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:If you can't take the heat, (Score:5, Interesting)
stop living in the desert.
What if the desert comes to you?
Re:The Lord Humongous! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Youngs are powered by high voltage electricity, not gas.
Re:A Third Possibility (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a nonzero chance that your third possibility is correct. But nonzero is all I'm going to give you. Have a look at the amounts of greenhouse gasses put into the atmosphere by a large natural phenomenon, vulcanism [usgs.gov]
Looks like the numbers are from 2009 or so. Summary: It takes ~3 days of humans' output to equal one year of volcanic greenhouse gas emissions.
The factors that are out of our control contribute a tiny fraction of our total.
Re:A Third Possibility (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, in the Hadean period 4600+ million years ago the Earth's atmosphere had no free oxygen.
The far distant past is not the issue. The ability of the human race to survive isn't the issue either. The issue is the ability of the society we have built to cope with environmental changes that may occur on the timescale of a single lifetime.
A +2C change would result in a world that looks drastically different than ours is now. But if that change occurred over a thousand years it'd be practically imperceptible to people. The same change over a century would be a major challenge to our economy. How well you adapt depends on how mobile your means of making a living are. If you're an investment banker, it's no problem at all to shift your money out of harm's way. If you're an American rancher, you may find yourself in a "Bottle Imp" scenario. If you're a Bangladeshi subsistence farmer you are SOL.
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:4, Interesting)
You are using page 1 of the global warming denier's handbook -- cherry-pick local minima to deny the trends. Yes, there is more arctic ice this year than last year, but last year was an extremely low point. The US has had one week of record cold, but not sustained record cold.
Next up you'll be saying that there hasn't been any increase in average temperatures since 1998 - ignoring the fact that 1998 was a massive outlier and that if you were to start witih 1997 or 1999 the trend of increasing temps is still, unfortunately, intact.
Re:Pshaw... it's just weather! (Score:4, Interesting)
Houses were not insulated, most didn't even have plaster and lathing on the interior of the wall studs, the only heating was radiant heat from the fireplace, and if you underestimated the amount of wood you needed in September you were burning your furniture to keep alive by April. Clothing was limited to wool and cotton, with no way to really dry them when you got wet. The gods help you if your boots fell apart in the middle of winter and you didn't live close enough to town to get them fixed, very few people had the tools to do that. Some winters it was a miracle ANY of them survived.
My grandfather had a photo of himself, his brother and some neighbors, young men all, standing in front of a snow drift with shovels. On the other side of the drift you can see about a foot of the smoke stack of a locomotive. When my dad was young someone he knew drove his car from Michigan to Wisconsin across Lake Michigan, and people moved HOUSES across the ice on Lake Superior. When I was little I remember snow banks were frequently taller than my dad. My mom saw her first Christmas without snow on the ground in 1984, in the last ten years they've had snow on the ground on Christmas day twice and Grand Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan (not the big lake, just the Bay) has frozen thick enough to go ice fishing once.
Australia isn't the only place that has seen a century of warming.