Heat Waves In Australia Are Getting More Frequent, and Hotter 279
vikingpower writes "In a landmark report on bushfires and climate change (PDF), the Australian Climate Council concludes that heat waves in Australia, as driven by climate change, are becoming more frequent — and that they get hotter. 'It is crucial that communities, emergency services, health services and other authorities prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme fire conditions,' says the Council in the report. Sarah Perkins, one of the report's co-authors,
was interviewed by The Guardian Australia. '"While we can't blame climate change for any one event, we can certainly see its fingerprint. This is another link in the chain." Perkins said her latest work had analyzed heatwave trends up to 2013. She said the trend "just gets worse – it's a bit scary really."' In 2009, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization signaled that a Southeast Australian heatwave was the hottest in 100 years."
Re:ahh we're all going to die (Score:5, Insightful)
get the tinfoil hats on, here come the climate changers!!
I think you'll find the tinfoil hat wearers are those who think that the scientific community are all conspiring to earn big bucks from climate change, although quite how they earn this money is never spelled out. Odd, that. Then the climate-change deniers have no trouble believing the industry-sponsored pseudo-science of the global warming denial industry that actually does have big money behind it from the likes of Exxon of Exxon Valdez fame. Yeah, you have no trouble believing the polluters, do you?
Get a fucking grip. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is a fact. Out of thousands of peer-reviewed papers you'd be doing well if you can find one single paper that says otherwise.
Re:ahh we're all going to die (Score:1, Insightful)
to earn big bucks from climate change, although quite how they earn this money is never spelled out
Climate Change Is the Next $10 Trillion Opportunity [yahoo.com]
While I'm not debating that the climate is changing, let's also not pretend that this is not all about $$$.
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Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:3, Insightful)
"So, yes, it's global warming."
You are giving us a prime example of exactly what GP wrote.
Sure, AUS is having a heatwave. Even while much of the United States was having a record cold temperatures, and much of Europe has been experiencing its coldest weather in more than 10 years... Arctic ice extent is expanding again and the Antarctic summer is colder than usual, with even more sea ice.
You can't cherry-pick your heatwaves. This is GLOBAL climate we're talking about.
Re:A Third Possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's possible that both the AGW deniers and AGW alarmists are wrong. Climate change could be real, but caused by natural factors that are out of our control, the same ones that have caused ice ages and warm periods in the past when carbon outputs were nowhere near as high as they are now."
The problem with this is that it is exactly what many of those so-called AGW "deniers" have been saying all along.
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hiding behind trend vs. weather is statistically significant> .
Fixed that there.
I'm sorry, but, if you don't understand basic mechanics of science, you can't be outraged when you don't understand the conclusions of science.
Re:ahh we're all going to die (Score:3, Insightful)
Great! Maybe we can get the crazy deniers to realise that the economy won't implode if we spend money on something other than oil subsidies.
$10 trillion worth of jobs? Why isn't everyone piling into that bandwagon?
Where's the money? (Score:2, Insightful)
While I don't even consider myself among the "deniers" ... I think you have to be going around with a big, thick blindfold on, if you really believe the "pro climate change" researchers aren't getting some money out of it.
The federal government wants to push climate change as its platform to encourage all sorts of initiatives, and to do so, it needs the backing of numerous scientific studies. Most researchers sustain themselves largely based on government grants. Even NASA has been a big climate change proponent in recent years, vs. focusing on the space travel projects we traditionally associate with it. Why do you think THAT is? All the funding cutbacks in space exploration mean they need to find something else to do that IS funded, or else they vanish.
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:2, Insightful)
Show us the 30-year trend of cooling to balance out our trend and we'll listen to you. Until then shut the fuck up.
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which says nothing about the *global* climate.
Here's a clue: the air mass that's breaking all the cold weather records? That air mass is actually unusually *warm* for this time of year. How can that be? Because it's not where it usually is, way up in Canada. At the same time many northern areas are getting record warm temperatures, and California is missing the rain it should be getting this time of year. The overall picture is of a *warm* winter, averaged over the northern hemisphere, but with temperature anomalies all over the place. Which is not in itself *climate*, but the kind of weather event climate models have been predicting for a decade or more now (citation: Easterling, David R., et al. "Climate extremes: observations, modeling, and impacts." Science 289.5487 (2000): 2068-2074.).
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the money? (Score:4, Insightful)
While I don't even consider myself among the "deniers" ... I think you have to be going around with a big, thick blindfold on, if you really believe the "pro climate change" researchers aren't getting some money out of it.
And how much money is flowing to the climate change deniers? Follow that money.
You'll find it dwarfs climate research grants significantly. If you think it's all a giant conspiracy to get money into the hands of researchers, you really need to up your medication because that's bordering on the paranoid delusional.
Besides this, money going to scientists doing real science is to produce accurate results. Only the money going to climate change deniers is being used to blatantly make stuff up.