Weather records have been smashed from one end of the country to the other as Australia swelters through its warmest-ever winter.
The Bureau of Meteorology has taken the unusual step of issuing a "special climate statement", confirming what many of us already knew - this winter has been very mild.
"Abnormal heat" has seen some temperature records broken by more than five degrees.
Some regions had their warmest 2009 day in the winter month of August - hotter than any summer day.
Nationally, the average winter maximum temperature is more than 1.6 degrees Celsius above average.
"Average winter maximum temperatures over Australia are likely to be the highest on record," said the Bureau's statement, issued on Wednesday.
And August was particularly warm - more than three degrees above average across the country.
"August 2009 has seen highly abnormal heat over large parts of Australia," the statement said.
The mercury soared above 37 degrees Celsius in some areas during August.
The Bureau says the hot weather was caused by a lack of cold outbreaks bringing air from the Southern Ocean, as well as clear skies and a lack of moisture.
And it's not over yet. The Bureau says the new temperature records may be broken afresh when more hot weather hits later this week.
Spring is also set to be hot.
Almost all of the country is forecast to be warmer than normal, with northern and western regions to be hardest hit.
It's also expected to be a drier spring than usual, especially in the south of the country.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Hot August nights set Australian records
As one can see these hornbags have coped very well with impending dramatic climate change, sending temperatures soaring everywhere.
Australia is having a winter day of extremes as temperatures peak, winds whip, and fire threatens.
Brisbane sweltered through its hottest August day ever, while strong cold winds howled through the southern states.
The record day temperatures and strong winds in the north have fire authorities on high alert, while night temperatures have also been unusually warm.
Brisbane's August maximum temperature record of just under 33 degrees Celsius was smashed as the temperature soared to 35.4 degrees at 4.20pm (AEST) on Monday.
And the high temperatures are set to continue.
"It's an unusual event for August," Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) weather forecaster Janine Yuasa told AAP.
The hottest temperature in Queensland, according to the BoM, was 36.4 degrees at Amberley, west of Brisbane, and in the state's northwest Mount Isa reached 35.7 degrees.
"The highest minimum we've ever had in August was 17.8 back in 1950, if we get 18 degrees (on Monday night) it will be the warmest night on record so far," Ms Yuasa said.
In Canberra, 12 degrees also set a new record for the hottest August night.
Meanwhile, in Sydney a cold front expected for Monday night is in stark contrast to the previous evening when the mercury remained above 20 degrees - double the average August minimum of 8.9 degrees.
Evans Head, on the NSW north coast, recorded the state's top daytime temperature at 36.8 degrees.
Sydney's maximum temperature of 25.4 degrees was recorded just before 10am (AEST) on Monday before gales brought the temperature down along with trees and roofs in Sydney's west.
Gusts of more than 80km/h were recorded at Sydney airport and Badgery's Creek, and more than 2,300 Sydney homes were left without power.
The northeast of NSW is expected to remain hot.
Meanwhile, Victorians have been asked to be storm-ready as the state braces for three days of damaging winds and rain.
A severe weather warning has been issued and wind gusts up to 110km/h are predicted as a cold front moves across Victoria.
Hundreds of South Australian homes have lost power, as strong winds and steady rain batter the state.
After gusts of almost 100km/h blew across the state, BoM duty forecaster Simon Ching said SA had overcome the worst of the wild weather and that he expected the winds to ease.
Tuesday would remain windy, Mr Ching told AAP.
A combination of global warming and El Nino have climate experts predicting this year could be Australia's warmest in more than a decade.
BoM climatologist Karl Braganza said the temperatures this week had been very unusual with temperatures about 10 to 15 degrees above average, breaking many records.
"Some of the locations in parts of Queensland and northern NSW are recording some of the warmest temperatures in 2009 so far, including summer, so it's really quite extraordinary," Mr Braganza told AAP.
"The two factors precipitating these warmer temperatures are global warming and the El Nino in the Pacific at the moment ... when combined together lead to record temperatures.
"What's happening in the north is extraordinary ... we're smashing the August records."
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Doom, allready in a town near you!
Seen yesterday, this hornbag is embracing all that climate change has to offer, by lurking under a bridge in somewhat reduced clothing, performing best practice climate change embracing, moving forward.
