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Archive for January 3rd, 2011
Australian floods submerge towns, coal exports hit
Posted by Reuters: Daniel Munoz on January 3rd, 2011
Reuters: Military aircraft ferried supplies to an Australian town slowly sinking beneath swollen rivers on Monday, as record flooding in the country's northeast severed roads and ports, curtailing coal exports and devastating farmland. Floods submerged the Capricorn Highway, the major traffic artery through Queensland state, and poured into homes in the sinking town of Rockhampton, sending furniture and refrigerators cascading down torrents of floodwater. Rockhampton, a community of 77,000 just off the...
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Our new Minnesota normal: Warmer and wetter
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 3rd, 2011
Minneapolis Star Tribune: The year 2011 will bring a change in the weather -- or at least what we think of as normal weather.
New "normal" settings for temperatures, rainfall and snow for Minnesota -- indeed, for 10,000 U.S. locations -- will be published later this year by the National Climate Data Center, which calculates them once a decade, much like the census. For the Twin Cities and much of Minnesota, normal will probably mean warmer and wetter.
The normal overall temperature for January for the Twin Cities could...
How Assam’s tea is beginning to feel the strain of global warming
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on January 3rd, 2011
Independent: Lush green tea plantations, so bright they often look fluorescent, blanket the hills of Assam in northeastern India. Women plucking the leaves in black aprons with large baskets on their backs dot the gardens that contribute to India's production of nearly a third of the world's tea. But this picturesque industry that the British began in the early 19th-century faces a very modern problem: climate change.
Researchers and planters worry that a rise in temperatures and change in rainfall patterns...