'Seeking shelter from the storm' - Age Editorial

(“Here are the facts:

■Last year was the world's warmest year on record. The planet's three hottest years are 2016, 2015 and 2014.

■2016 was Australia's 4th hottest year on record.
■Around Australia ocean temperatures were the warmest on record.

■We experienced our warmest autumn on record for Australia.

■The 2015/16 El Nino was one of the strongest on record. It brought the warmest wet season on record for northern Australia.
■It was also Australia's wettest May to September on record”)

Yes, populism punished the body politic, but we had to seek shelter from more literal storms.

The most recent, on December 29, lashed Victoria. The deluge in Melbourne alone turned domesticated creeks decidedly angry. And the roads, well, as the gutters disappeared they conspired against pedestrians and vehicles alike.

Way up north, just a few days before, the Bureau of Meteorology described a Christmas Day storm as a "once-in-a-half-century" weather event. The flooding flashed its way through the Northern Territory.  Uluru  wept unforgettably – majestic cascading streams.

In retrospect, we shouldn't have been surprised that 2016 had more mad weather to throw our way.

There were the massive storms and king tides that swept along the east coast of Australia in June, washing away sand, beaches and property, including a swimming pool yanked from its bed and left dangling.

As one Sydney local, Craig Graham, said: "I have never seen it come up this high with this amount of storm surge and I've been living here about 40 years."

Read the Editorial in today’s Melbourne Age - “Seeking shelter from the storm.”