Australia’s Fires Test Its Winning Growth Formula.

Australia’s remarkable prosperity rests on a balancing act. It mines coal, natural gas and iron ore from a vulnerable landscape. It takes ever more money from China while allied with the American military.

Scientists say Australia’s increasingly hot and dry
conditions are to blame for the blazes ripping
 through its countryside. 

With devastating wildfires ripping through its countryside, that balance may become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Australia’s leaders face growing pressure to address climate change, as scientists blame the country’s increasingly hot and dry conditions for the disastrous blazes. 

That would mean reckoning with Australia’s dependence on providing China and other countries with coal.

The fossil fuel, used to fire many of the world’s power plants and steel mills, is one of Australia’s biggest exports. Coal is also one of the biggest sources of climate change gases, and produces most of Australia’s own electricity.

Read the story from The New York Times by Keith Bradsher and Isabella Kwai - “Australia’s Fires Test Its Winning Growth Formula.”

‘Really extreme' global weather event leaves scientists aghast

Climate scientists are used to seeing the range of weather extremes stretched by global warming but few episodes appear as remarkable as this week's unusual heat over the Arctic.

Zack Labe, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, said average daily temperatures above the northern latitude of 80 degrees have broken away from any previous recordings in the past 60 years.

"To have zero degrees at the North Pole in February - it's just wrong," said Amelie Meyer, a researcher of ice-ocean interactions with the Norwegian Polar Institute. "It's quite worrying.”

The so-called Polar Vortex - a zone of persistient low-pressure that typically keeps high-latitude cold air separate from regions further south - has been weakening for decades.

In this instance, "a massive jet of warm air" is penetrating north, sending a cold burst southwards, said Dr Meyer, who has relocated to Hobart to research on the southern hemisphere, and is hosted by Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in The Age - “‘Really extreme' global weather event leaves scientists aghast.”

Unusual hot spell for Victoria and Tasmania driven by warm seas, stable systems

Victorians mopping up after recent heavy rain could be forgiven if they were too busy to reflect for long on the remarkable heat that precede the downpours.

St Kilda beach during one of record-breaking stint of
warm evenings in Melbourne last month.

The Bureau of Meteorology, though, has tallied the many records for Victoria and Tasmania during the blistering end to spring in a special report it released on Monday. 

Despite a cool start to last month – which has returned for the start of December – southern Victoria had its second-warmest November on record, behind only 2009.

In Melbourne, the 12 November days with temperatures topping 30 degrees eclipsed the previous record of 10, set in 2009.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Unusual hot spell for Victoria and Tasmania driven by warm seas, stable systems.”

El Niño and La Niña – por que no los dos?! (Actually, that would be very bad)

It would be pretty remarkable if you weren’t somehow affected by the Queensland floods in 2011, the Great Ocean Road Christmas bushfires in 2015, or even the heatwaves leading up to Black Saturday in 2009 that killed 173 people in Victoria.

When floods occur, is it always La Nina to blame?
Nope. The tricky part is that no two El Niño or
La Niña events are exactly the same.

But have you ever taken a step back to think about what’s really going on with the weather in times like this? We don’t have bushfires and floods all the time, so something was obviously happening to cause such a drastic change in weather.

You’d be correct in saying that something more was at play here. In fact, it’s called ENSO – the El Niño- Southern Oscillation – the changing surface ocean temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean. When the central and eastern equatorial Pacific is warmer than normal, it is called El Niño, “the little boy” in Spanish; conversely, when it is cooler than normal, it is called La Niña, or “the little girl.”

These two children are responsible for changes in our weather patterns every two to seven years. They make tweaks in the Pacific Ocean temperatures, wind and clouds that have enormous effects on the rest of us.

Read CSIROscope by Rachel Vorwerk - “El Niño and La Niña – por que no los dos?! (Actually, that would be very bad).”

A Momentous Month for Tackling Climate Change

It has been a remarkable month for global resolve on tackling climate change.

The most conspicuous indicator has been the crescendo of corporate CEOs and global investors calling on President Donald Trump to support the Paris Climate Agreement. Dozens of iconic CEOs from Dow Chemical Company, General Electric, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America took out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal urging strong support for keeping the U.S. in the Paris Agreement.

Just days before, more than 200 global investors, collectively managing $15 trillion in assets, sent a letter to the President and other G20 world leaders calling for the same action.

The growing number of high-profile voices is remarkable and heartening, to be sure, and we hope the President is listening.

Read Mindy Lubber’s story on Greentech -  “A Momentous Month for Tackling Climate Change.”