By Jeff Goodell
It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."...
Premier Anna Bligh issued a stark warning to Queenslanders as Yasi approached the coast, saying it had the potential to be the biggest cyclone the state had ever seen.
"This storm is huge and it is life-threatening," Ms Bligh warned. "Being well prepared is our best defence."
People in all low-lying and waterfront areas between Cairns and Mackay were told to relocate, with large storm surges expected to accompany the cyclone.
Flights out of north Queensland filled up quickly as thousands of people evacuated; businesses closed down and many patients in local hospitals and nursing homes were relocated. Other residents simply battened down the hatches to ride out the storm.
