Lethal Heating: 03/02/22

02/03/2022

(AU ABC) WA Weather Delivers Perth Its Hottest Summer On Record As Scientists Predict Trend To Continue

ABC News - Tyne Logan

Perth recorded a string of six consecutive days above 40 degrees Celsius as temperature records kept tumbling. (ABC News: Jon Sambell)

Key Points

There were 13 days of 40C temperatures in Perth over summer
There was also a record number of days over 35C
Several regional towns are also set to break their summer heat records

It's been a summer for the history books in Western Australia with Perth sweltering through its hottest on record, and several regional towns all but guaranteed to follow suit.

While numbers will not be technically official until Tuesday, Bureau of Meteorology figures show Perth's average maximum temperature is currently 33.2 degrees Celsius — well above the previous record of 32.3 set in 2012/13.

It means the city is guaranteed to break the record even without the final day's temperature, forecast to be 36C.

Several regional towns through the Central West, Wheatbelt, Great Southern and South West are also likely to break summer records.

The numbers speak for themselves

When you look at individual days, it is easy to see why.

Perth set a summer record of 13 days above 40C, six of which were consecutive.

Perth also experienced a record number of days above 35C, and in January Onslow equalled Australia's hottest ever temperature, reaching 50.7C.

BOM forecaster Jessica Lingard says there's been an unusual number of heat records broken this summer. (ABC: Greg Pollock)

Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Jessica Lingard said it had been hard to keep up with the number of records.

"So many places have had their hottest Christmas, their hottest December, their hottest January," Ms Lingard said.

"There has just been an awful lot of records broken this season and it's quite unusual."

What's been driving the heat?

In terms of weather systems, Ms Lingard said it was the usual heat-bearing systems that fuelled the hot weather.

Perth has endured its hottest summer on record. (ABC News: Hugh Sando)

That includes high pressure systems and west coast troughs, which drive in strong and warm easterly winds from the desert and often delay or stop the sea breeze.

But she said this year the systems were sticking around for much longer than normal, allowing the heat to build.

"They usually transition eastwards fairly rapidly, forming a west coast trough and then a couple of days later it moves inland," she said.

"But we've been seeing these west coast troughs really hanging around for a long time.

"We're talking four to seven days, so that really allows all that warm air from inland parts to penetrate right into coastal areas."

Challenging fire season

The conditions have had devastating consequences, even for regions that only experienced short bursts of heat.

In early February, four out-of-control bushfires were burning at the same time — ultimately destroying homes in Denmark, Bridgetown and Corrigin.

In February 2021 an out-out-control bushfire doubled in size overnight in Denmark, destroying three houses. (Supplied: Emily Harper)

A week later it happened again, but this time with lightning added to the mix.

One home in Jerramungup was lost along with two in Hopetoun.

Department of Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner Daren Klemm said conditions had been particularly severe this year.

"We've had some really challenging, complex fires in particularly difficult fire weather," he said.

Fingerprint of climate change

Unfortunately, climate science indicates this is just the start.

Rainfall has declined significantly in the last 50 years over WA's south-west.

While it can be difficult for scientists to directly attribute extreme weather events to climate change, climate scientist Andrew King said Perth's summer clearly bore the fingerprint of global warming.

"Given the background trends and previous work looking at heatwaves and their links to climate change in different parts of Australia, and our understanding of how the climate system works, we can be quite confident that climate change has exacerbated the heat and Perth the summer," Dr King said.

He said there would still be cooler summers in future, but climate change had loaded the dice to make hot years more common.

"Because we've got such a clear trend in temperatures across the whole of Australia, including in Western Australia, it's just quite easy to break records these days," he said.

"I guess an analogy to that is you can think of like COVID cases.

"If you've got an outbreak occurring, you can have record numbers of cases each day, day after day, when you've got a strong trend in case numbers.

"In a way, temperature trends are a bit like that, when you've got a very clear trend, it's very easy to break records so you break them more frequently."

Dr Andrew King says there's very little doubt that WA's hot summer was influenced by climate change. (ABC Weather: Kate Doyle)

Dr King said heatwaves would only become more frequent and intense if greenhouse has emissions were not reduced.

"However, if we try and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and try and stick to the Paris Agreement, that would help a lot.

"We would see slightly worse heat waves than we do now, but not as bad as if we just keep emitting greenhouse gases."

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(USA PBS NewsHour) UN Releases Dire Climate Report Highlighting Rapid Environmental Degradation

PBS NewsHour - William Brangham

A new United Nations science report warned that the effects of climate change are growing faster and more severe than expected.

It cited hunger, disease, poverty and other ills made worse by a warming planet and indicated the repercussions may soon outstrip humanity's ability to adapt.

William Brangham reports.

REPORT VIDEO

REPORT AUDIO

REPORT TRANSCRIPT

Judy Woodruff:

Now let's take a deeper look at the new climate change report the U.N. released today.

