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Aussie Data Centres Brace For Dust Storm Barrage
An anonymous reader writes "Data centers and telcos in the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today. The storm is said to be the worst of its type ever recorded in Australia. Macquarie Telecom disengaged automatic deployment of fire-prevention gas from the fire alarm to prevent gas being released on a false alarm. Other major data center operators reported clogged air filters and heat exchangers and said they would be performing cleaning and maintenance operations this week."
The dust may have settled yesterday, but I think cleaning bits of uluru out of the filters etc. in the data centres may keep the IT monkeys busy for the next week or so.
It's our turn with the dust up here in North Queensland. Mind you, it is not nearly as bad, merely masking out the mountains. Should get a spectacular sunset this afternoon.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You could taste it by about 11am (still can). Water restrictions will be lifted for a few days to allow people to hose things down. Latest reports suggest there is a lesser dust storm due here by Saturday. Damn Kiwis are stealing our country by stealth!
You never catch me alive
Climate change is a farce. im a sydneysider, this is the worst duststorm we've had in 70 years, IE: 70 years ago, it was this bad. It's the first year of el nino, the ground is going to be dry, it happens. its also not the worst dustorm in the country, the 1984 one in melbourne was worse. the arctic icecap is melting too, curiously in line with the friggin range of underwater volcanoes spewing hot magma into the ocean.
That's certainly how it felt. I was up at the crack of dawn and what an eerie red dawn it was. Never seen anything like it. It was interesting that earlier in the morning near dawn it was easier to capture the dust as it was stronger where I was.
Mind you it's nice and Sunny in Sydney today, so as usual this story's a little late.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This was posted on one of the Aussie mailing lists I'm a member of, absolutely sureal. Wish I could have seen it, bit of a drive from the West coast and I believe they were grounding planes at one point.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
These worst-on-record, high-energy climatic phenomena -- hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, dust storms, etc. -- tell the real story of global warming. Burning fossil fuels emits energy into the atmosphere. Over a long period of time, that energy dissipates into the "cold" of outer space.
Over the past century, this injection of energy into the atmosphere was caused by the (very) roughly 1 billion Westerners. In the current century, there will be roughly 3 billion (including the Indians and the Chinese, who are buying cars left and right) apes who are injecting energy into the atmosphere.
Will the "cold" of outer space absorb enough surplus heat from the atmosphere at a sufficiently fast rate? Is anyone using a supercomputer to model this heat equation?
What sort of climatic catastrophy will occur when 3 billion apes -- with their automobiles, power plants, lawn mowers, etc. -- inject a daily, massive pulse of energy into the atmosphere?
You have to admit, the Melbourne one does look pretty cool!
Americans thinking they are in a position to laugh at another countries beer. Now I've seen everything!
Link to Brisbane pics
You never catch me alive
There are some great pictures floating around, but this video shows what it looks like to come on the wall of dust...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you know this is coming, get extra air filters, use the absolute kind (like 3M Filtrete), and be prepared to change them frequently. With absolute filters, the filters will gradually stop letting air through as they clog, so you must inspect them regularly or have clogged-filter sensors. The usual fibreglas filters don't even try to stop 100% of the particles above the filter's size limit, but they tend to still pass air even when clogged, so neglecting them doesn't stop airflow.
And use duct tape to fix any leaks around the filters.
Now that the US has been operating in the sandbox for years now, keeping gear going during sandstorms is well understood.
Yes but everyone knows Australia is in the future.
It's only just happening now for real.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Yep. Here's what it looked like yesterday:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/E_Aust_dust_storm_-_MODIS_Terra_1km_-_23_Sept_2009.jpg
The coast of Queensland is that as-yet-untouched bit up the top-right there. :-)
Usually when I see someone spouting off, there's at least some argument that can be rebutted, some point that can be countered, some claim that can be disproved or, at least, some myth that can be dispelled. I read this post, over and over, trying to find some way to respond in an intelligent manner, to try to get across a point about this subject that I feel so strongly about. However, try as I might, the only response I could come up with was this:
OMGWTFLOLHAHA.
I hate printers.
Yes but everyone knows Australia is in the future.
It's only just happening now for real.
Send me cash and I will give you tomorrows lottery numbers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Adelaide is semi arid. Always has, always will. Build desal and be done with it. (coming from someone who grew up in Adelaide for 26 years, then got the hell out before Adelaideism nearly robbed me of my ambition)
In Soviet Australia, outback visits you!
So that would roughly line up with the 1937-1947 drought, when the following happened:
I don't know about you, but that's not something I'd like to experience with the current population of Australia. If there's some part of cutting CO2 output that would help avoid such a situation, I'll gladly sign up for it.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
So, climate change is a farce, just because you say so, despite the overwhelming evidence that it's happening? Congratulations, you just destroyed any credibility you might otherwise have.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Climate change a farce?
Give me a break. Of course climate change is happening. Look at California, Spain, Greece, and other places. They are turning into deserts. Year after year more fires, and more arid. It is changing the land at a local level. Other places like Canada are get more tornado's and they are getting more tail ends of hurricanes.
The question of whether or not it is man made in my opinion is quite irrelevant since we don't even have plan regardless of the cause. The big issue right now is how to deal with climate change? What are we doing to secure our water supplies? Or our essential resources...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"Climate change is a farce."
No, farcical is believing an obvious lie such as the claim that an active super volcano is melting either or both poles.
