Australia this week farewelled its hottest summer on record and entered autumn with heatwave warnings across the southern part of the continent. And if you happen to be the Prime Minister famous for posing in Parliament holding a lump of coal, there was worse news to come.
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| The coal cuddler and the green PM. Illustration: John Shakespeare. |
The Bureau of Meteorology forecast that the outlook for all of autumn is for unusually warm and dry conditions. Which will keep the weather in the news all the way to election day and dismay farmers. But this can't have anything to do with the mythical beast known as "climate change", can it?
Consider just the first two dot-points in the summary of the bureau's annual "State of the Climate" report for 2018. One: "Australia's climate has warmed just over 1°C since 1910 leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events." Two: "Oceans around Australia have warmed by around 1°C since 1910, contributing to longer and more frequent marine heatwaves.”
But surely we aren't supposed to attribute even a warmer, drier few months ahead to long-term climate change, too?
Read the story from The Age by Peter Hartcher - “Inconvenient truths for our coal-cuddling PM.”
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