Human Influence On Climate Clear, IPCC Report Says

It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. The evidence for this has grown, thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.

Warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850, reports the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group I assessment report, Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by member governments of the IPCC in Stockholm, Sweden.

"Observations of changes in the climate system are based on multiple lines of independent evidence. Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased," said Qin Dahe, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.

Thomas Stocker, the other Co-Chair of Working Group I said: "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions."

"Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is projected to be likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900 in all but the lowest scenario considered, and likely to exceed 2°C for the two high scenarios," said Co-Chair Thomas Stocker. "Heat waves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As Earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall, and dry regions receiving less, although there will be exceptions," he added.

Projections of climate change are based on a new set of four scenarios of future greenhouse gas concentrations and aerosols, spanning a wide range of possible futures. The Working Group I report assessed global and regional-scale climate change for the early, mid-, and later 21st century.

"As the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years," said Co-Chair Qin Dahe. The report finds with high confidence that ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010.

Co-Chair Thomas Stocker concluded: "As a result of our past, present and expected future emissions of CO2, we are committed to climate change, and effects will persist for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 stop."

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, said: "This Working Group I Summary for Policymakers provides important insights into the scientific basis of climate change. It provides a firm foundation for considerations of the impacts of climate change on human and natural systems and ways to meet the challenge of climate change." These are among the aspects assessed in the contributions of Working Group II and Working Group III to be released in March and April 2014. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report cycle concludes with the publication of its Synthesis Report in October 2014.

"I would like to thank the Co-Chairs of Working Group I and the hundreds of scientists and experts who served as authors and review editors for producing a comprehensive and scientifically robust summary. I also express my thanks to the more than one thousand expert reviewers worldwide for contributing their expertise in preparation of this assessment," said IPCC Chair Pachauri.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGI AR5) is available at www.climatechange2013.org or www.ipcc.ch.

 

Water harvesting helps Kenya's women cope with failing rains

NGURUBANI, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Rose Wanjiku first moved to her home in Central Kenya province 14 years ago, the region received four months of rain every year. The rains began in April and again in October, and were sufficient for a small-scale farmer such as herself to grow staples like maize and beans to feed her family and sell the surplus at local markets.

Today the Ngurubani area gets only two months of rain a year. Because of the growing scarcity, Wanjiku has resorted to irrigating her crops with water pumped from the Thiba River when rains fail in mid-season. Even though the river is just a stone’s throw away from her house and fields, the water pump means extra expenses for her household.

“Farming has become very expensive for us these days. We hardly make profits,” said her husband Munene. His wife added that the river water cannot be used for household purposes because it is too muddy.

To counter the water shortages, Wanjiku, 45, has begun harvesting rainwater. Her roof is fitted with gutters and through a loan from SMEP, a Kenyan microfinance programme, she has bought a 2,300-litre (600-gallon) water tank to store the harvested water.

Rainwater gathered since April has been sustaining her household until the rains are due to begin again next month.

Wanjiku began making loan payments of 1,000 Kenyan shillings (around $11) a month in February, and aims to clear the loan by November.

The frustrations of poor rainfall also have taken a toll on Margaret Njeri Muthee, 38, another farmer and secretary of the 12-member Wendani Women’s Group, which also counts Wanjiku as a member.

Njeri recalls that when she first moved to Ngurubani 15 years ago, rains were regular and she was able to harvest up to two 90kg bags of beans per acre of land. Today she gets half a bag of beans at most.

“The weather has really changed here – there is a chill I never saw before, destroying our staples,” Njeri said. Because of the unpredictable weather and poor crop yields, Njeri now rears pigs, in addition to chickens and cattle.

“I’m tired of farming maize and beans,” she added.

As a result of increasingly short rainfall, Njeri was spending 400 shillings (nearly $5) every week to pay for a donkey-drawn cart to fetch water from the Thiba River, over a kilometre away from her home. But now she, too, has a water tank, bought on credit from SMEP.

Njeri and Wanjiku are among over 7,000 Kenyan recipients of an ongoing water credit schemeaccessed through microfinance institutions such as SMEP. The scheme enables households to buy tanks to capture and store clean rainwater that runs from rooftops along the gutters.

WIDESPREAD WATER STRESS

UNESCO reports that 17 million of Kenya’s 41 million inhabitants lack access to safe water.

