BRAZIL,AUSTRALIA FLOOD

BRISBANE: Heavy rain prompted new flood warnings in Australia even as thousands of volunteers cleaned up the gooey mess coating homes and streets in its third-largest city Saturday.

Four states had flood warnings due to overflowing rivers and rain, while Queensland worked to recover from its deadly, weekslong disaster. Large parts of the vast state are still under water and some places are still on alert for flooding. In Brisbane, the water that swamped entire neighborhoods has mostly receded, leaving behind a thick, putrid sludge.

About 7,000 residents joined 600 military personnel in what was dubbed ‘Salvation Saturday’ to shovel, mop and sweep away the mess after the Brisbane River overflowed earlier this week.

Mayor Campbell Newman praised the overwhelming turnout. ‘Everybody rolls up their sleeves in this town,’ Newman said. The volunteers were given mops, garbage bags and cleaning supplies before being bused to the areas of Brisbane most in need.

Survivors of mudslides that killed more than 555 people are growing frustrated, saying Brazil’s government has fallen short in rescuing victims still stranded on remote hillsides and finding the bodies of the dead.
On the fourth night since torrential rains sent avalanches of mud and boulders smashing through communities in the lush mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, many people were still begging officials for aid late Friday. Many also took it upon themselves to search for their dead and help out the living.
‘The ones I’ve seen go up there and really make the effort are all people from here,’ said Sergio Joaquin de Jesus, 48, a construction worker who had just donated blood and was rounding up a crew of co-workers to dig for bodies Saturday morning. ‘Imagine, human beings up there, with no food, no water, nowhere to sleep, in this weather. They’re living like dogs,’ he said. ‘Where is the government? What are they still waiting for?’
The military said that it was sending 11 helicopters and 500 personnel to help approximately 800 rescuers from fire departments and the state civil defence agency who were struggling to reach stricken areas in an incessant rain. The army and navy also pledged heavy digging machinery, ambulances and generators - the last essential to continue the rescue effort in the dark. Low-hanging rain clouds prevented the helicopters from flying in, however, and the military promised it would try again Saturday. Survivors did what they could.
After failing to find his other children, the 31-year-old ranch hand built a gurney from scrap wood, carried his son’s body down a mudslide-wrecked slope before dawn Friday and buried him in a homemade coffin. Then Perfista waited with a crowd in the rain outside the Teresopolis morgue for a chance to plead with officials to help him continue his search. He clutched plastic-covered pictures of his three other children: a chubby 1-year-old and two smiling girls, ages 6 and 10.

Survivors of mudslides that killed at least 537 people in a mountainous area north of Rio de Janeiro streamed into the centre of Teresopolis on Friday.

Amauri Souza, a 38-year-old who helped Perfista carry his son’s body, said a few helicopters had reached isolated areas, but ‘they’re only taking down the wounded.’ He said officials were not dropping off body bags or food or water, adding that he feared the consequences if aid did not arrive soon.

‘The water is rotten, but people are forced to drink it. There is no food. I had meat in my house, but it’s all gone bad,’ Souza said. Officials fear the death toll could rise once remote areas are reached. Authorities did not offer an estimate on the missing, but local reports put it in the hundreds.

There is no central repository of information about survivors and missing people, said Carla Monica Tomazetto, a city worker using a microphone to call out the names of those being sought by relatives just outside a shelter for those who lost their homes.

Teresopolis, a city of 163,000 people next to a national park, sits in a land of thickly forested slopes and sheer mountain peaks, and is a chief training site for Brazil’s national soccer team. It’s home to many ornate weekend homes where the wealthy of Rio escape the summer heat to enjoy horseback riding and other luxuries.

worlds climate change now

NASA said on January 13, 2011 that a particularly strong La Nina weather pattern of cooler water temperatures is fueling heavy rains and floods in Australia, Sri Lanka and Brazil. “This La Niña has strengthened for the past seven months, and is one of the most intense events of the past half century,” said Climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA/JPL. Australia’s third-largest city Brisbane was turned into a “war zone” with whole suburbs under water and infrastructure smashed as the worst flood in decades hit 30,000 properties. Officials said, the number of people killed in Sri Lanka’s monsoon flooding and mudslides have risen to 27 with more than a million people still displaced by the devastating disaster. In Brazil, authorities have stated that more than a thousand people have been left without homes and 71 lost their lives in Teresopolis alone.

Climate change in world natural disaster in world

Climate Change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.

But while scientists say a warmer world is predicted to lead to more intense droughts and floods, it wasn’t yet possible to say if climate change would trigger stronger La Nina and El Nino weather patterns that can cause weather chaos across the globe.

“I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change,” said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The Queensland floods have killed 16 people since the downpour started last month, inundating towns, crippling coal mining and are now swamping the state’s main city of Brisbane.
The rains have been blamed on one of the strongest La Nina patterns ever recorded. La Nina is a cooling of ocean temperatures in the east and central Pacific, which usually leads to more rain over much of Australia, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
This is because the phenomena leads to stronger easterly winds in the tropics that pile up warm water in the western Pacific and around Australia. Indonesia said on Wednesday it expected prolonged rains until June.
Weather Switch
The Pacific has historically switched between La Nina phases and El Ninos, which have the opposite impact by triggering droughts in Australia and Southeast Asia.

“The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world,” he told Reuters, adding that meant more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.
“So the El Nino droughts would be expected to be exacerbated and also La Nina floods because rainfall would be exacerbated,” he said, though adding it would be some years before any climate change impact on both phenomena might become clear.
He said the current La Nina was different because of the warmest ocean temperatures on record around Australia and record humidity in eastern Australia over the past 12 months.
Prominent US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.
He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.

He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.
“The extra water vapor fuels the monsoon and thus alters the winds and the monsoon itself and so this likely increases the rainfall further,” said Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in        Boulder, Colorado.
“So it is easy to argue that 1 degree Celsius sea surface temperature anomalies give 10 to 15 percent increase in rainfall,” he added.
Some scientists said it was still too soon to draw a definite climate change link to the floods.
“It’s a natural phenomenon. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La Nina is any stronger than it would be even without humans,” said Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne and president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
But he said global atmospheric warming of about 0.75C over the past half century had to be having some impact.
“It has to be affecting the climate, regionally and globally. It has to be affecting things like La Nina. But can you find a credible argument which says it’s made it worse? I can’t at the moment.”