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Whether on television or in the real world, it seems like the Tasmanian devil just can’t catch a break. In Robert McKimson’s Looney Tunes of the 1950s, the devil “Taz” was little more than a dim-witted glutton; in the Australian forest, the animal has been tethered to the endangered species list for over a decade [...]
Feral camels have never gotten much love in the Australian bush. Considered to be an invasive species, they graze native plants to the point of local extinction. They walk across roads in the middle of the night. They trample fences. Now one Australian company has a plan to get rid of the camel scourge once [...]
The cyclone that thrashed a still-soggy Queensland yesterday has re-energized an ongoing debate Down Under over what Australia can expect from a warmer planet and what the nation – the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita – should do about it. Front and center in the fray is Ross Garnaut, the government’s climate [...]
How big is the storm that is threatening much of Australia with 190 mph winds? About this big, according to our friends at NASA: In a way, though, it’s fortunate that the storm will be hitting a relatively rich, relatively well-off country like Australia, which is on the fortunate side of the disaster gap. Less [...]
As terrible floods rage simultaneously around the world—inundating half of Australia, killing more than 50 people in the Philippines and hundreds in Brazil—it’s natural to want a scapegoat. Well, you can blame the “little girl”—the weather phenomenon known as La Nina, which many meteorologists are blaming for the unusually heavy rainfall that’s led to these [...]
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face [...]
New Yorkers like myself awoke this morning to a fluffy layer of fresh snow. (And the sound of scores of plows sweeping the streets clean, as our billionaire mayor tries to make us forget about the Blizzard of 2009.) New Englanders are being walloped with a full-on major snowstorm—though hardened Bostonians just shrug it off—while [...]
It’s another miserable day for flood-stricken Queensland, with parts of Brisbane being evacuated after the city’s river burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon. Local reports say the Brisbane roads that haven’t been closed due to flooding are choked with fleeing residents. Yesterday, flash floods roared through a valley nearby, crashing through the city of Toowoomba [...]
