Age of extremes.

Drought, heatwaves, bushfires and intense rain. Summer has barely started, but spring brought more than enough extreme weather to go on with.

Early indications: firefighters working to control a bushfire at
Deepwater in Central Queensland last month. At one point,
140 fires were burning around the state.

Spring is a time when southern cold fronts and warm northern air often battle it out all over the country. This makes for changeable and sometimes unpredictable weather, with the southern states topping 40°C one day but barely reaching 18°C the next.

As summer approaches, warmer — and in the tropics, more humid and wetter — conditions become the norm, and they usually fall within a more predictable envelope of variability. Extreme events occur when that envelope is pushed. And while a couple of extreme events in a season is fairly standard, a greater number of extreme events is starting to become the norm.

Read the story Inside Story by Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick - “Age of extremes.”

(Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is featured on “Climate Conversations”)