Of the loan recipients, 92 percent are women. According to Patrick Alubbe, East Africa regional director of Water.Org, a nongovernmental organisation, it is the women in households who must spend hours searching for water, and this makes them appreciate the scheme, as it saves them time.

SMEP has given 821 water-related loans so far, with repayment rates of more than 90 percent, according to Fridah Njeru, SMEP’s senior programmes coordinator.

Kenya has 29,000 beneficiaries of water-related loans countrywide, with some funds going to building latrines or fix sewer systems to improve sanitation. The scheme also operates in Uganda, Bangladesh and India.

With a tank to harvest rainwater, Wanjiku says she no longer needs to wait for mud in collected river water to settle at the bottom of her containers so that she can use it at home.

Kenya’s average annual rainfall is 630 mm, which qualities it as a water-scarce country, according to a study published by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. However, astudy by the Southern and Eastern Africa Rainwater Network notes that large groundwater aquifers represents a valuable water resource not directly related to or dependent on rainfall patterns.

Experts are pointing to aquifers as the country’s next important source of water. This comes following the recent discovery of aquifers in the drought-hit Turkana region in Kenya’s north, where rainfall does not exceed 450mm annually.

The aquifers are reported to hold 250 billion cubic metres – enough to supply Kenya’s needs for 70 years at the current rate of consumption of 3 billion cubic metres a year. More

James Karuga is a Nairobi-based journalist interested in agriculture and climate change issues.

 

Photos Show Why the Colorado Floods Are Being Called ‘Biblical’

Four people in Colorado this week already lost their lives in the record-breaking rains and floods that are battering parts of the state, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes.

On Friday, Governor John Hickenlooper declared a disaster emergency for 14 counties from the Wyoming border to Colorado Springs. President Obama also declared a federal state of emergency for Boulder, Larimer, and El Paso counties, allowing FEMA to deploy four rescue teams to those areas.

This afternoon, Reuters reports that a fifth victim, a 60-year-old woman who was swept away by flood waters, is now missing and presumed dead.

With no signs of a slow-down, even the comparatively shorter rains expected this weekend are expected to cause further flash-flooding as areas of Colorado's landscape are already well oversaturated.

Unlike other recent flooding disasters in countries like Taiwan and China, Colorado's defies expectation. September tends to be a drier month for the state, reports National Geographic.

Sandra Postel, National Geographic's Freshwater Fellow, tells the magazine that the flooding may be linked to recent droughts, which have hardened the soil of the Colorado River Basin, preventing it from absorbing much of the rainfall. Forest fires may also shoulder some of the blame; a portion of the vegetation normally responsible for trapping rainwater burned to the ground in recent years.

The most pressing question remains: How much of a hand has global warming played in these events? Climate Central's Andrew Freedmanwrites:

"It will take climate scientists many months to complete studies into whether manmade global warming made the Boulder flood more likely to occur, but the amount by which this event has exceeded past events suggests that manmade warming may have played some role by making the event worse than it would have otherwise been." More

 

After the Storms, A Different Opinion on Climate Change

Extreme weather may lead people to think more seriously about climate change, according to new research. In the wake of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, New Jersey residents were more likely to show support for a politician running on a “green” platform, and expressed a greater belief that climate change is caused by human activity.

This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that traumatic weather events may have the power to shift people’s automatic attitudes — their first instincts — in favor of environmentally sustainable policies.

Though scientists are in near-unilateral agreement that human activity contributes to climate change, the relationship isn’t as clear to many politicians and citizens. This translates into lackluster support for environmental policies, especially when the short-term consequences amount to higher taxes.

“Americans tend to vote more from a self-interested perspective rather than demand that their government affect change,” says lead researcher Laurie Rudman of Rutgers University.

In 2010, Rudman and her colleagues Meghan McLean and Martin Bunzl surveyed over 250 Rutgers undergraduate students, measuring their attitudes toward two politicians, one who favored and another who opposed environmental policies that involve tax increases. The researchers asked the students whether they believed that humans are causing climate change, and they also had the students complete a test intended to reveal their automatic, instinctual preferences toward the politicians.

Though most students said they preferred the green politician, their automatic preferences suggested otherwise. The automatic-attitudes test indicated that the students tended to prefer the politician who did not want to raise taxes to fund environment-friendly policy initiatives.

After Hurricanes Irene and Sandy devastated many areas on the Eastern Seaboard in 2012, Rudman and colleagues wondered whether they would see any differences in students’ attitudes toward environmental policies.

