I hope to have some thoughts on Obama’s speech to the UN a little later today, but right now I want to focus on what may be the most underreported story of the day:  what’s happening in Australia.

Take a look at this.  It’s not Mars.

Sydney woke up this morning to a massive dust storm that turned the sky red and sent hundreds to hospitals with breathing problems.  The Associated Press, via the NYT:

Australia’s worst dust storm in 70 years blanketed the heavily populated east coast Wednesday in a cloud of red Outback grit, nearly closed the country’s largest airport and left millions of people coughing and sputtering in the streets.

No one was hurt as a result of the pall that swept in overnight, bringing an eerie orange dawn to Sydney, but ambulance services reported a spike in emergency calls from people with breathing difficulties, and police warned drivers to take it easy on the roads.

Dust clouds blowing east from Australia’s dry interior — parched even further by the worst drought on record — covered dozens of towns and cities in two states as strong winds snatched up tons of topsoil, threw it high into the sky and carried it hundreds of miles (kilometers).

The Australian provides an idea of how bad the air quality was:

Paramedics were called to help 469 patients suffering from breathing problems from 6am yesterday — 218 of them in Sydney, where particulate matter brought by the dust storm peaked at more than 15,500 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

A reading of more than 100mcg/m3 is normally taken to indicate poor-quality air, and more than 200 is ranked as hazardous to human health under the air quality index used by the [New South Wales] government.  Yet officials said readings yesterday were “off the chart” and throughout the day remained several times higher than the worst levels that would normally be seen in a bushfire, of 300 to 500mcg/m3.

Last night, even as the dust began to disperse, the readings were still more than 3000 in most parts of Sydney, reaching 4750 in the lower Hunter region and 4231 in the central tablelands.

To give you an idea of how bad this is, people were worried in the leadup to the 2008 Olympics that Beijing would have particluate matter levels of between 200 and 300 mcg/m3.  Here are the readings taken by the BBC in the days leading up to the Opening Ceremonies:

During the storm today Sydney was 550 times worse than the worst pre-Olympic reading.

As Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Australia is one of the most fragile modern societies in existence.  Although this video (from Phillip Adams of the Australian Broadcast Corporation) is two years old, it provides a pretty good idea of the challenges the country faces:

As Adams notes, Australia is “looking down the barrel of a disaster.”  He talks about the potential of a Katrina in Australia, but as today’s events show, there are multiple potential crises.  Right now, the biggest challenge the country faces is not water, but the lack thereof.  Its entire infrastructure is predicated on a water table that, given weather patterns, is unsustainable.  The country is quite literally drying up.

Before the day was over, the Australia’s red dawn had passed.  Below are two shots of downtown Sydney.  The lower one was during the storm; the upper one was taken from the same spot later that afternoon:

The dust storm may be over, but Australia’s more fundamental climate challenges aren’t going anywhere.

The Big Picture has an amazing roundup of photos taken during the storm — well worth your time.

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