Fuck 54 degrees in Aus....

[pErvinalia]

Jesus.... I used to like the idea of moving to Oz. But if scary animals weren't enough, it now gets hot enough to grow doughnuts. Yikes!

Someone was pointing out to me that some proteins start to denature at 55 degrees C. So if the snakes and sharks don't get you, you'll probably just end up as a sloppy gelatinous mass.

[JimC]

Agree in general on the nuclear issue, except that it is politically dead in the water...

[Blind groper]

That is true, Jim But there is nothing more changeable than politics.

[pErvinalia]

The problem with nukes is disposing of the wastes safely. I suggest developing massive railguns for launching space barges into the sun.

Getting rid of waste safely is a political problem - not a technical one. That is : getting around the millions of idiots crying, "No, no!"

Simple solution. Put the nuclear waste into safe containers and drop them into the bloody great holes left by abandoned open cast mines in central Australia or Southern Africa, where there is desert, no people, and a geology so stable that no earthquake or volcano will happen for at least a million years. Cover them with dirt. Leave for 10,000 years. No problem. Except for the previously mentioned idiots.

Actually, parts of central australia suffer quite big earthquakes. They don't get reported coz they don't do any damage to any humans or infrastructure, because there is none out there.

[JimC]

The problem with nukes is disposing of the wastes safely. I suggest developing massive railguns for launching space barges into the sun.

Getting rid of waste safely is a political problem - not a technical one. That is : getting around the millions of idiots crying, "No, no!"

Simple solution. Put the nuclear waste into safe containers and drop them into the bloody great holes left by abandoned open cast mines in central Australia or Southern Africa, where there is desert, no people, and a geology so stable that no earthquake or volcano will happen for at least a million years. Cover them with dirt. Leave for 10,000 years. No problem. Except for the previously mentioned idiots.

Actually, parts of central australia suffer quite big earthquakes. They don't get reported coz they don't do any damage to any humans or infrastructure, because there is none out there.

Parts do, but we also know areas where the strata have been stable for eons.

Also (obviously) one would avoid the Great Artesian Basin...

[pErvinalia]

yep!

[pErvinalia]

Looking hot here today at my place. Only 9.30 in the morning and it's warm and a very gusty hot wind is coming out of the south (strange, but not so strange when you realise the heat mass is south of us in NSW).

[JimC]

Looking hot here today at my place. Only 9.30 in the morning and it's warm and a very gusty hot wind is coming out of the south (strange, but not so strange when you realise the heat mass is south of us in NSW).

Bad bushfire weather in NSW - nice cool day in Melbourne, but NE Victoria is at risk...

[pErvinalia]

Any lives lost yet? I don't get TV or radio up here.

[JimC]

Any lives lost yet? I don't get TV or radio up here.

Haven't looked at the news so far today - I'll get back to you later. There were a lot of people not accounted for in Tassie, but in all the confusion that is expected...

[macdoc]

Like a yoyo - first the US now Aus on the barbi

It’s Official: 2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S.
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: January 8, 2013 360 Comments

The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.


How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 new daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 new record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.
..........

With the end of the growing season, coverage of the drought has waned, but the drought itself has not. Mr. Crouch pointed out that at the beginning of January, 61 percent of the country was still in moderate to severe drought conditions. “I foresee that it’s going to be a big story moving forward in 2013,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013 ... ?ref=earth

Interesting times.

[MiM]

That is true, Jim But there is nothing more changeable than politics.

It looked good at the start, but then Chernobyl, and as soon as it started to gain momentum again - Fukushima Really can't guess where that iceberg is gonna tip in the future.

I agree that reprocessing would be preferable in many ways, but it's expensive and dirty, so not without its own problems. In Finland we are planning to bury the first canisters with spent fuel 400m down in the bedrock in 2020, so these plans are very advanced already. BTW, it requires a lot more space than a football field, because it has to be spread out to avoid heating the rock too much (avoid exceeding boiling temperatures for water).

[Tyrannical]

But the reason deserts are hot has nothing to do with "green house" gasses, desert heat is caused by direct sun light and little air moisture to absorb the heat.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, but it's hotter than usual. Record breaking hotter.

[pErvinalia]

And it's not just the desert. Even Tasmania had over 40 degrees the other day.