Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum

cooran wrote:Hello all,

It was to be a wonderful long weekend with monday as a public holiday.

We were looking forward to it after the searing temperatures in the 40C-45C ranges. Imagine lying on beach, surfing, walking in the sub-tropical rain forest, camping, family gatherings ..........

Then - the rains came ..and came.. and came.. and came.. Floods, roads closed, high winds, tornadoes, road accidents, houses wrecked

http://au.news.yahoo.com/qld-floods/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Dukkha, dukkha, dukkha

with metta
Chris

Ben wrote:

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Ben wrote:Unbelievably archetypal australian phenomena of drought, bushfire and flood.

Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice
10 November 2011
J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy
Abstract. The "climate dice" describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more "loaded" during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming. The most dramatic and important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate outliers. These extremes were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering much less than 1% of Earth's surface. Now summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology, typically cover about 10% of the land area. Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming. If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by mid-century 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.
The greatest barrier to public recognition of human-made climate change is the natural variability of climate. How can a person discern long-term climate change, given the notorious variability of local weather and climate from day to day and year to year?
This question assumes great practical importance, because of the need for the public to appreciate the significance of human-made global warming. Actions to stem emissions of the gases that cause global warming, mainly CO2, are unlikely to approach what is needed until the public perceives that human-made climate change is underway and will have disastrous consequences if effective actions are not taken to short-circuit the climate change