Thousands of people are stranded and about 100 are still unaccounted for as out of control bushfires continue to burn in Tasmania.

The threat for the state's most destructive fires has been downgraded, but residents are being warned to remain vigilant.

More than 100 properties have been destroyed since the bushfires broke out in extreme heat on Friday, and police have warned that bodies may be found as teams go door-to-door in the devastated communities.

Experts in Indonesia are preparing to build a huge wall to stop the ocean from swamping parts of Jakarta.

Some suburbs in the capital already go underwater when there is a big tide but the problem is expected to get even worse.

Jakarta is sinking by up to 10 centimetres a year and Indonesia's national disaster centre says with oceans rising, large parts of the city, including the airport, will be inundated by 2030.

Heavy rain triggered flooding in several southern provinces and disaster zones have been declared to facilitate processes to assist flood victims.

The flooding in Narathiwat keeps rising due to heavy rain in the past few days.

About 200 villages in 13 districts have been declared flood disaster zones and about 27,000 people have affected and 345 people evacuated to safer areas.

Following release of provisional rainfall data for the UK, showing that 2012 has been one of the wettest on record, Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, tells us:

"The trend towards more extreme rainfall events is one we are seeing around the world, in countries such as India and China, and now potentially here in the UK", adding that "the long-term trend towards wetter weather is likely to continue as global air temperatures rise. "

Leaving aside the fact that the Met Office have also been warning us about droughts lately, let's take a look at some of the forecasts they were making during 2012.

Each month they issue a 3-month outlook. Unfortunately the ones issued prior to September have disappeared from their archives, but I had already saved the April-June, and also the Sep-Nov forecasts. Along with the Oct-Dec ones, what were the Met forecasting as the year progressed?

An amazingly ominous picture of a black iceberg on social media platform Reddit.com is creating quite a stir among online denizens as it went viral within hours of it being published on January 4, 2013.

The iceberg stands in sharp contrast to another whitish iceberg in the photo which seems to have been taken during the day. The image has thus far been viewed some 1.17 million times, got more than 20,000 'up votes' and, strangely, another 17,000 'down votes', with more than 1,200 people commenting on the Reddit post.

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, most icebergs are white except along freshly calved ice cliffs, which tend to appear blue. "Others may appear green, brown or black, or combinations of these colours," it says.

Loughareema, also known as the Vanishing Lake, is located on the coast road, just a few miles from the seaside town of Ballycastle in Ireland. The lake sits on a leaky chalk-bed with a "plug hole" that often becomes jammed with peat causing the Loughareema depression to fill, especially during heavy rain.

When the plug clears, the lake drains rapidly underground. A passerby who is not aware of the lake and its disappearing act would never even know it existed in the first place.

Interestingly, the road to Ballycastle runs right through the lake, though the modern road sits high enough to avoid flooding, unlike the original. It is quite possible that even the road engineers who built road were fooled by the lake's trickery. In former days the route was frequently under water, sometimes for weeks on end, making crossing treacherous.

It was during one particularly bad state of flooding in 1898, a certain Colonel John Magee McNeille, anxious to catch the 3 pm train from the town, persuaded his coachman to drive a covered wagon pulled by two horses through the lake. When they reached the middle of the lake, the cold water reached the bellies of the horse who became nervous.

From the journal Earth System Dynamics billed as "An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union" comes this paper which suggests that the posited AGW forcing effects simply isn't statistically significant in the observations, but other natural forcings are.

"...We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature."

This is a most interesting paper, and potentially a bombshell, because they have taken virtually all of the significant observational datasets (including GISS and BEST) along with solar irradiance from Lean and Rind, and CO2, CH4, N2O, aerosols, and even water vapor data and put them all to statistical tests (including Lucia's favorite, the unit root test) against forcing equations. Amazingly, it seems that they have almost entirely ruled out anthropogenic forcing in the observational data, but allowing for the possibility they could be wrong, say:

"...our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint. However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels."

I expect folks like Tamino (aka Grant Foster) and other hotheaded statistics wonks will begin an attack on why their premise and tests are no good, but at the same time I look for other less biased stats folks to weigh in and see how well it holds up. My sense of this is that the authors of Beenstock et al have done a pretty good job of ruling out ways they may have fooled themselves. My thanks to Andre Bijkerk and Joanna Ballard for bringing this paper to my attention on Facebook.

Full Paper: Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming (PDF)

Shanghai - Temperatures in China have plunged to their lowest in almost three decades, cold enough to freeze coastal waters and trap 1,000 ships in ice, official media said at the weekend.

Since late November the country has shivered at an average of minus 3.8 degrees Celsius, 1.3 degrees colder than the previous average, and the chilliest in 28 years, state news agency Xinhua said on Saturday, citing the China Meteorological Administration.

Bitter cold has even frozen the sea in Laizhou Bay on the coast of Shandong province in the east, stranding nearly 1,000 ships, the China Daily newspaper reported.

Zheng Dong, chief meteorologist at the Yantai Marine Environment Monitoring Center under the State Oceanic Administration, told the paper that the area under ice in Laizhou Bay was 291 square km this week.

Conditions on the planet continue to deteriorate, particularly in respect to more pronounced climate extremes seen across hemispheres, and the number of volcanoes that are now continuously erupting. The planet is undergoing dynamic change, whereby we're seeing early evidence that the physical dynamics of the planet is moving towards a spectrum of greater instability. This is happening, as the planet's magnetic field continues to abate in strength. This is suggestive that we've passed the rubicon in this internal process of a geological shift that has been brought on by an anomalistic fluctuation of thermal gradient in the planet's outer core. Consequently, change is now uniform, and these Earth changes can now generate events which will affect the entire planet. We had a 4.6 magnitude earthquake in Falcon, Venezuela on January 4, 2013 and that earthquake was immediately followed by a 4.3 earthquake in the Ceram Sea and a 4.9 in Halmahera, Indonesia.

Both points on the globe are on exact opposite ends of the planet. We call it an antipodal tangent. On January 5, we had a 5.1 magnitude earthquake on the Mid-Indian Ridge and that was followed approximately 4.5 hours later by an earthquake near the antipodal point of the Cascadian fault with a 7.5 magnitude earthquake in southeastern Alaska. What this means is the entire planet is now starting to resonate from this heightened state of seismicity. The Bible prophesized in Isaiah 24:20 there would come a time, in the very near future, where the Earth would be reeling to and fro or back and forth like a drunkard. This is a state of resonate seismicity resulting from the impact of very large cluster earthquakes or what we refer to in geology as an earthquake storm.

A blistering heat wave, power outages and a fuel shortage added up Tuesday to a second day of hellish conditions in Greater Buenos Aires, home to about a quarter of Argentina's 40 million people.

Amid a plethora of recommendations by the authorities on how to deal with the soaring temperatures, which on Tuesday were expected to reach 36 C (97 F), people took refuge in any shade they could find to get out of the blazing heat of the Argentine summer.

The National Meteorological Service renewed this Tuesday a high alert for the Argentine capital and its surrounding areas due to the high temperatures, which created scenes the total opposite of those seen these days in snowbound Europe and the United States.

"The city of Buenos Aires (with its 2.8 million inhabitants) has a summer average of 90 deaths per day but, for example, during the heat wave at the beginning of 2001 it went up to 250 deaths in a single day," the weather service warned on its Web site.

"Given that high temperatures will continue throughout the week, we ask the population to avoid as much as possible exposing themselves to sun rays and to drink a lot of water," Argentine Health Minister Juan Manzur said, urging people to seek medical attention if they develop such symptoms as high fever, drowsiness, fainting or a racing pulse.