Freaky weather -- a sign of things to come?

I was watching Good Morning America early today and was appalled by the weather system moving into the US. Today will be 37 C here (100 F), but we've had miserable weather for the past few days... cold, wet, windy.

I think I must be getting paranoid after watching "The Day After Tomorrow" the other week with Esther. The story is based on current scientific thinking that ice ages are actually triggered by global warming... the ice caps begin breaking up, salinity of the oceans is lowered by the melting ice, the water temperature begins dropping, affecting the life-giving major currents, especially in the northern hemisphere, and this gives rise to major climate vortices, at the centre of which the temperature plummets to less than minus-150 F, snap freezing anything over which it passes. (Thus explaining the discovery of a Siberian mammoth, frozen upright, with food in its mouth and stomach still.)

Well... in the past 6 months a major part of the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica has broken away and begun to disintegrate. This was the opening scenario of the movie, made more than a year before this happened! It's feared that as much as 40% of the Antarctic penguin population will perish as a result of this disaster.

Three weeks ago there was a significant disturbance in the floor of the Southern Ocean which, geophysicists believe, triggered the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunamis.

At the same time, the annual Sydney-to-Hobart ocean yacht race lost a record number of entrants due to massive seas and storms, especially in Bass Strait, which is fed by the Southern Ocean. I could only watch in utter bewilderment as race organisers ignored gale warnings and predictions of 20 metre (65 foot) waves of the kind that cost 6 crewmen their lives a couple of years ago, with scores of near-misses, due only to the bravery of rescue crews, and pressed on with plans to conduct the race. Unbelievably irresponsible behavior, all round.

In yesterday's paper there was an article on the current boom in the Tasmanian salmon fishing industry -- giant salmon are being harvested, their size affected by the drop in water temperature in the Southern Ocean.

Our weather comes directly off the Southern Ocean. We're currently experiencing unseasonably cold weather and storms -- sort of a reverse El Nino (El Nino climate is triggered by a rise in ocean temperatures of less than 5 C).

Hel-lo-o? Is everyone asleep at the wheel? Can nobody see any connections here?

Think I'll move to high ground in Queensland -- or Papua New Guinea!