“It seemed likely that what was needed was a change of ‘heart,’” Rudman explains. “Direct, emotional experiences are effective for that.”

In contrast with the first group, students tested in 2012 showed a clear preference for the green politician, even on the automatic attitudes test. And those students who were particularly affected by Hurricane Sandy – experiencing power outages, school disruptions, even damaged or destroyed homes – showed the strongest preference for the green politician.

“Not only was extreme weather persuasive at the automatic level, people were more likely to base their decisions on their gut-feelings in the aftermath of Sandy, compared to before the storm,” Rudman explains.

While they don’t know whether the first group of students would have shown a shift in attitudes after the storms, the researchers believe their findings provide evidence that personal experience is one factor that can influence instinctive attitudes toward environmental policy. If storms do become more prevalent and violent as the climate changes, they argue, more people may demand substantive policy changes. More

Colorado and industry working to assess damage in flooded oil fields

Colorado's richest oil field — the Denver-Julesburg Basin — is buried in floodwaters, raising operational and environmental concerns, as state and industry officials work to get a handle on the problem.

Champion Greens neighborhood in Longmont, CO

Thousands of wells and operating sites have been affected — some remain in rushing waters, officials said.

"The scale is unprecedented," said Mike King, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. "We will have to deal with environmental contamination from whatever source."

Any pollution from oil fields likely will be mixed with a stew of agricultural pesticides, sewage, gasoline from service stations and other contaminants, King said.

"As far as we know, all wells affected by flooding have been shut," said Tisha Schuller, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, a trade group.

The basin, one of the most promising onshore oil plays, has been the target of an estimated $4 billion of oil industry investment, with about 48 rigs operating when the flood hit.

Companies are using boats and helicopters to check sites not accessible by road, Schuller said.

"As water levels recede, operators are assessing any damage and addressing it," she said.

The major public health risks will come from contaminated water and sediments, said Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a Natural Resources Defense Council staff scientist.

"The aim is to find where there may be significant pollutants and where they are heading," said Rotkin-Ellman, who studied industrial contamination in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The

Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is setting up a clearinghouse to log the status of every well and operation, said Matt Lepore, the commission's executive director.

The commission also is using its mapping technology to identify well sites along the South Platte River for inspection.

"Mapping is a really good first step — it locates where the problem could be," said NRDC's Rotkin-Ellman.

The commission is forming teams — including inspectors, engineers and environmental specialists — to focus on locations north and south of the South Platte.

Still, the specter of pollution has raised concerns among environmentalist and community groups.

"With the Texas Gulf Coast, they know in advance a hurricane is coming," said Irene Fortune, a retired chemist who worked for British Petroleum and is now running for the Loveland City Council.

"To have something this inland, this level of flooding in an area with high oil and gas development, it's new territory," Fortune said.

Gary Wockner, Colorado Program Director for Clean Water Action, said, "Every flooded well needs to get inspected.

"The COGCC needs to pass new regulations for drilling in floodplains to better protect people and the environment."

There are more than 20,000 wells in th e DJ-Basin and surrounding areas and 3,200 permits for open pits in Weld County, according to state data.

A review of the pit permits, however, found a significant number are old permits that may not be operating — most were to hold produced water that contains salts and metals from wells.

Major operators in the basin said they were able to shut all the wells hit by the flood.

Encana Oil & Gas (USA) has shut about one-third of its 1,241 wells, the company said.

"We have plans in place to inspect all of our facilities," Doug Hock, an Encana spokesman, said in an e-mail. "We're using (geographic information systems) to help prioritize lower-lying facilities that may likely have greater impacts."

Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the second-largest operator in the basin, shut wells and stopped drilling activity.

"The majority of our drilling, completions and workover activities in the affected areas of the field have been shut down," the company said on its website.

"Restarting the activities is expected to be significantly delayed due to road and location conditions," the company said.

The well sites are designed to withstand harsh weather, said William Fleckenstein, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

"The actual wells are meant to hold pressure on the inside. They're designed to be fluid-tight," Fleckenstein said.

Concern arises when tanks are knocked over or damaged, Fleckenstein said.

The "worst-case scenario," however, would be damage to a high-pressure gas line, which would leak hydrocarbons in the air and be "very explosive," Fleckenstein said.

The impact of the flood waters has been uneven in the basin, said the oil and gas association's Schuller. Some areas are untouched, and some facilities are still surrounded by flowing water, Schuller said.

