Australia fire crews face extreme weather in NSW

BBC: More than 3,000 firefighters in Australia are battling devastating bushfires raging across New South Wales as weather conditions worsen. "This will be as bad as it gets," Rural Fire Service chief Shane Fitzsimmons said, adding there was "real potential for more loss of homes and life".

High temperatures, low humidity and strong winds of up to 100km/h (60mph) were forecast for Wednesday. In total, 71 fires are burning across the state, 29 of which are uncontained.

Hundreds more firefighters have been deployed to the Blue Mountains, to the west of Sydney, to work alongside the 1,000 already there, making it one of the largest firefighting contingents ever assembled in the state's history.

Residents have been urged to leave affected areas. Hundreds of nursing home residents were evacuated late on Tuesday and all schools in the area are closed.

"We are all in this together and we are going to get through this day. If you haven't prepared yourself, for those in the Blue Mountains, now is the time to leave," NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell said at a news conference on Wednesday morning. "We hope, of course, today's conditions and potential events do not occur. We've planned for the worst but we continue to hope for the best."...

Smoke from the State Mine Fire over Sydney, October 17, 2013, shot by RazorEyeEdits, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Exact climate change contribution to floods won't be clear for a decade, say scientists

Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald: The floods inundating northern NSW and Queensland are likely to have been driven in part by human-induced climate change - although the precise extent of this influence won't be known for another decade. Leading climate researchers said the frequency of El Nino and La Nina events that bring drought and flood to Australia seems to have increased in the past 30 years, even though such events have been occurring independently of human influence for far longer.

''It's completely naive to exclude climate change as a contributor to the floods because of the rapid warming of the oceans, but we are not yet at the stage where we can be too specific about individual events,'' a climate researcher at the University of NSW, Matthew England, said.

The El Nino/La Nina-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a cycle caused by warm sea-surface temperatures and air-pressure changes, and is a principal driver of weather in the southern hemisphere. Unusually, Australia has endured two La Ninas in the past 18 months, leading to the nation recording the wettest two-year period since instrumental records began in the 1880s.

''Some of the main El Nino and La Nina reconstructions available show a significant trend in the cycles over the past century and particularly in the last 30 years,'' Professor England said. ''We are getting more El Nino and La Nina events. 'One thing that's certain is that the water north of Australia has warmed about 0.7 degrees above the long-term average. For this key region, we are in the situation now where the long-term trend is as significant as natural variability.''

Recent studies overseas have drawn similar conclusions. A paper published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change reported an increased frequency of ENSO in the past 30 years...

A 4WD crosses the rising Boyne River east of Durong in Queensland, shot by Sweetbixkid, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Sandbag strategy leaves an Australian beach's future living on the edge

Kelsey Munro in the Sydney Morning Herald: Emergency work to prevent further coastal erosion at the northern NSW town of Kingscliff has been stalled by red tape, with council staff warning many more seaside communities will face the same problem unless the complex coastal protection laws are streamlined.

Kingscliff has lost an estimated 40 metres of beach to the sea in less than two months, leaving the surf club and cabins at a caravan park dangling at the edge of the water. But protection works must stop by Friday because NSW legislation requires the council to go through a public tender process to procure more sandbags.

The council-owned Kingscliff Beach Holiday Park has already spent $800,000 on temporary protection works, and is building a four metre-high sandbag wall along the most damaged sections of beach. Phase two, for which they have environmental approval, requires larger, more durable sandbags but the council must cease work for at least a week for the procurement process.

Richard Adams, who runs the park for Tweed Shire, said the situation was ''frustrating''. ''In an emergency event like this, where clearly there is an extenuating circumstance, it would be great if we could go to the government and say let's look at some way to relieve us from some of the more protracted planning consent and procurement issues,'' he said....

A view of the Cocked Hat Rocks at Broken Head (NSW, Australia)