The Greens and Federal Labor are still at odds over how to divide up the revenue from the proposed carbon price, Greens deputy leader Christine Milne has confirmed.

Yesterday, the Government held its monthly meeting with the Greens and independents to continue talks on the design of the carbon tax scheme.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet also met with an industry advisory group yesterday to discuss the carbon price.

The Government has already said more than half of the revenue from the scheme will be used to compensate households, but Senator Milne says that means there will be less money to go around for industry compensation and energy efficiency measures.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/20/3196163.htm?section=justin

The ozone "hole" over Antarctica could be increasing the amount of rainfall as far away as the subtropical regions of the southern hemisphere, according to a study that highlights the global nature of climate changes.

For the first time scientists have found evidence to suggest the depletion of the thin ozone layer high above the South Pole can alter the wind patterns thousands of miles away that bring rain to the subtropics.

The researchers believe the thinning of the ozone layer in the polar stratosphere over the past few decades as a result of the build-up of man-made pollutants has caused a southern shift of the westerly jet stream, which has caused a corresponding migration of the climatic bands that result in dry or wet conditions south of the equator.

"The ozone hole is over Antarctica but it causes a moisturising trend over subtropical regions of the world, such as eastern Australia," said Sarah Kang of Columbia University in New York, who led the study published in Science.

"Previous work has shown the impact of the ozone hole on the circulating winds at higher latitudes nearer the poles, but this is the first work to link the thinning of the ozone layer with circulation patterns at lower latitudes nearer the equator," she said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/antarctic-ozone-hole-creating-rainfall-in-subtropical-region-2271987.html

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http://royalsociety.org/climate-change/?gclid=CI34z8PDr6gCFUqFpAodalFSHg

The combination of ozone layer depletion in the upper atmosphere and the increase of CO2 in the lower atmosphere is a cause for great concern. As I have explained many times on this site, the combination of several factors can lead to more rapid change. Stress from one factor may not be enough to induce change, although in the case of global warming, CO2 is creating change but other factors can add or substract to it — including the complex relationship of water vapour with the atmosphere.     

When there is a certain moon/sun relationship for example, we know that the tides will be more extreme. When the sun and the moon are at right angle from each other (half-moon), in relation to the earth, the tides will be minimum. When the sun are in opposite position (full moon) or on the same side (new moon), the tides will be maximum. But this sun/moon relationship also infuences the weather by "distorting the atmosphere" in the same way the oceans are distorted (tides). 

But one should also note there is a lag time due to inertia. It should make us worry more about the problem of global warming. In many set of events, factors in step with each other will precipitate maximum change at a particular point in time. Shift in status happens very fast. This point meaning that we might get into a comfort zone that change is only this much incrementally at the moment and that we may be able to cope, but suddenly there is a strong gradient of change because we forgot to account for the drop that makes the bucket overflow.

My personal view is that September 2012 will be a massive tell-tale of the mountainous task we face to arrest what we've unleashed.

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The Antarctic ozone hole is about one-third to blame for Australia's recent series of droughts, scientists say.

Writing in the journal Science, they conclude that the hole has shifted wind and rainfall patterns right across the Southern Hemisphere, even the tropics.

Their climate models suggest the effect has been notably strong over Australia.

Many parts of the country have seen drought in recent years, with cities forced to invest in technologies such as desalination, and farms closing.

The scientists behind the new study - led from Columbia University in New York - added the ozone hole into standard climate models to investigate how it might have affected winds and rains.

"The ozone hole results in a southward shift of the high-latitude circulation - and the whole tropical circulation shifts southwards too," explained Columbia's Sarah Kang.

Of particular interest was the southward migration of the Southern Hemisphere jet stream.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13161265

A churning, deadly storm system is poised to continue pounding the south-central U.S. for at least another day, before shifting its energy to the East Coast. Nearly 40 percent of the nation now lies in its path.

(UPDATED: 1:15 p.m. ET) Some states simply cannot catch a break. Residents in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma will see the tail end of the system bombarding them with much the same violent weather as its front end: tornadoes, hail, high winds and flooding rain is in order for much of the South and Midwest today. The Weather Channel notes there's a "significant and life-threatening" outbreak of tornadoes expected to move from northeastern Texas across Arkansas and into the Memphis, Tenn. area.