"It may take some operations a week to get back up," Schuller said. "It may take a year for others."

Pictures of flooded well and drilling sites and damaged or floating tanks have been appearing on several social-media sites.

"We've seen the pictures but don't know the locations," Schuller said. "If people provide the locations, we will check them." More

Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe

 

Massive Flooding Shuts Down Entire Region of Northern Colorado Read more: PHOTOS: Massive Flooding Shuts Down Entire Region of Northern Colorado

The Northern Colorado Front Range is experiencing an unprecedented flood that has stranded and displaced thousands of residents and shut down well over a dozen towns.

Every river and stream in an 80 mile swath from west of Denver to Ft Collins has overflowed its banks, taking out major highways to towns in the mountains, and flooding entire communities downstream. While flooding has been a concern for years and flood controls have been built up, the sheer scale and volume of the rains have ground Colorado to a halt while altering the landscape to an unrecognizable state and prompting a state of emergency throughout the region. From my vantage on a mountain 10 miles west of Fort Collins, the sound of water cascading through the vast valley below fills the air, and all roads further west are closed.

The true scope of the damage will not be known for some time. The record-breaking forest fires in Larimer County and Colorado Springs last year have hampered the ability of the landscape to absorb the water, which has only aggravated the damage. The large rain totals (which have been gauged up to 11 inches in Boulder and 15 inches higher up) are a result of monsoonal moisture traveling north from the Gulf of Mexico. That moisture combined with a low pressure system to the west has created an upslope weather phenomena in which the Rocky Mountains literally squeeze the rain out of the clouds.

While the rains are finally subsiding, the volume of water in the mountains streams is actually picking up, closing virtually every bridge in Larimer and Boulder counties. Many roads near valley streams are destroyed along with homes and businesses. Some towns are completely isolated,including Lyons, and Estes Park (at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park) is only accessible by Trail Ridge Road – the highest paved road in the US. Many homes through the mountains are also cut off due to the roads being made impassable, if not outright destroyed.

In the larger cities at the base of the Front Range, most major bridges have closed, including I25, and neighborhoods scattered from Fort Collins to Denver have been evacuated as the waters find their way down from the mountains. Some of the flooding concerns come from failed dams like the one at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which prompted thousands of homes to be evacuated in Commerce City, just north of Denver. Many low-laying areas near rivers all along the Front Range have also been evacuated. Others residents have been asked to shelter in place as the scale of the flooding makes many roads impassable. More rain forecasted for this weekend will keep the state on high alert. More

 

Deadly 1,000-year floods strike Colorado

Biblical hell has broken out in Colorado, where more than six inches of rain fell in 24 hours, contributing to flash floods that killed at least three people.

(Before you complain about our use of “biblical,” note that it’s the word federal forecasters chose to describe the flooding in an official update on the National Weather Service website.)

“It’s insane right now, I’ve lived in Colorado my whole life, and this is nothing that I’ve ever, ever seen before,” Andra Coberly, spokesperson for the YMCA in Boulder, where soggy residents were taking shelter, told NBC. “Streets were turned into rivers and streams were turned into lakes.” From the NBC report:

The torrential downpours that lashed parts of Colorado drove hundreds of people from their homes, shut down Boulder and the nearby university, and had police and fire responders scrambling all day as they worked to help stranded residents in what they described as a still-developing disaster.

The bad weather also hampered rescue efforts, making it impossible to get search and rescue helicopters into the air, officials said at a press conference on Thursday afternoon, and increasing the dangers for responders who tried to make their way into some of the most affected areas. About 6.8 inches of rain fell over the city in a 24-hour period, according to the National Weather Service.

Slate science correspondent Phil Plait reported from Boulder that the sheriff was asking people to stay inside and off the roads. His post describes the years of climatic pandemonium that culminated with this week’s deluge:

We’ve been suffering a long drought in my hometown of Boulder, Colo., including unusually hot weather for the past few summers. The ground has been pretty hard, and we’ve had fires, which reduce the vegetation. It’s been worrisome for some time, because we knew if it rained hard, we could be in trouble.

We’re in trouble.

It started raining off and on a month or more ago, but then a couple of days ago, the skies opened up. We’ve had more than an inch of rain in some places, and it’s had nowhere to go but down from the foothills of the Rockies. Boulder is now flooding; the Boulder Creek crested at 2.7 meters (8.8 feet) last night, well above its usual height.

