KEY POINTS:
Politics aside I love watching Fox News - it's entertaining to watch and is in stark contrast to our somewhat 'serious' TV news.
Fox is fun to watch - and when there's a hurricane or some other breaking news story their coverage is excellent and much better than the yawn-fest that the now bland CNN International covers. CNN lost my interest when they dropped the American side and became this watered down international news channel.
Because Fox is an American news show it's local ads are edited out and they instead air these short snippets presented by white teethed news anchors who oddly say "Now, here's news you might find interesting" (to me implying that the past 20 minutes of "run down Obama" was boring!). Anyway, these snippets they present are basically entertainment 'featurettes' that cover anything from health, to science - to weather.
The other night I watched a piece that grabbed my attention and sent me to the internet to research more on it. It was about a strange type of flood. Here in New Zealand we have a number of regions that can be affected by flood - but none are affected by sand floods.
In China, the Gobi Desert is advancing towards Beijing at an incredible speed, flooding towns and villages under metres of sand - literally killing the vegetation and burying entire communities. China is now at war - with Mother Nature. (and it wouldn't be the first time either! Remember my blog earlier in the year talking about China shooting rockets at the clouds to make them rain - called Cloud Seeding).
China's Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometres from 1994 to 1999 - an area roughly half the size of the North Island. And while that was nearly a decade ago, things are only getting worse despite Chinese efforts to plant trees and slow the desert's movement toward Beijing.
Overflowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions - making the US dustbowl of the 1930s look more like a farmer's dirt track. It really is massive. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds literally remove millions of tonnes of topsoil in a single day - and that soil that can take hundreds of years to replace.
These massive dust storms cause chaos for Beijing residents - already dealing with mammoth smog conditions - who also have to worry about inhaling sand/dust and having eyes/nose irritated by the thick particles in the air they breathe in. Residents need to sweep their pathes and front doors frequently - like those in Canada who have to clear their driveways every couple of hours during snow storms just to be able to open their door. The huge dust storms are wiping crops away and making life for Chinese people living west of Beijing completely miserable.
For more details on this story I found a great article online about it - click here.
Well back here in New Zealand and another wintry chill will move up the country today - for all the news on today's cold weather read this morning's blog at the Weather Watch Centre by clicking here.
Check back again here at NZHerald.co.nz on Friday for my outlook on this weekend's weather (hmmm - another 'mixed bag' on the way? Haha - a friend of mine hates me saying 'mixed bag' - I don't know why, I think she finds it unimaginative!).
Until then - go check out Fox News on Sky - if you're left wing you'll probably throw your remote at the TV - if you're right wing you'll be in heaven. Either way it's truly addictive! And they have great hurricane coverage too - although it's all gone quiet on the hurricane front at the moment.
Philip Duncan
AP Photo / Rafiq Maqbool
For the latest weather news keep up to date with The Radio Network's new Weather Watch Centre or the NZ Herald weather section.