This bleak forecast comes only hours after some Arkansas communities were devastated by the volatile storm front. “The town's gone,” one Vilonia, Ark. resident told the Associated Press. A tornado peeled through the small town in central Arkansas late Monday evening, with torrential downpours and high winds causing damage across much of the state. Since Monday, this storm has killed 14 people, four of whom drowned after heavy rains led to widespread flooding, leading Arkansas to issue a state of emergency. Compounding the misery: More rain is expected to come down Tuesday, not only in Arkansas but also in Missouri, where a levee protecting the town of Poplar Bluff was breached late Tuesday morning. Officials were rushing to evacuate residents. (See the latest photos of the devastating floods.)

But these storms are hardly localized affairs. The wider Lower Mississippi Valley, already hit by one arm of the storm Monday afternoon into early Tuesday, will be struck by yet another wave of storms this afternoon. In fact, early Tuesday morning, meteorologists were already warning half a dozen states to be on the lookout for funnel clouds: Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. Overnight, this system will then continue its tirade north into Illinois and Wisconsin, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. From there, the storm will sweep east across the nation, reaching as far north as New York and far south as Georgia, dumping inches of rain across a major swath of the Eastern seaboard.

"With Greenlandic independence glinting on the horizon, the US has a unique opportunity to shape the circumstances in which an independent nation may emerge," said one dispatch from US diplomats in 2007. "We have real security and growing economic interests in Greenland."

The presence of US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, at the Greenland summit shows the importance that countries are attaching to the region as the polar ice caps melt further.

An international study released last week projected that world sea levels could rise up to 1.6 metres over the next 90 years. These projections have prompted calls to increase action to reverse climate change, but have also raised speculation about how the resources of the Arctic can best be retrieved.

The region is believed to hold about a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, and environmentalists say the thought of such riches is leading the Arctic countries to lose sight of longer-term climate issues.

"Instead of seeing the melting of the Arctic ice cap as a spur to action on climate change, the leaders of the Arctic nations are instead investing in military hardware to fight for the oil beneath it," said the Greenpeace campaigner Ben Ayliffe. "They're preparing to fight to extract the very fossil fuels that caused the melting in the first place."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/revealed-the-secret-battle-for-the-riches-of-the-arctic-2283229.html

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Meanwhile in the US:

The bursting Mississippi was threatening last night to submerge still more farmland, homes and even towns as an enormous swell of water fed by spring rains and snow-melt forged its way to the Gulf of Mexico, unleashing some of the worst flooding since the Great Depression.

While some towns already soaked by the river's wrath further to the north – including Memphis in Tennessee and Cairo in Illinois – were yesterday beginning the task of cleaning up as water levels begin to fall, the worst is still to come for low-lying areas of the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana.

In Louisiana, which has in recent years suffered Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, engineers were getting ready to begin gradually opening sluices on the giant Morganza Spillway just north of the state capital, Baton Rouge. The 5,000ft span of gates has been opened only once before in history.

It is not a decision that will be taken lightly, however. While diverting some of the river's fury through the gates means lowering the risk that levees will be overtopped in Baton Rouge and further downriver in New Orleans, it will mean deliberately flooding vast areas of the state west of the river and close to the coast.

With the first gates likely to be opened at the weekend or early next week, entire cities may be forced to evacuate in the path of the escaping water, including Houma, where the BP clean-up and spill-response teams are housed, and Morgan City. As many as 13,000 buildings, 25,000 people and 3 million acres of land are likely to be impacted, the authorities said.

The situation across parts of the Mississippi Delta was already dire last night, with as many as 600 homes already touched or swamped by muddy water filled with debris and snakes. Residents were on high alert in the city of Vicksburg, where the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers merge.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-worst-is-yet-to-come-from-the-mighty-mississippi-2283372.html

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But all is well in the best of the worlds:

The La Nina weather pattern blamed for Australia's summer of natural disasters is in its death throes, forecasters say.

"The La Nina weather event that brought unprecedented rain and flooding to much of Australia has now weakened, with most indicators now showing neutral conditions have returned to the Pacific Ocean," The Weather Channel meteorologist Tom Saunders said in a statement.

The La Nina pattern formed in autumn last year and will be recorded as one of the strongest of the past century.

It generated torrential flooding rains and contributed to the ferocity of cyclone Yasi, which hit north Queensland in early February.

"It's the main cause of all the flooding that eastern Australia has seen over the last nine months," Mr Saunders said.

"It's one of our strongest flooding years on record, right up there with the strongest falls and that's going back to 1900."

The Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate prediction services, Dr Andrew Watkins, said conditions were heading into neutral territory.