Further afield, folks at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been poring over satellite images and other data to try to make sense of the waterlogged chaos. Their startling conclusion: “This event could be classified as a 500- to 1000-year event.”

Meteorologist Jeff Masters explained in his Weather Underground blog that “a flow of extremely moist air” from the southeast pushed up against the mountains, expanding and cooling as it climbed, “forcing the moisture in it to fall as rain.” He posted the following map, showing that rainfall on Wednesday and Thursday was not only heavy around Boulder — the inundation was regional: More

 

Drought Called a Factor in Syria’s Uprising

Two-and-a-half years ago, a group of children in the Syrian city of Dara’a triggered one of the bloodiest conflicts in the 21^st century when they painted some anti-government graffiti on a school wall in the ancient farming community.

The children were quickly detained and tortured, leading to widespread protests in the city that were met with harsh repression. The government’s brutal response led to a nationwide revolt that has now stagnated into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. Dara’a is a mostly agricultural community in a region that has suffered an unrelenting drought since 2001.

Some experts say it’s no accident that Syria’s civil war began there. In 2009, the United Nations and other international agencies found that more than 800,000 Syrian farmers and herdsmen had been forced off their lands because of drought, with many crowding into cities like Dara’a. Additionally, thousands of illegal wells were drilled, drastically lowering the nation’s ground water supply.

The effects of drought and water-mismanagement in the region were highlighted recently by the publication of U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration satellite photographs of Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Faced with drought, Syrians crowding these farm towns started drilling deeper for fresh water in the aquifer beneath them. Experts estimated that 60 percent of the aquifer has been lost due to illegal drilling, and a total of 177 million-acre feet of water disappeared, the second-largest aquifer loss in the world.

Satellite images reveal depth of drought

“I actually don’t think the aquifer will recover,” said , a hydrologist and leader of a study of seven years of NASA satellite data that show the Tigris-Euphrates region second only to India in the speed of its groundwater loss. “The Middle East is the dry part of the world and now that climate change is expressing itself very clearly, one of the things that we will see is that the dry parts of the world will get drier,” Famiglietti said. “Think of it as a persistent prolonged drought.” Because of climate change, the Tigris-Euphrates basin and the underground reservoirs of fresh water that once nurtured this fragile desert climate may not be able to sustain future populations in Syria.

It all started in Dara’a

The Syrian uprising was unlike political uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and other Middle East states, all of which started in the major cities. Dara’a was a regional agricultural hub with a pre-war population of 90,000. “Dara’a is the capital of an agricultural province, one of the most significant agricultural areas,” said Syria scholar Ayel Zisser of the Tel Aviv University. Their protests spread from Dara’s at Syria’s southern border to communities north of Aleppo and across the vast al-Jazira plain that stretches from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks of the Tigris. The pattern of the protests followed the rural path of the drought. “Even until today it’s been a peasant revolt isolated to the rural areas,” Zisser said. Assad’s economic reforms focused on global trade that benefitted the urban middle classes, thereby worsening the plight of Syria’s farmers, according to Zisser. The reforms were implemented “at the expense of the population in the rural areas, where they abolished agricultural subsidies,” Zisser said. “The regime turned its back to the rural population and the result was the revolt.” Like other Middle Eastern countries, Syria’s population has increased dramatically in recent years. “This is the first time in history that in less than 30 years, the Middle East doubled its population. It was between 1950 and 1980,” said Arnon Soffer, a demographer and the head of research at the University of Haifa and Israel’s National Defense College. “If that’s not tragic enough, from 1980 to 2010 – another 30 years – this crazy area doubled itself again,” Soffer added. Even before climate change threatened less rainfall in the region, water was a hot-button issue. In 1973, Iraq rushed troops to Syria’s eastern border as upstream, Syria began filling its Tagba Dam with Euphrates water to create Lake Assad.

The real water power in basin is Turkey.

