What if you lived in Australia?

[trailmaster]

Your Australian winter is nothing like what I have to experience. Sometimes we have snowstorms where the wind is blowing at 60 mph, and 20 inches of snow comes down. Then when the wind finally dies down one notices that there might be 10 foot drifts. Entire cars are buried by this snow. It takes weeks for the streets to be fully plowed. Tens of thousands of tons of salt have been spread on the streets all over the city and its suburbs. That stuff messes up the bottom of your cars bigtime. The heavy snow, or extreme cold slows down delivery of food and other stuff to stores. Then finally in April it all goes away. And everyone is saying Spring has sprung. Even the birds and squirrels are relieved.

[Hikarufan]

Sometimes it snows close to where I live, about 50 mile drive to the mountains. Some nights it's 28F. But it never lasts long and we'll think of you all while we have a cold beer on a warm xmas day!

It's great to be us!

[trailmaster]

One of those days during your warm, sunny Summer a once in a lifetime cyclone is going to come tearing off from the ocean. It will bring with it things you've never seen before. tremendous dust tornadoes, ice tornadoes, hail as big as basketballs that smash your towns flat, so much rain that the land floods and whole towns wash away, and the larger cities like Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra are flooded to a depth of 10 feet of water. There will be tremendous tidal surges and the waves at the beaches will be 50 feet high. The water will be surging so much that great white sharks are washed ashore and attack the beach people. There might even be earthquakes and giant sinkholes appear everywhere. Bridges collapse in the big cities, and if you think you have a fly problem now,just wait. There will be swarms of black biting flies that are so great that they blot out the sun. The people everywhere will be screaming: "It's the end of the world" Armageddon is here!! Don't ever be complacent! Mother nature can be a shrieking bitch at times!!

[palo5]

Originally Posted by trailmaster

One of those days during your warm, sunny Summer a once in a lifetime cyclone is going to come tearing off from the ocean. It will bring with it things you've never seen before. tremendous dust tornadoes, ice tornadoes...The water will be surging so much that great white sharks are washed ashore and attack the beach people...

Hey, get real! Everyone knows ice-tornados don't exist, and sharks don't eat people on land. You reading trashy American fiction again?

Keep telling them about your terrifying 5-minute winters in tropical Chicago

That will convince them

[Sir Honkers]

Originally Posted by trailmaster

One of those days during your warm, sunny Summer a once in a lifetime cyclone is going to come tearing off from the ocean.

As if ferocious, flesh eating quokkas weren't enough to worry about.

[bloke57]

I read that imported South American fire ants are the next threat to Australia's well-being. As if you didn't have enough home-grown nasty critters you have to go importing them.

It's at times like this that I am glad I live in a place where we get frosts of below minus ten degrees on winter nights. Kills 'em all off in no time.

[effCup]

The newsrag recently had a story about problems with fruit bats/flying foxes in NSW, I think even South of Synny(?), as well as the more expected Queensland... although I can't now re-find it. Something about some councils compensating folk for the extra cost of power for drying their laundry indoors, because of the stinky mess from the bats, as well as much other unpleasantness. At least one council was planning to cut down/prune trees to below a certain height so the bats wouldn't have trees of a height desirable for roosting, or something.

Anyway, here's a couple of older articles.

[Hikarufan]

It's pretty stable for weather where I am. Only the odd tornado and they are small. More chance of damage from fires around here.

[trailmaster]

One of these days a supervolcano at the bottom of the ocean will explode and these will come to all your coastal cities.

[bloke57]

Originally Posted by trailmaster

One of these days a supervolcano at the bottom of the ocean will explode and these will come to all your coastal cities.

Careful what you wish for t'master. Your Jellystone Park could go up at any moment.

The world would be deluged with a fallout of flaming pic-a-nic baskets. The ranger certainly wouldn't like that Yogi!