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.

world climate change

NASA’s announcement this year – that 2010 ties 2005 as the warmest year in the 131-year instrumental record – made headlines. But, how much does the ranking of a single year matter? Global temperature records in close agreement, despite subtle differences
Multiple institutions monitor global surface temperatures. Despite subtle differences in the ways the scientists perform their analyses, these four widely referenced records show remarkable agreement. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Groups of scientists from several major institutions – NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the Japanese Meteorological Agency and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom – tally data collected by temperature monitoring stations spread around the world and make an announcement about whether the previous year was a comparatively warm or cool year. The availability of and access to climate change information remains insufficient, according to many of the world's leading financial institutions. A pioneering study launched  confirms the increasing financial relevance of climate change and the fact that insurers and lenders need better information regarding the physical and economic impacts of the world's changing weather patterns.

Financial service providers and their customers are increasingly affected by the impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather events. Moreover, the survey shows that insurers, reinsurers, lenders, and asset managers expect these kinds of risks to increase in the future.

Given that financial institutions are able to influence their clients and investee companies across all sectors of the economy, they can play a key role in accelerating the implementation of adaptation measures by the private sector.

But in order for the sector to manage climatic risks affecting their business portfolios and to give the best possible advice to their customers, financial institutions need access to applied information such as climate change predictions, modelling, analysis, and interpretation. Such information needs to be appropriate to the duration of contracts, the regions where customers hold assets or undertake operations and the hazards that are material to the operations of borrowers, investees, and the insured.
Not all that much, emphasizes James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City. In the GISS analysis, for example, 2010 differed from 2005 by less than 0.01°C (0.018 °F), a difference so small that the temperatures of these two years are indistinguishable, given the uncertainty of the calculation.
Meanwhile, the third warmest year -- 2009 -- is so close to 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007, with the maximum difference between the years being a mere 0.03°C, that all six years are virtually tied.
Even for a near record-breaking year like 2010 the broader context is more important than a single year. “Certainly, it is interesting that 2010 was so warm despite the presence of a La Niña and a remarkably inactive sun, two factors that have a cooling influence on the planet, but far more important than any particular year’s ranking .

Brazil flood death toll tops 500

Rescuers are searching through layers of mud for survivors and bodies after heavy rains caused landslides and torrents to slice through three towns near Rio de Janeiro, killing at least 500 people.

Walls of thick, muddy gunge cascaded past apartment blocks in several towns, flowing into single-storey homes and overturning cars as they surged down the hills sweeping along everything in their path.

Freakish storms early Wednesday (local time) in the mountainous area just north of Rio de Janeiro dumped the equivalent of a month's rain in just a few hours, sending mudslides slicing through towns and hamlets, destroying homes, roads and bridges and knocking out telephone and power lines.
Local officials and media in the worst affected towns of Novo Friburgo, Teresopolis and Petropolis put the death toll at 432.

President Dilma Rousseff, clad in black rubber boots, walked the mud-covered cobblestone streets of Novo Friburgo, where 201 deaths were recorded.

The death toll was expected to rise further as rescuers arrived in remote hamlets, many cut off to all but helicopter access.

Tropical rains, common at this time of year, intensified as a cold front moved in, unleashing the tragedy before dawn, while families slept.

"In eight hours... it rained as much as for the entire month," said Paulo Canedo, a hydrologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

The deluge "caused avalanches of rocks and soil that carried everything down with them, picking up houses," he said.

As weather forecasters warned of more rain in the hours and days ahead, rescuers aided by desperate residents clawed through rubble and mud looking for survivors or bodies.

GloboNews television said 175 people had died in Teresopolis, while officials in Petropolis counted 39 dead.

Another 17 bodies were discovered Thursday in a village called Sumidouro.

Churches and police stations were turned into makeshift morgues, the smell of decomposing corpses heavy in the warm air. Thousands of survivors took refuge in shelters.

But among the despair were a few triumphs.

The scenes of crumbled towns and the stench of death transformed the Serrana region, a popular historical getaway for wealthy Rio residents seeking cooler temperatures.

The disaster also provided the first big test for Ms Rousseff, who only took power on January 1.

Her government has released hundreds of millions of dollars in initial emergency aid and sent seven tons of medical supplies.

The last major natural disaster in Brazil was in March 1967, when mudslides killed 300 people in a coastal town called Caraguatatuba, Brazilian media said.

By way of comparison, Brazil recorded 473 deaths for all of last year from heavy rains.