Syria and Iraq depend on the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, which flow from southern Turkey, for most of their agricultural irrigation. Farmers on both sides of the border also rely on traditional irrigation techniques that waste water resources. “Turks use most of the water of the Euphrates,” said Bogochan Benli, a water expert who worked in the Aleppo labs of the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas during the years of the drought. Aleppo and many northern Syrian communities traditionally also depended on the Euphrates for their drinking water, he said. In Turkey, Benli said since the 1970’s the Southeastern Anatolia project has created employment for a poor and arid region of Turkey. It’s the main income-generator for the region and their water policy “will never change.” The project is an ambitious development of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants to irrigate and provide electrical power in nine Turkish provinces. The centerpiece is the massive Ataturk Dam and hydroelectric power plant that opened in 1990. According Arnon Soffer of Haifa University a few months before the dam was completed, then-Turkish president Turgut Ozal told Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, “Now you can wash yourself for the next two months, but I will close the Ataturk Dam and I will dry the Euphrates River.” He said Ozal’s abrupt pronouncement to Hafez Assad was devastating to Syria. “The Euphrates became a wadi, a dry valley,” said Soffer. Assad Dam closed for a month. “The dam was empty and there was no electricity. Even up to today, I could not imagine how they could recover.” Though Turkey and its downstream neighbors have discussed sharing their waters, Turkey has not signed away any rights. With little or no regional cooperation on water issues, experts fear that the turmoil now wrecking Syria could be a prelude to other conflicts in the region. More

While there is still no regional conflict in the region there is a compelling need for an international organization to start a regional conversation on trans-boundary rivers. Rivers, although they may, as in this case originate in Turkey, are a critical element of the global commons, and must be fairly shared by all riverine states. We are no longer in colonial times where for instance Egypt got the lions share of the Nile, leaving very little for Ethiopia. Syria is already in turmoil, Turkey is simmering with protests, Jordan is being blown to and froe and Israel may go off on a tangent at any time. Let us therefore address this issue immediately.

 

At least two homes have been lost and seven firefighters injured as bushfires burn uncontained west of Sydney

At least two homes have been lost and seven firefighters injured as bushfires burn uncontained west of Sydney

Summary

We're wrapping up our live coverage. Here is a summary of today's events:

• Over 60 fires broke out across New South Wales as temperatures reached 30 degrees in some parts of the state. A map of fire locations is viewable here.
• Four of the blazes were given emergency warning level, meaning lives and property were under threat. At present one emergency warning, for the fire in Winmalee, Blue Mountains remains in place. The NSW rural fire service have said it may take days to contain the Winmalee blaze.
• Two firefighters have been injured with burns and five more have needed medical assistance for smoke inhalation.
• Two properties, one at Winmalee and one at Marsden park in western Sydney, have been destroyed.
• Ongoing updates on the status of the fires can be viewed on the NSW rural fire service website.

Yesterday, 11:23pm

The Fire Brigade Employees' Union, who represent professional firefighters in urban areas, has issued a damning statement, saying that NSW state government cuts has meant that firefighters were under resourced when fighting today's blazes. They say that five fire stations in Sydney were closed today as a result of cuts, and resources diverted from four others.

The statement says:

As today’s bushfire emergency hit — with multiple fires in Western Sydney, the Hawkesbury, Blue Mountains and the Central Coast — Fire and Rescue NSW has had to recall off-duty firefighters to cover the gaps and closures.

At Castlereagh, where a large fire is impacting rural properties, the local fire station was also closed on both Sunday and Monday this week.

Union secretary Jim Casey said:

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that hot weather and strong winds can mean bushfires, but it appears to be news to the O’Farrell Government who have been caught with their pants down today.

Off-duty fire crews had to be called in as neighbouring stations raced to protect life and property, all because budget cuts have left large areas of Sydney without adequate fire protection. More

The full statement is available here.

 

 

Storms wreak agricultural losses of over NT$400 million in Taiwan

Taipei, Sept. 1 (CNA) Agricultural losses wreaked by two successive tropical storms in late August rose Sunday to top NT$400 million (US$13.3 million), after days of torrential rains caused flooding and landslides in several parts of Taiwan.

Since Tropical Storm Trami struck Aug. 20, which was followed by another, named Kong-Rey, agricultural crops, products, buildings and equipment have sustained losses of NT$405 million, according to the latest tallies, as of 10:00 a.m.

Yunlin County was hardest hit by the storms, with losses there reaching NT$143 million. Nearby Chiayi County in southwestern Taiwan came next, with losses of NT$131 million, according to the Council of Agriculture.

The storms took their heaviest toll in rice, vegetables and fruits, with damaged crops reaching over NT$280 million, surpassing losses in livestock, fisheries and forestry, according to the council.

Additionally, farmers throughout Taiwan lost 435,000 chickens, 24,000 geese and 32,000 pigs, valued at NT$65.2 million, according to the council. More