The Long Hot Summer
Summer started early this year with new August temperature records set in Queensland and NSW, and wild and windy weather across the country.
Bushfires are still burning in South East Queensland and the NSW bushfire season has started with fires in the Shoalhaven, Eurobodalla and Mullumbimby areas.
The Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) has identified more than 50 fire hot spots in danger this summer, many in settled areas like Daylesford, Bendigo, the Dandenongs, Lorne, Aireys Inlet and Anglesea. The CFA is nervous after the horrific loss of life in last summer’s fires.
And it’s not just in Australia. During this year’s northern summer, hundreds of fires in Spain, France, Italy and Greece destroyed thousands of hectares of forest and bushland. Strong winds and temperatures above 40 Celsius fanned fires across Europe in July and August. In North America fires are still burning in the San Gabriel Mountains behind Los Angeles with unseasonably high temperatures and low humidity making control very difficult.
Some argue these are signs of global warming but climate sceptics say weather and climate have always been subject to wild fluctuations.
To make matters worse for Australia a new El Nino event is starting to develop in the Pacific Ocean. This will be the 17th El Nino in the last 50 years.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) forecasts drier and windier conditions as a result, but BOM climate analysis chief David Jones noted cooler conditions in the eastern Indian Ocean may balance some of the effects of this El Nino.
This Indian Ocean temperature anomaly seems more pronounced each year and may be related to the monsoon cycle of South Asia. The Indian monsoon, which started in June with heavy rains in some areas, has now stalled, raising the spectre of famine in Northern India. Seasonal crops have not been planted and cattle are starving.
The Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University says the Indian monsoon is possibly a ‘tipping point’ event that could switch into a permanent drier mode in a few seasons. If this were to happen, it would create a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude.
There are many other indicators of increasing climate instability, despite the pseudo-scientific denials of climate sceptics and the desperate whingeing of Barnaby Joyce. The West Antarctic Ice Shelf and Greenland are losing ice at an increasing speed, although the East Antarctic is not, because of the Indian Ocean anomaly.
And there’s the rapidly increasing permafrost melt in the tundra of northern Russia, which is causing social chaos as roads and buildings built across permafrost collapse into mud. Alarmingly, the increasing melt-water flowing into the Arctic sea has the potential to release billions of tonnes of methane from frozen methane hydrates into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for over 10 years and is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
The news just keeps getting worse.
– BY JEREMY BROWN
