Australia Has Always Been On Leading Edge Of Warming; It's Now Entering Utterly Uncharted Waters

[hatrack]

EDIT

But seemingly only the country’s climate-denial politicians are surprised. Australia’s meteorologists and fire chiefs had been predicting a record fire season for months. The weather watchers saw early in the year that Australia faced a fire-raising combination of natural rainfall cycles — notably fluctuations in sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean that brought high temperatures and drought to southeast Australia this year — and a very unnatural trend toward a hotter and drier climate. The ensuing blazes have attracted worldwide attention, in large measure because they are part of a pattern of intensifying fires from the Arctic to the Amazon.

Australia is among the countries most exposed to the gathering pace of planet-wide warming. Last year, Australia experienced its highest recorded temperatures, 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the late 20th century average, and 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above the early 20th century average — twice the global increase. The year also saw the six hottest days ever recorded in Australia, maxing out at 49.9 degrees C, or 122 degrees F.

Higher temperatures are ensuring that vegetation dries out faster and further in droughts, creating extreme fire risk. And the droughts have come. Australia’s average rainfall in 2019, at 10.9 inches, was 40 percent below the late 20th century average and 12 percent below the previous lowest. The resulting fires far exceeded in extent Australia’s most deadly bushfire disaster in February 2009, when 173 people died but only 1,700 square miles burned.

As the country has reacted in horror, meteorologists have said, in effect, “We told you so.” The rising fire risk was predicted by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s senior research scientist Chris Lucas, who warned 13 years ago that in southeast Australia “fire seasons will start earlier and end slightly later, while being generally more intense. This effect… should be apparent by 2020.”And so it has proved.

EDIT

https://e360.yale.edu/features/long-shaped-by-fire-australia-enters-a-perilous-new-era

[Mickju]

1. Thanks to the Murdoch press