Study links drought with rising emissions
Melissa Fyfe
August 16, 2009
DROUGHT experts have for the first time proven a link between rising levels of greenhouse gases and a decline in rainfall.
A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed that the drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.
Scientists working on the $7 million South Eastern Australian Climate Initiative said the rain had dropped away because the subtropical ridge - a band of high pressure systems that sits over the country's south - had strengthened over the past 13 years.
Last year, using sophisticated computer climate models in the United States, the scientists ran simulations with only the ''natural'' influences on temperature, such as differing levels of solar activity.
The model results showed no intensification of the subtropical ridge and no decline in rainfall.
But when human influences on the atmosphere were added to the simulations - such as greenhouse gases, aerosols and ozone depletion - the models mimicked what has been observed in south-east Australia: strengthening high pressure systems and the significant loss of rain.
''It's reasonable to say that a lot of the current drought of the last 12 to 13 years is due to ongoing global warming,'' said the bureau's Bertrand Timbal.
''In the minds of a lot of people the rainfall we had in the 1950s, '60s and '70s was a benchmark. A lot of our [water and agriculture] planning was done during that time. But we are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.''
Dr Timbal said that 80 per cent of the rain loss in south-east Australia could be attributed to the intensification of the subtropical ridge. The research program covers the Murray-Darling Basin, including parts of NSW, all of Victoria and parts of South Australia.
Monash University’s Neville Nicholls, a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who has also published work on the subtropical ridge, said he believed the research program’s results were right.
"We did think that the loss of rain was simply due to the [rain-bearing] storms shifting south, off the continent," Professor Nicholls said. "Now we know the reason they have slipped south is that the subtropical ridge has become more intense. It is getting bigger and stronger and that is pushing the rain storms further south."
The scientific results have implications for many State Government water programs and drought funding, some of which factor in climate change and some of which do not. Projections for the water coming to Melbourne in the north-south pipe, for instance, are based on the assumption that Victoria will return to rainfall levels of last century.
The Victorian Farmers Federation new president, Andrew Broad, said he would not speculate about whether there was a connection between drought and climate change.
"I have a healthy scepticism for scientists," he said. "But I will say that the doomsday people in climate change are robbing people of hope at a time when that’s all they’ve got left."
Melbourne’s dams get roughly a third less water than they did before the drought began in October 1996.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
We are stewing in our own oven
Yes today again proving that global warming is at a train station near you, these stewing hornbags were sauced by one's BIG lens, in a somewhat heated state, in keeping with the situation...you have been warned! Or warmed as the case may be!
You, reader, live in a primitive city. In a hundred years from now, the society we are building will look back and marvel at how little we really understood about the world we have constructed for ourselves.
We are stewing in our own juices.
Last Wednesday, a night of driving rain, I attended a seminar where more than 100 professionals, a standing room-only crowd, had gathered to learn about practical, cheap, achievable ways of stopping Sydney's pot from simmering. These were not wide-eyed utopians. In purely parochial terms, the heating of our biggest cities is even bigger than the global warming debate. Because the rise in temperature is mostly and demonstrably caused by outdated thinking.
The story starts on Observatory Hill, at the southern end of the Harbour Bridge, where weather records have been kept daily since 1860. What the observatory has recorded is a rise in the average temperature at the centre of Sydney from 20.5 degrees to 22 degrees. As Sydney grows, Sydney slowly heats.
At last Wednesday's seminar we learnt why - 27 per cent of the surface of the metropolitan area is covered by bitumen, the black tar which soaks and retains heat and thus changes the city's climate.
Nearly all the rainwater run-off on this 27 per cent of the city is lost to productive use, flowing into Sydney Harbour because it is designed that way. The city's rooftops also gather heat. Roads and pavements maximise the waste of arable land. Tree-planting is stunted for legal reasons. Topsoil is "scalped" by roadworks. The increasing use of air-conditioners is creating more energy. More heat begets more heat.
It is not just a Sydney story. The most telling detail lost amid all that was written and broadcast about the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, which killed 173 people, was that more people died from heat stress in Melbourne than in the fires. During the oven-like temperature peak (three consecutive days above 43 degrees) Melbourne saw a spike of 1400 emergencies requiring an ambulance.
An extra 374 people died in Victoria that week compared to the average week. Most were heat stress related.
