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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

According to this story from the Associated Press, 2007 will go down in history as the year of record-breaking, ‘normal’-shattering, totally bizarre weather events.

January 2007 was the hottest January worldwide since such record-keeping began.

2007 is likely to be the hottest year on record for the Northern Hemisphere.

More than 260 highest all-time temperature records in the US were broken or tied.

April 2007 was the warmest April in England since the mid-1600s.

New York City was hit by a tornado.

Oman and Iran were hit by extremely cyclonic events.

US lakes were found to be shrinking.

South Africa had the first notable snowfalls in more than two decades.

Reunion Island recorded 155 inches of rain 72 hours, an historical record.

The Arctic dramatically warmed, with new records for the volume of ice found to be melting.

In August, 60 percent of the United States was under drought, or found to be “abnormally dry”.

Los Angeles recorded its driest year in decades.

Australia continued suffering through the worst drought in a century.

China, Wales and England clocked up historical levels of rainfall.

Southern California saw severe winds, snow, hail and torrential rain all in the same day, back in March.

The Northwest Passage through the Arctic opened up enough to allow ships to pass through.

And that’s just for starters. There are more plenty stunning record weather events detailed in the story here.

All right, fess up, who’s been playing around with Yakuza weather machines?

Just from where I live in Sydney, the number of fast-forming freakishly large storms has been amazing to witness. In one week, last month, I think I saw something like 9 big storms sweeping in over the city from my balcony, busting open, dumping huge amounts of rain and then disappearing, usually within a matter of minutes. Then there were the storms that hit during the night.

During long drives through Western Australia, I heard countless stories from locals about how horrifically dry the farm lands had become. The wheat fields were crisp and barren. Town after town had removed public taps due to water shortages. I found a town on the coast that was almost totally sustained by bottled water, which was piled in pallets in a stack ten feet high and forty feet long in the front of the local supermarket. Then there was the morning I woke up in a camp ground near Margaret River when the temperature was supposed to 33 Celsius. By 11am it was heading past 45 Celsius. Truly scary stuff.

On the plus side, I went to visit friends in the outer western suburbs of Sydney and saw a landscape transformed. The local bushland I had roamed as a kid had always been tinderbox dry and scrubby. On Christmas Day, the bush was lush and kangaroos were gorging on the greenery. The scrubby old bush I had bashed through on motor bikes as a kid looked like it was seriously considering becoming rainforest.

Now here comes 2008. Normal weather would be a nice change.

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