Slowly staring to catch up again with life … and starting with some older news: according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia had its hottest January on record, in line with a pattern that has seen the country’s average temperature rise over the past five decades under the impact of global warming.
With the exception of eastern Queensland and north-eastern NSW, where La Nina related wet weather brought the figures one or two degrees below the average, and Sydney (and adjacent coastal areas) where the same weather pattern kept daytime January temperature right on average at 25.9 degrees (but where night-time temperatures were almost two degrees up at 20.3 degrees), the rest of the country sweltered.
The average temperature across the country rose 1.3 degrees last month, but large areas, especially in the Pilbara in Western Australia and in Central Australia, recorded temperatures three to four degrees above average.
“We just continue to get a stream of these records being broken,” said Dr Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, who has analysed Australia’s rising temperature going back almost 60 years.
“The general pattern is one of warming. We have now warmed up by a degree since 1950. The effects of global warming have been felt across Australia as a whole. And the pattern of warming across Australia is very consistent with the pattern we’ve seen across the globe.”
Apart from Sydney and the and other coastal areas, he rest of NSW was not so fortunate. Temperatures in the south and west climbed two degrees higher than average. Pooncarie, a town west of Griffith, recorded the state’s highest temperature, 44.5 degrees – which is better than Onslow in WA with almost 50 degrees (and let’s not forget s.th. that a lot of people don’t realise: these temperatures are measured in the shade).
But it’s not just the heat – large areas of Australia (apart from the tropics and the La Nina affected East Coast) didn’t get much rain either, which for example led to the horrific bushfires so far in WA or Tasmania. All in all: an omen for the challenges this continent will face over the decades at least.
melange 