‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C

It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

 A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia.

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

Read the story from The Guardian by Naaman Zhou - “‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C.”

Hottest February was a 'moster of a month'

Most people know by now that last month was the hottest February since modern records began. It was also the hottest overall month on record, and by the largest margin.

The global average temperature anomaly was 1.35ºC above the 1951–80 average and 1.21ºC above the entire twentieth-century average. For temperatures over land, the deviation almost doubles to a whopping 2.31ºC above the twentieth-century average. Other records broken by February 2016 include the fact that it was the tenth consecutive month in which the global average monthly record was broken and that it completed the hottest three-month period on record (December 2015 to February 2016).

Normally, climate scientists don’t get too anxious over a single month; our blood pressure tends to rise a bit more when record-breaking temperature anomalies are consistently smashed. But February is a special case – not only did it set yet a new record in an increasingly concerning upwards trend, but magnitude the record is terrifying.

Read the Inside Story article - “A monster of a month.”

Records tumble and climate change cited as reason

Climate change has been named is the reason for the breaking of more than 150 weather records in Australia in the immediate past summer.

An ABC report headed: “Climate Council report: More than 150 weather records broken last summer, climate change cited as reason”, directly attributes the responsibility to our changing climate.