Also you haven't defined "worst dustorm"? - I would assume TFA is measuring the duststorm by the area it covered. In which case this one would be the "worst" of the two since it streached from South Australia to Queensland where as the 1984 one (that I experienced as it rolled over Bairnsdale) only covered Victoria and parts of NSW / S.Australia, at a rough guess that's about 1/4 of the area.
"It's the first year of el nino, the ground is going to be dry"
El Nino has not kicked in yet and it is NOT forecast to do so this year, this dust has accumulated under El Nina conditions. When ENSO does in fact flip to El Nino conditions the ground is going to get even dryer than it already is.
Did you (while reading up on non-existant volcanos), fail to notice that the majority of Aussies are living with strict water rationing laws? Are you unaware that practically all the state capitals in the country are frantically pouring billion$ into building some of the largest desal plants on the planet? Have you not noticed that most aussie grain harvests over the last 10yrs have seen a 50-60% drop in size when compared to pre 1990 averages? Is there not a giant scar on the Victorian bush from what was an upnprecedented firestorm (I say this having wittnessed first hand all three major fires in living memeory, 2009, 1984 & 1968(?) ). Are the hydro plants in Tassie not silent due to lack of water in their recently completed dams? Is Melbourne currently not at it's lowest winter water reserves on record?
Please also explain to us (without invoking invisable volcanos) why an entire forrest of 600yo river red gums has not survived this particular drought, when according to you conditions have been much worse at various times in the last century or so.
Like some of the other replies, I really have no explaination for why people post bullshit like the steaming pile in your post, is it attempted gallows humor? Are you paid?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How do you shoot down a simple argument of logic?
It's been this bad 70 years ago.
70 years ago we didn't pollute ANYWHERE as much as we do today.
If our polluting nature is supposed to be the cause for climate change, which would then lead to, say, DUSTSTORMS, how come the same thing happened when we had barely begun the polluting?
Climate change is real. It happened since the beginning of this dirtball. The question is, how much of what we see today is natural and how much is man-made. Considering that they also found that CO2 rises came after our atmosphere warming up and not before, I'd like for you to give me a few examples of shut down points in favour of us not having much to do with the situation.
It's easy to say "Everyone KNOWS that your arguments won't hold up". But have the common decency to prove it instead of making blanket statements about our intelligence.
I am fucking fed up with this behaviour. Time and again, people had to lower their eyes in shame after they had made fun of others for their outrageously unpopular statements and then being proven wrong after all. How can any sane and halfway intelligent being continue doing that when none of us have any kind of insight into the bigger picture? Have you ever checked which scientists have proclaimed human induced climate change? Have you checked their work? Have you checked their numbers? Their conclusions? Have you checked whether their institutes are low on cash and just freaking needed the publicity?
Same goes for any opponents of human induced climate change, by the way. Same rules for all of us. The difference between you and me is that I don't call you stupid just because you have a different opinion than I have. All I call you is frickin' rude.
70 years ago the Rabbit plague was in full swing (until the Myxoma Virus was introduced in 1950's). Rabbits combined with overgrazing it amplified El Ninyos drying effect on Australia (Learning from history: land and pasture degradation episodes in Australiaâ(TM)s rangelands).
Today due to climate changes effects on the ocean currents, El Ninyo could quite possibly become permanent rather than a periodic event - which if happens, will freeze eastern Australia in a permanent drought conditions (and South America in permanent flooding conditions). A bit of drought in half of Australia and a few major floods in South America would be the very least of the worlds worries though... climate change screwing up the ocean current system is implicated in the Anoxic event which eventually led to the death of 90% of life on earth
>Climate change is a farce. im a sydneysider, this is the worst duststorm we've had in 70 years
No worries mate, the planet will be just fine. Nothing we can do to the planet short of complete nuclear Armageddon that Mother earth can't recover from in a few million years. Its not the planet we have to worry about... its our survival on it as a destructive, greedy, self serving species - and that's just a random sampling of our "elected" leaders
Well lets look at reality now shall we? See in the last 150 years we've had amazing improvements in the ability to see and record weather events. Now, where I'm from Ontario, even in the last 10 years if a tornado happened in the middle of nowhere Northern Ontario and no one was around to hear it, it didn't happen. These days it's hit or miss. In the southern half, meaning south of Ottawa, we get anywhere between 20-45 a year. Which is pretty average and has been average.
Nowe to continue on, if you don't let nature do it's thing out west. Like in California, BC and so forth and burn out the dead brush then you start getting these amazing wildfires which will do the job for you because there is so much dry tinder. See wild fires are a part of the ecosystem. Plants and animials there have developed around it. See how some of the pines even require fire to crack open their cones. Now, Spain and Greece. They've been pretty good at failing to maintain low-level growth, and killing off large trees. See where I'm going with this? And in places like the Sahara where they're now planting seed grasses and small trees. They're taking off. Desertfication is receeding.
Om, nomnomnom...
I won't comment on "Spain, Greece, and other places", but much of California IS a desert, and always has been.
LA, San Diego, most of southern California can exist as they do because humans diverted virtually the entire Colorado river and the entire snowmelt in the southern Rockies to making it the environment you consider "normal".
Fact is, the real California climate is semi-arid at best until you get up toward the Bay area.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Isn't it just amazing how wide your margins can get when you have good money riding on not exceeding them?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.