The North Hemisphere is on ice and the Southern Hemisphere is on fire.

A water bomber works over a large fire burning throughout Victoria's Grampians region. Photo / AP

By Jamie Morton

1:49 PM Tuesday Mar 4, 2014

 

Australia continues (click here) to be the "burning, drying" continent, with a new report showing temperatures across the country are on average 1C warmer than they were a century ago.
Most of the warming has happened within the last 60 years.

The worrying trend is laid out in a new report released today by Australia's national science agency, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and its Bureau of Meteorology.

Bureau chief executive Dr Rob Vertessy said temperatures across Australia were, on average, almost 1C warmer than they were a century ago, with most of the warming having occurred since 1950....


...Although volcanoes (click here) are active around the world, and continue to emit carbon dioxide as they did in the past, the amount of carbon dioxide they release is extremely small compared to human emissions. On average, volcanoes emit between 130 and 230 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. By burning fossil fuels, people release in excess of 100 times more, about 26 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere every year (as of 2005). As a result, human activity overshadows any contribution volcanoes may have made to recent global warming....