Wild weather report - early December

Do you know one explanation for science deniers not "believing" that weather extremes are getting more extreme more often? It's because they only read climate conspiracy blogs, like WUWT. Despite Anthony Watts claiming to be a meteorologist (unqualified) - that is, someone who used to announce the weather on television - he doesn't like to report unusual weather. Some of his readers might wake up to the fact that he's a charlatan, a fake, a fraud.

For example, in the last few days there were at least 245 people who were killed as a result of unseasonal torrential rains in Chennai, India. You can read about that disastrous weather event at the Times of India, which reported that:

The deluge destroyed crucial road and rail links, shutdown the airport, snapped power and telecom lines and left lakhs [hundreds of thousands} of people stranded. 

Then there's northern England and Scotland that was drenched and battered by record-setting Storm Desmond. You can read about that at the BBC. There are also some photos on Quartz, just in case you thought it was a fuss over nothing. It isn't. The BBC reports that thousands of homes were flooded, one person died, and power is slowly being restored to thousands. As quoted on Quartz:

Storm Desmond dropped a total of 262.6 mm (10.3 inches) of rain in Cumbria county, in northwest England, from Friday through Sunday. Floods minister Rory Stewart told the BBC that Desmond had “broken all the UK rainfall records.”

There's also wild weather in the Pacific north west. Not as bad as the flooding rains in the UK, but the storm has caused power outages affecting 18,000 homes in Washington state.

While down here in Australia not long ago, there were deadly bushfires. The fire in South Australia's mid-north was burning at a rate of 580 acres a minute. One woman described it as ""It was like a fireball, 90 kilometres an hour." If you can't imagine a fire burning that quickly, then just make sure you aren't in the bush on a catastrophic fire danger day. To make matters worse, the communications systems failed the volunteer firefighters. Two people died in those fires, and at least 87 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. One man was watching his property burn from 3,000 km away (from Darwin) via a feed from cameras he'd installed. He saved his home by activating sprinklers via his mobile phone. The ABC has mapped what happened where in the fires in South Australia's mid north. The agricultural land could take years to recover.