Sydney hits its highest temperature recorded since 1939 with Penrith reaching 47.3C

Penrith in Sydney's west reaches a top of 47.3 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature recorded by a weather station in the Sydney metropolitan area in 79 years.

Sydneysiders are flocking to the beach to cope with the heat.

The temperature hit 47.3C at Penrith just after 3:00pm.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) early this afternoon said it had confirmed preliminary data and declared it was the highest temperature ever recorded by a weather station in the Sydney metropolitan area.

Read the ABC News story - “Sydney hits its highest temperature recorded since 1939 with Penrith reaching 47.3C.”

Dehydration, death and power cuts: What 50C days would look like in Australia

Australia is hot. But future extreme hot weather will be worse still, with new research predicting that Sydney and Melbourne are on course for 50 degrees Celsius summer days by the 2040s if high greenhouse emissions continue.

That means that places such as Perth, Adelaide and various regional towns could conceivably hit that mark even sooner.

This trend is worrying, but not particularly surprising given the fact that Australia is setting hot weather records at 12 times the pace of cold ones. But it does call for an urgent response.

Most of us are used to hot weather, but temperatures of 50℃ present unprecedented challenges to our health, work, transport habits, leisure and exercise.

Read the piece from The Conversation by Liz Hanna of the Australian National University as published by ABC News - “Dehydration, death and power cuts: What 50C days would look like in Australia.”

Hume Highway cut by bushfire, temperature records tumble as east coast swelters

The main highway between Sydney and Canberra was cut by a bushfire and parts of New South Wales reached 40 degrees Celsius in September for the first time on record.

The grassfire at Paddys River near Wingello
 is causing lengthy traffic delays

The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) said the blaze at Paddy's River, near Wingello, crossed the highway but the threat to property had eased. It was downgraded to Advice level at 6:00pm.

After several hours of closure about 160 kilometres west of Sydney and east of Canberra, the Hume Highway has reopened.

Meanwhile, temperature records are being broken as the east coast swelters through a heatwave.

In Sydney's west, it was 36.4C at Richmond, and records were set in other parts of the state.

Read Sarah Hawke’s ABC News story - “Hume Highway cut by bushfire, temperature records tumble as east coast swelters.”

Combatting climate change in Victoria

The Victorian Government is laying the foundations for effective and long-lasting climate change action.

In late 2015, 195 countries made a landmark agreement at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Paris to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

Victoria is playing its part to meet that target. 2016 was the world's hottest year on record but it was a year Victoria took important steps and 2017 will be a new year of climate action.

Read the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) story - “Combatting climate change in Victoria.”

What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind

A freshly extracted section of the
two-mile-deep West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Divide core, drilled from 2006 to 2011. 

A dramatic pattern in our planet’s climate history involves paroxysms in Arctic temperatures. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, Greenland repeatedly warmed by about 10 degrees Celsius over just a few decades and then gradually cooled. Meanwhile the Southern Hemisphere climate stayed fairly stable, with only weak and long-delayed echoes of the temperature chaos up north.

But new research shows the fierce winds circling Antarctica—an important lever on the global climate—shifted quickly in response to the Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes.

“It’s most surprising that we can see these really abrupt changes in the Northern Hemisphere making it very quickly to the Southern Hemisphere,” says first author Bradley Markle, a doctoral student in earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. “The atmospheric circulation is tightly connected across the globe during these events.”

Read the Futurity story - “What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind.”

Fran Kelly talks with Climate Analytics boss, Bill Hare

Since the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, the world has been aiming to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But amid fears by vulnerable countries that two degrees was not 'safe', the Paris Climate Agreement last year tightened this global goal to 'well below two degrees while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees'.

A new report for the Climate Institute has found that this seemingly small difference in global average temperature represents a large addition of energy into the global climate system.

For example, in a world that is two degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, the typical annual length of warm spells would be up to 60 days longer than today across northern parts of Australia, and around 20 days longer across central and southern regions. This increase would be reduced by at least 30 per cent if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Sea level is also significant. The report says two degrees Celsius will lock in a 'multi-metre' increase in sea levels over centuries—but 1.5 degrees Celsius will lead to 'declining rates of sea level rise' toward the end of this century.

Read the introduction and go to ‘listen now’ to hear the Radio National Breakfast host, Fran Kelly, talk with CEO and Managing Director/Senior Scientist and co-founder of Climate Analytics, Dr Bill Hare -“Two degrees warming 'not safe' for Australia, report finds.”

At Paris will have a 'funeral without a corpse'

"P

aris will be a funeral without a corpse," according to David Victor.

David Victor.

The professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, has predicts the 2C goal will slip away despite insistence by many governments that is still alive.

Reuters reports: “The U.N.'s Paris climate conference, designed to reach a plan for curbing global warming, may instead become the graveyard for its defining goal: to stop temperatures rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“Achieving the 2C (3.6 Fahrenheit) target has been the driving force for climate negotiators and scientists, who say it is the limit beyond which the world will suffer ever worsening floods, droughts, storms and rising seas.”

Read the Reuters story - “U.N. climate deal in Paris may be graveyard for 2C goal”.

Partnership could influence energy-intensive companies to cut emissions

A

 partnership between CDP, UN Global Compact, World Resources Institute and WWF launches today, to encourage influential energy-intensive companies from around the world to set carbon emission reduction targets which are in line with climate science.

Announced today at the Business and Climate Summit during Climate Week Paris – which is convened by The Climate Group – the ambitious Science Based Target initiative aims to recruit 100 companies by the end of 2015, who by joining, will offer a leading example to their peers by setting emission targets compliant with the scientifically-acknowledged global temperature rise limit of 2 degrees Celsius.

The new targets are critical because even though 80% of the biggest 500 companies in the world told CDP they had emission reduction goals in place in 2014, only a few of those reached the scale required to properly address the threat of climate change.

Read the story here - “Climate science gives competitive advantage to big companies including Mars, Enel and CLP Holdings”.

Climate change impacts on everything, including our memories

Memory is to be celebrated, particularly if it is reliable, but frequently facts demonstrate that it is not to be trusted.

The switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius has worsened the reliability of memories, particularly among those whose youth was measured in Fahrenheit temperatures and now, much later in life, they are experiencing temperature in Celsius.

For many older people 100° Fahrenheit was frightfully hot and now they seem to equate that with 40° Celsius, which is in fact, on the old scale, is 104° Fahrenheit.

It was in April 1975 that Australia switched to the metric measurement of heat and it seems that those still locked in that time warp are yet to really understand the earth is warming and that the “hot” of the past is not the “hot” of today.

Temperatures of 45° Celsius have been historically rare in Australia’s major population centres in decades past, but as this century unfolds, they will become increasingly common - 45° Celsius is 113° Fahrenheit!

It is worth noting that at the time of writing this (4:48pm, February 2, 2014); the temperature in Shepparton is 41.2°C which on the old scale is 106.1°F.

Climate change is on the march, double time

Climate change is inherently loaded with challenges, some to which we can adapt and others that are either impossible or border on that.

The latest warning from America’s Stanford University suggests the unfolding changes are happening so quickly that adaptation for much of life on earth is in fact impossible.

Scientific American says in a story headed: “Today’s climate change proves much faster than changes in the past 65 million years”, that earth’s eco systems will find it hard to adjust.

Quoting a Stanford University study, the Scientific American story said that if global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next century, that increase will be 10 times faster than anything seen before.