‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C

It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

 A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia.

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

Read the story from The Guardian by Naaman Zhou - “‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C.”

Polar Vortex roars across the US

Snow covers vehicles in a rental car parking lot
 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. 

A winter storm's unrelenting march across the United States' northern tier brought snow to a handful of states on Sunday and promised plunging temperatures that could drive frost as far south as Atlanta by week's end.

"It may not set records, but it will be really, really cold," Bruce Sullivan, senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Centre said. "The thing is, it's not even winter yet."

Parts of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin were among states blasted Sunday by a band dumping up to 20 centimetres of snow more than a week before winter officially begins. A few areas, such as Granite Falls, Minnesota are reaching double-digit accumulations.

On Monday the snow was forecast to roll into Upstate New York and parts of New England. A wide swath of the region could see up to 15 centimetres, with more in the mountains. New York City was bracing for snow Sunday night that was expected to turn to rain by Monday, the National Weather Service said.

Read the story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Polar Vortex roars across the US.”

Don't look now! But there is an elephant standing in the room

Unrelenting population growth is the elephant in the room when the conversation turns to climate change.

Humans are squeezing the life out of the planet and by inference threatening their own existence.

A story on Mongabay.com headed: “Unrelenting population growth driving global warming, mass extinction” explores the fatal-like nexus between climate change and population growth.

Humans are prolific breeders and although it took 200 000 years to reach the first landmark of one billion, but in 200 years we have septupled that and over the last 40 years we have added a further billion every dozen years or so.

Then add to that the fact that the United Nations has said the earth will have a total of about 11 billion people by the century’s end.

Despite this few scientists, policymakers, or even environmentalists are willing to publicly connect incredible population growth to worsening climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, or the global environmental crisis in general.

"We are already to a point where our population size is unsustainable," Jeffrey McKee with the Ohio State University told mongabay.com.