 1911,” said Dr.
David Jones, manager of climate monitoring prediction at the Bureau of
Meteorology. “From this national perspective, one might say this is the largest
heat event in the country’s recorded history.”
With the record-breaking heat,
firefighters were struggling to contain the huge bushfires in Australia’s most
populous state, New South Wales, which have swallowed around 324,000 acres of
forest and farmland since they erupted on Tuesday. Fires on the island state of
Tasmania off the country’s southern coast have destroyed 80,000 hectares since
Friday.
No deaths have been reported in connection
with the fires, although about 100 people remain unaccounted for since a fire
destroyed around 90 homes in the Tasmanian town of Dunalley, east of the state
capital of Hobart, last week.
Thousands of head of cattle and sheep are
believed to have died already in the fires, which have torn through some of the
country's most productive agricultural and farming regions. Some 10,000 sheep
alone are believed to have died in New South Wales, according to the state
government's Department of Primary Industries.
Despite a brief respite from the searing
heat in some coastal areas on Wednesday, the government has warned that the hot
spell was only just getting started as the so-called “Dome of Heat” began
moving up the eastern seaboard away from Sydney, where it was expected to
deliver more blistering weather to Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city.
 |
Dean
Lewins/European Pressphoto Agency
A firefighter
fought to save a property threatened by the Dean's Gully fire near
Wandandian,
south of Nowra, New South Wales on Tuesday.
|
"Those of us who spend our days
trawling - and contributing to - the scientific literature on climate change
are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilization,” Dr.
Elizabeth Hanna, a researcher at the Australian National University in
Canberra, told The Sydney Morning Herald. ”We are well past the time of
niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying
not to scare the public.”
Dr. Jones, the government climate
scientist, echoed that opinion.
“This event is turning out to be hotter,
more spatially expansive and the duration is quite remarkable,” he said in an
interview. “And that suggests climate change.”
At least 141 fires continued to rage in
New South Wales on Wednesday, with 31 of those fires burning out of control.
The deputy commissioner of the state’s Rural Fire Service, Rob Rogers, told
reporters that it was a bad sign that the fires could not be contained during
the brief drop in temperatures.
“We’ve got a huge swath of New South Wales
that potentially is going to get new fires again this afternoon,” Mr. Rogers
said. “It will be an absolute battle to get containment on most of those fires
before the return of the hot weather on the weekend.”
Tuesday’s new high adds to a growing list
of records the Bureau of Meteorology has recorded during this extended heat
wave: the first time the country has recorded seven consecutive days of
temperatures above 39 C; the year with the most record hot days in Australia
since national records began in 1910, and nationwide average temperatures on
each of the first eight days of 2013 that were among the top 20 hottest days on
record here.
Dr. Jones warned that there was no sign
that temperatures would stay down even as the heat wave appeared to slightly
recede in Sydney on Wednesday.
“We expect it to stay very hot across
inland Australia for the next week,” he said. “Beyond that it’s hard to say.”
@ The New York Times
BRITISH SOLDIER KILLED AND SIX OTHERS WOUNDED IN ATTACK BY AFGHAN SOLDIER
BRITISH SOLDIER KILLED AND SIX OTHERS WOUNDED IN ATTACK BY AFGHAN SOLDIER
[During the attack, which occurred at Camp Hazrat, a joint patrol base in the Nahr-e-Seraj District of Helmand Province, several Afghan soldiers were also shot at but were not wounded, said Maj. Gen. Sayed Maluk, the commanding general of the Afghan Army’s 215 Corps, in a statement to the British Forces Broadcasting Service, an arm of the British Defense Ministry.]
By Alissa J. Rubin And Taimoor Shah
The attacker, who struck on Monday evening, also shot and
wounded six other British soldiers in the engineering regiment, three of them
seriously, before being killed, Afghan and British officials said.
During the attack, which occurred at Camp Hazrat, a joint
patrol base in the Nahr-e-Seraj District of Helmand Province, several Afghan
soldiers were also shot at but were not wounded, said Maj. Gen. Sayed Maluk,
the commanding general of the Afghan Army’s 215 Corps, in a statement to the
British Forces Broadcasting Service, an arm of the British Defense Ministry.
“It was the British team that sustained injuries,” General
Maluk said. “Unfortunately, they were engineering personnel, and they were
building billeting for the A.N.A.”
He said the Afghan Army was doing everything it could to
prevent such attacks. Until 2011, insider attacks, also known as “green on blue”
attacks, were a relatively minor problem for the Western military forces in
Afghanistan.
But last year, 62 international troops and civilian
contractors died in attacks by Afghan forces. Two additional attacks are still
under investigation.
Many in the military see the escalation as a game changer that requires Western troops to stay
at arm’s length from the Afghans they are supposed to be training and
mentoring.
At one point late last summer, Gen. John R. Allen, the
commander for international forces in Afghanistan, temporarily suspended joint
patrols unless they were approved at the highest levels because of the risk.
Members of NATO units were required to carry weapons
with a loaded magazine, and each unit assigned some troops as “guardian angels”
to protect fellow soldiers from insider attacks during meetings with Afghans as
well as on patrol.
The Afghan Defense Ministry overhauled its screening
process for new recruits and rescreened those already deployed.
“Prior to this incident happening we have done almost
everything that we can,” General Maluk said.
He said Afghan soldiers have been told by religious leaders
inside the corps that the coalition forces “are not invaders, they are our
friendly forces; they are not here to invade, but rather they are here to help
us reconstruct this country.”
“But to them, the enemy is the enemy,” he said.
The Taliban claimed
responsibility for arranging the infiltration into the Afghan Army of the
soldier responsible for Monday’s shooting.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yusuf, said that the attacker’s
name was Mohammed Qasim and that Mr. Qasim had “fulfilled his blessed duty.”
Mr. Qasim, who was 23 to 25 years old and was known as
Sheik Mohammed by his fellow soldiers, was a reticent young man who came from
eastern Afghanistan, said Col. Abdul Saboor, an officer with the 215 Corps.
The sequence of events that led to the attack is still
unclear, but it seems that the attacker, Mr. Qasim, was on guard duty in a
tower as punishment for an infraction and initially began shooting at his
Afghan compatriots. It is not clear if Mr. Qasim intended to kill them or
whether it was a ploy to draw the British troops closer so that he could target
them more easily.
Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and
Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting
from Kabul.