"To break this heating cycle we don't need more money, we need more intelligent use of what we already have," says the person who organised Wednesday's seminar, Michael Mobbs, the creator of Sydney's most famous experiment in sustainable housing. He was stunned by the size and quality of the turnout. The room was full of planners from councils across Sydney. He was especially pleased that the gathering was addressed by Arjan Rensen, a senior executive from ARRB, the company which writes the specification guidelines for all the road agencies in Australia.
"It was hugely symbolic having him there, willing to be associated with what we're trying to do," Mobbs told me. "It means the road authorities are at last starting to deal with the impact their roads are having on our cities."
The roads are Mobbs's starting point for reform, because they take up so much room and are so taken for granted. "We should just use existing bitumen and gravel but choose pale gravel, and mix it so that the gravel shows through the bitumen," Mobbs says. "We could also use dyes like those used in bus lanes, but paler than green or red. These were first used in the Harbour Tunnel, which was privately owned, because the owners wanted to cut the cost of their electricity bill. On streets with low traffic volume, these dyed surfaces will last 15 to 20 years."
Then there is the overlooked space, the humble pavements. They should be planted and widened where possible because of the cooling powers of plants and trees. Fruit trees and vegetable gardens should also be grown in public space such as roadsides. The practice is common in Germany.
Planners have started listening to Mobbs because, having transformed his own home into a dwelling with self-contained power, water and sewerage systems, he is busy converting his street, Myrtle Street, Chippendale, into the sort of micro-environment that, if replicated across the city, would cool it, slash energy consumption, and massively increase carbon sequestration.
In the block where Mobbs lives, much of the pavement is covered in mulch and supports a variety of plants, including fruit trees. The fruit is available to anyone. Large public compost bins store debris, each collecting three tonnes of food waste a year to create one tonne of compost. Pipes have been manipulated to retain rainwater run-off.
All this is so simple yet so innovative. Councils and planners have been trying to do their best with what they have inside a system they have inherited. What has been lacking is a sense of the whole, of the potential for policy symbiosis, a greater realisation of what Sydney looks like on Google Earth rather than on planners' maps. Google Earth shows a city that acts as a heat trap and an energy sink, especially in the sprawling, spreading western suburbs, away from the cooling salvation of the coast.
But when I asked Mobbs if he had received council approval for his innovations on public space on Myrtle Street he replies, "not quite".
The local authority, Sydney City Council, has an ambivalent attitude. It is on his side but it is also a bureaucracy operating under the morass of laws and regulations that sits like an oppressive weight on innovation in society. Says Mobbs: "It's all been done with the delicious sense of doing something without approval."
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Global warming making fish smaller: study
Lets hope that global warming does not cause hornbag shrinkage. However it is allready being experienced here. Before there was three hornbags, by the time this photograph was sauced there was two. More proof that global warming is indeed at work in our daily lives, and, er hornbag photography.
Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study has found.
"It's huge," said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France.
"Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity - the capacity to reproduce."
Smaller fish tend to produce fewer eggs. They also provide less sustenance for predators - including humans - which could have significant implications for the food chain and ecosystem.
A similar shrinking effect was recently documented in Scottish sheep and Mr Daufresne said it is possible that global warming could have "a significant impact on organisms in general."
Earlier research has already established that fish have shifted their geographic ranges and their migratory and breeding patters in response to rising water temperatures. It has also been established that warmer regions tend to be inhabited by smaller fish.
Mr Daufresne and his colleagues examined long-term surveys of fish populations in rivers, streams and the Baltic and North Seas and also performed experiments on bacteria and plankton.
They found the individual species lost an average of 50 per cent of their body mass over the past 20 to 30 years while the average size of the overall fishing stock had shrunk by 60 per cent.
This was a result of a decrease in the average size-at-age and an increase in the proportion of juveniles and small-sized species, Mr Daufresne said.
"It was an effect that we observed in a number of organisms and in a number of very different environments - on fish, on plankton, on bacteria, in fresh water, in salt water - and we observed a global shrinking of size for all the organisms in all the environments," he said.
While commercial and recreational fishing did impact some of the fisheries studied, it "cannot be considered as the unique trigger" for the changes in size, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.
"Although not negating the role of other factors, our study provides strong evidence that temperature actually plays a major role in driving changes in the size structure of populations and communities," the study concluded.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
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