Australia Is On So Much Fire, You Can See It From Orbit 289
Jeremy Lee writes "Temperatures in Australia this week hit the point where the Bureau of Meteorology had to invent a new color. And with heat and winds come Bushfires. So it's probably good that I made a real-time bushfire map with every known source of public data directly relating to fires in Australia, mostly because fire doesn't respect state borders."
From space.
Re:Demise of the English langauge (Score:4, Interesting)
Self-Solving Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect next summer is going to be another bad year for fires in the USA. Seems like the entire goddamn west burned down last year. The sky was brown all summer. We cleared the layer of smoke in a plane, and the blue of the sky came as quite a shock. I'd actually forgotten the sky was supposed to look like that. I didn't want to descend back into the sludge, either. It was the first time in a couple of months that I'd had a breath of fresh air.
Affect global temperatures? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this will create enough particulate in the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures.
Re:Demise of the English langauge (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's not formally correct.
It's very much allowed, it just ceases to be formal English at that point. Most people do not communicate using formal English.
Re:Numbers from the article... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure the Global warmers/deniers will be all over the place. Either way, the article for those who didn't read it have the following stats:
Hottest national averages on record (before today).
-Snipped-
So it would appear that 1972 and even 1973 were very hot years there. As well as it appears that 2013 will be as well. Finding cause in those two anomalies will be interesting. I don't think 1972 had as much CO2 in the air as we do now. Is the area of temp measurement too small to say either way was is the cause? I'm not a climatologist. But what I do know is it's hot.
I'm not going to point out the obvious fact that they're out of order because it's a conspiracy to disprove global warming. However, I just want to ask, can we just have a giant, 10 year study of several locations among the map from Antarctica to Chile, seeing if cars or power plants may or may not have an adverse affect on weather? I'm getting tired of hearing this story, but I also know that there might be SOMETHING man-made affecting our weather.
Consider the fact there the industrial revolution happened a hundred years ago, back then there was no control of pollution until fairly recently. Today, there are a few tens of millions of cars on the road, about half of that are semis, half of that are trains, with a few thousand coal plants, several hundred thousand oil rigs, and several dozen places where garbage burning is done (rough numbers yes, but I think these are fairly close), you're going to give me a straight face and say that man has absolutely nothing to do with affecting the temperature of Earth by a single degree?
Re:Demise of the English langauge (Score:4, Interesting)
We're now using and at the start of sentences?
Yup.
Face it: language changes. The English of Beowulf is a foreign language to modern speakers. Chaucer is heavy going. Hell, many people struggle with Shakespeare and Dickens.
Some changes I've seen in my own life. I'm 51.
Loss of distinction between adjectives and adverbs in spoken English, particularly "good" vs. "well".
Loss of "hw". "Whale" and "wail" are homonyms except in a few regional accents.
Singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. I like this and use it myself.
Very few people use colons or semicolons in written English. Fewer still know how to use them correctly.
My grandparents were born from 1884 (paternal grandfather) to 1905 (maternal grandmother) and used the subjunctive mood. It was largely gone before I was born. It only survives in fossilized expressions like "so be it" and the song title "Let it be".
...laura
Re:Thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks to you and everyone who looked at the map. The extensive slashdotting let me code some improvements :-)