This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor. I welcome Jeremy Zachus,

New South Wales to report on first the climate and then a very shrewd cockatoo in the neighborhood mall.

Jeremy, a good day to you, a mega cloud over Australia.

What does that mean?

4,000 miles long 6,000 kilometers?

What was the weather while the mega cloud was above you?

Good day, Jeremy.

You know, John, yes, this was a weather event, I guess you could say, a mega cloud is literally as it sounds.

It's basically a cloud that covers pretty much the entire continent of Australia.

And we very rarely get mega clouds here in Australia unless it's in really unusual

weather conditions where typically it's normally a winter season there's a bit of

tropical activity going on in the north and then down to the south we have some

rain brown bands but what happened this week was we actually got a

dry weather mega cloud and now the mega cloud itself was literally a single continuous cloud that

stretched 6,000 and that 6,000 kilometers, which is around 4,200 miles,

from the top left part of Australia, all the way across to the bottom right, then across the Tasman and actually touched New Zealand.

So this was one cloud that reached from the very, very extremity of the northwestern part of Australia

to New Zealand in one foul swoop. But what made this

very, very remarkable was the fact that conditions were incredibly dry at the time. So

the cloud was basically mixing up all the moisture in the atmosphere

creating this cloud but not really releasing any rain anywhere on the

continent so standing under the cloud for most of the week all we got was very

...