(AU) 'Climate Is Changing': Historical Maps Show It's Getting Hotter And Drier

The Age - Noel Towell

As severe bushfires raged in NSW and Victorians baked under Friday's brutal sun, a new set of official maps shows in stark detail how Australia is growing dramatically hotter and drier.
The charts produced by Agriculture Victoria show a marked rise in maximum temperatures across much of the country in recent years, a trend the government agency's climate experts expect to continue.

But the charts, mapping climatic conditions for the past 109 years and intended as a planning tool for farmers, also offer hope for those suffering under drought conditions that good rainfall years will come again.

Australia has already had its hottest December day on record this week. Victoria will swelter under more record-breaking heat on Friday. Terrible bushfires are raging across NSW, with the danger set to intensify in that state on Saturday when catastrophic conditions are expected.

Agriculture Victoria climate specialist Graeme Anderson, who produced the maps with his colleague Jemma Pearl, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald  that they'd done the work to show the difference between "good old-fashioned variability and the trends that come with climate change".

"We've got these increasing temperature trends from climate change and that's a trend that's expected to continue, predicted with high confidence from the atmospheric scientists," Mr Anderson said.

But the scientist said the separate rainfall charts show that rainfall is likely to bounce back, when the conditions in the Pacific and Indian oceans are right.

"There's a lot of variability in the system," Mr Anderson said.

The 109-year sweep shows the extremes in Australia's weather.

In 1974 much of Australia is shaded blue, reflecting the cool and very wet year. January that year was the wettest month in 70 years. Fourteen lives were lost in Brisbane floods after record summer rains.

Come 1982, above-average temperatures in south-eastern Australia combined with several years of low rainfall to create the conditions for Ash Wednesday early the following year, the bushfires that killed 47 people in Victoria and 28 in South Australia.

A lot of Australia is coloured red in 2009, when bushfires in Victoria killed 173 people in the nation's worst ever bushfires, surpassing the record set by Ash Wednesday.
A heatwave in south-eastern Australia in 2013 resulted in several bushfires in Tasmania, while a monsoon trough over parts of Queensland and New South Wales caused severe storms, flooding, and tornadoes.

Victoria's Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes encouraged farmers to download the maps from the Agriculture Victoria website to gain a better understanding of climate trends in their particular region.

"These maps tell us that Australia's climate is changing rapidly and the future will bring hotter temperatures and more frequent, severe drought," Ms Symes said.

"Victoria is an Australian leader when it comes to agricultural research and this information is one way we are ensuring farmers have access to quality information about weather and climate conditions.
"It's vital that we keep working with our country communities to build their resilience to increasingly difficult conditions."

Links

• Australia 'absolutely' must take more action on climate change: Michael McCormack
• NSW burns with multiple fires in extreme conditions
• Morrison's big failure is his lack of leadership on climate change
• Homes lost, firefighters seriously injured in bushfire crisis as worst is yet to come
• Sydney's air quality 'hazardous' 28 days in the past two months
• Can Morrison's 'she'll be right' strategy on climate work forever?
• No rain ’til April, BoM tells ministers
• Australians overwhelmingly agree climate emergency is nation's No 1 threat