Word: australia
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...raging infernos that have left more than 160 people dead in southern Australia burned with such speed that they resembled less a wildfire than a massive aerial bombing. Many victims caught in the blazes had no time to escape; their houses disintegrated around them, and they burned to death. As firefighters battle the flames and police begin to investigate possible cases of arson around some of the fires, there will surely be debates over the wisdom of Australia's standard policy of advising residents to either flee a fire early or stay in their homes and wait it out. John...
Although the wildfires caught so many victims by surprise last weekend, there has been no shortage of distant early-warning signs. The 11th chapter of the second working group of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, warned that fires in Australia were "virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency" because of steadily warming temperatures over the next several decades. Research published in 2007 by the Australian government's own Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization reported that by 2020, there could be up to 65% more "extreme" fire-danger days compared with 1990, and that...
Destructive wildfires are already common in Australia, and it's not hard to see why climate change would increase their frequency. The driest inhabited continent on the planet, Australia has warmed 0.9°C since 1950, and climate models predict the country could warm further by 2070, up to 5°C over 1990 temperatures, if global greenhouse-gas emissions go unchecked. Beyond a simple rise in average temperatures, climate change will also lead to an increase in Australia's extreme heat waves and droughts. Southwestern Australia is already in the grip of a prolonged drought that has decimated agriculture...
...important to acknowledge that no single weather event can be definitively caused by climate change - and it's possible that the current inferno in Australia might have been as intense and deadly even without the warming of the past several decades. Police are beginning to suspect that many of the fires may have been deliberately set, and the sheer increase in the number of homes built in fire-danger zones in southern Australia today puts more people in harm's way, raising the potential death toll. Still, heat waves and drought set the table for wildfires, and temperatures...
...Similar atheist campaigns have run in Barcelona, Madrid and Washington, D.C. But since its Jan. 6 launch, the London scheme has been credited with inspiring atheist bus campaigns in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Italy, where next month posters in Genoa will read, "The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that we do not need him." The Genoa campaign prompted Father Gianfranco Calabrese, a spokesman for the Archbishop of Genoa, to speak out against what many opponents of the campaign call blasphemy. "There are some methods which promote dialogue and others which feed intolerance...