By Kristine Phillips
In the northeastern United States, (click here) temperatures dipped far into the negatives this week.
The streets of Boston were flooded with icy waters that carried dumpsters away. Cars in nearby Revere, Mass., were nearly buried in frozen floodwaters. Wind chills in parts of New Hampshire could hit 100 degrees below zero (That’s not a typo, as the New York Times points out).
In Australia, however, it’s summer — and a remarkably hot one. So hot that part of a freeway in Victoria on Australia’s southeastern coast was “melting.” Several hundred miles northeast, in the greater Sydney area, Australians spent Sunday in the most sweltering heat in nearly 80 years.
Such is the extreme weather greeting 2018 from opposite ends of the globe. As winter in the United States brought a historic “bomb cyclone” that unleashed heavy snow and days of bone-chilling winds to the East Coast, summer in Australia, particularly in the south and southeastern parts of the country, is delivering a “catastrophic” heat wave, with record temperatures hovering in the triple digits (Fahrenheit) and fires scorchingthousands of acres of dry lands.
Temperature in the Sydney suburb of Penrith reached 47.3 degrees Celsius (117.14 degrees Fahrenheit), just a bit short of surpassing the hottest day on record — 47.8 degrees Celsius (118.04 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1939, according to the Bureau of Meteorology....
...(Melting streets are not unheard of. It happened in India two years ago during a heat wave that killed thousands. Photos taken from New Delhi showed distorted road markings caused by melting asphalt.)...
Dead Flying Fox
US President Donald Trump (click here) may believe that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” but the fact of the matter is, it is real and planet Earth is witnessing the consequences of global climate change every day. One the one hand in the northern hemisphere, a place as hot as the Sahara Desert experienced snowfall recently and America has been hit with something scientists are calling a “Bomb Cyclone”, in the southern hemisphere, things have taken a turn for the hotter, and as a result, the wildlife is being affected.
On January 10, biologist Daniel Schneider tweeted about the mass death of bats in Australia. He wasn’t the only one. Dozens of news agencies and scientific journals have reported on this strange and horrifying phenomenon. The National Geographic magazine, on January 9, reported that Australia has been experiencing record high temperatures reaching over 46 degrees Celsius, and a direct result of that, apart from heat strokes in people and melting asphalt, was the death of more than 400 flying foxes (also known as fruit bats) at a local bat colony....
