January 9, 2013

RECORD HEAT FUELS WIDESPREAD FIRES IN AUSTRALIA

[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 


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.
SYDNEY, Australia — Australia on Wednesday was grappling with an unprecedented heat wave that has sparked raging bushfires across some of the country’s most populated regions – pushing firefighters to their limits, residents to their wits’ end and leaving meteorologists tracking the soaring temperatures into uncharted territory.
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.
NASA published alarming photographs of the enormous fires, which have grown so large that they are visible from outer space, allowing them to be photographed from the International Space Station on Tuesday. The intensity of the bushfires and the unrelenting nature of the heat have already led some climate scientists to criticize what they see as an indifference to the realities of man-made climate change, which is widely believed to be the driving factor behind these events.
"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

[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
KABUL, Afghanistan — A British soldier who was helping to build new quarters for the Afghan National Army at a small base in southern Afghanistan was fatally shot by an Afghan soldier in the first insider attack of 2013, military officials said Tuesday.
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.