Are there connections between burning fossil fuels and cyclones in Australia? We have burned so much coal, oil, and natural gas the last 150 years that the concentration of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide has increased by about 40% – from about 270 PPM to about 390 PPM, from about 2.5 trillion tons to 3.67 trillion tons. (Click here or here).
From Meraiah Foley’s “Australians Take Cover as Cyclone Lashes Coast,” posted on The New York Times:
SYDNEY, Australia — One of the most powerful cyclones ever to strike Australia ripped dozens houses from their foundations, uprooted trees and shredded millions of dollars worth of sugar and banana crops when it slammed into Queensland’s northeastern coast in the predawn hours on Thursday.
“It was really terrifying, but we were safe,” said Barbara Kendall in a report from The Associated Press. She said she spent a sleepless night in a basement parking garage with her husband and four cats after evacuating their coastal home at Kurrimine Beach. “It’s a terrifying sound. It’s really hard to describe. All I could hear was the screeching of the wind.”
Some of the hardest-hit towns were still isolated by floodwaters and fallen trees into Thursday afternoon, but emergency crews were working quickly to assess the damage. Power was out in more than 180,000 homes, and could stay that way for several days, according to Ergon Energy, the region’s main utility.
The emergency services minister, Neil Roberts, said around two dozen homes were heavily damaged in the coastal village of Mission Beach, about 60 miles south of Cairns. In nearby Tully, about one-third of homes and 20 percent of businesses were seriously damaged, he said.
Television footage from Tully showed how the cyclone ripped the walls and roof from the senior citizens’ hall, stopping the clock at about 25 minutes past midnight, shortly after the storm made landfall. Some homes were spared major damage; others were reduced to matchsticks.
- An aerial view showed homes destroyed in a caravan park in Tully, in the northern Australian state of Queensland, on Thursday
“It’s just like weapons have come through, bombs have come through and destroyed everything,” a Red Cross coordinator, Noelene Byrne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Excerpted from Meraiah Foley’s “Australians Take Cover as Cyclone Lashes Coast,” in The New York Times, 3 February, 2011.