As William Brangham tells us, it provided the starkest warnings yet, not only about what could happen, but what's already been set into motion.
William Brangham:

The evidence is everywhere, burning forests in Argentina, massive floods in Bangladesh, drought in Spain. The impacts of climate change are here, and they're getting worse.

And according to a landmark United Nations report, not only are some of these impacts worse than previously known; some may already be irreversible.
Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General:

Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership. With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.
William Brangham:

The report conducted by a U.N. panel of more than 200 scientists from over 60 countries emphasized that our warming of the planet is unleashing damages at a pace and intensity that many nations won't be able to handle, and that reducing the pollution that's driving climate change isn't happening nearly fast enough.
Hans Otto Portner, Co-Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.
William Brangham:

The report noted that each additional fraction of warming had serious implications for life on Earth. The report laid out 127 of these threats, including the growing loss of usable farmland and increasing drought, which will threaten the global food supply, rising sea levels and floods, which are already driving tens of thousand of people from their homes, growing numbers of punishing deadly heat waves, and increasing extinction of plant and animal species.
Camille Parmesan, Make Our Planet Great Again, France:

Some impacts are already irreversible. Even at the 1.09 in warming that we have had, we're already seeing species go extinct, and that is new for the — since the last IPCC report.
William Brangham:

World leaders, including President Biden, have pledged to try and limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

But with the world's top economies spitting out near record carbon emissions, achieving that goal is getting further out of reach every day. At the current pace, the planet is on track to warm between two and three degrees Celsius this century.
Antonio Guterres:

Global emissions are set to increase almost 14 percent over the current decade. That spells catastrophe. It will destroy any chance of keeping 1.5 alive.
William Brangham:

And if the planet overshoots that 1.5-degree target, as it's expected to, this report warns that some of these damages likely can't be undone.
Camille Parmesan:

Species have already gone extinct because of climate change. Islands have already become uninhabitable because of sea level rise.
William Brangham:

The U.N. report notes that poorer, less developed nations are and will continue to be the hardest hit by the ravages of climate change.

In 2019, it's estimated that over 13 million people in parts of Asia and Africa were driven from their homes by extreme weather events. The report found that, between 2010 and 2020, droughts, floods and storms killed 15 times as many people in these highly vulnerable countries.
Camille Parmesan:

What you find is that the most vulnerable are the most affected, whether it's the most vulnerable within a country, the poorest, the ones in the most marginalized settlements, or the most vulnerable countries. It works at all scales.
William Brangham:

One hundred and ninety-five governments approved this report. But the head of the U.N. argues that, if past action is any guide, these warnings continue to fall on deaf ears.
Antonio Guterres:

The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal.
William Brangham:

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm William Brangham.

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(AU SMH) Climate Change Will Cost Australia Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars: UN Report

Sydney Morning Herald - Mike Foley

Climate change will cost Australia’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades, driven by loss of life and physical damage caused by heatwaves, droughts, floods, fires and other natural disasters, according to the United Nation’s report compiled by the world’s climate scientists.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impacts of climate change makes “conservative estimates” for the economic cost of global warming.

It said 1 degree warming would cause a loss of 0.3 per cent of GDP a year, 2 degrees would cost 0.6 per cent of growth a year and 3 degrees would decrease growth by 1.1 per cent a year.

Lismore in northern NSW is being hit with the worst flood ever recorded. Credit: Elise Derwin

That means that, under 2 degrees of warming, Australia’s economy would miss out on $115 billion in lost earnings over the next decade and $350 billion over the next 20 years.

Under 3 degrees warming, the economy would lose $200 million in potential earnings by 2032 and $600 billion by 2042.

The world has already heated by 1.1 degrees and Australia’s land mass has warmed by an average of 1.4 degrees since 1910, according to the CSIRO.

Climate policy

The climate clock: What’s the world’s carbon budget and what’s Australia’s share?

The IPCC said there is a “very high level of confidence” that current international emissions reduction commitments would not limit warming to less than 2 degrees.

If the rest of the world followed Australia’s current commitments and policies, global warming would exceed 3 degrees, according to Climate Action Tracker.

Greenhouse gases retain heat in the atmosphere, adding to the energy that drives weather events – making droughts, cyclones, fires and floods more frequent, intense and unpredictable.

Unprecedented floods are sweeping down the North Coast of NSW, after Brisbane was inundated last week, just two years after the most intense drought on record in many parts of the eastern seaboard.

General manager of natural disaster consultancy Risk Frontiers, Andrew Gissing, said Lismore was exceeding record flood heights set in 1974 and 1954 by a significant margin, with forecast peaks that have an annual average chance of about 0.2 per cent of occurring.

Emissions

Renewable energy drives fall in Australia’s carbon pollution

Even if the earth’s heating is kept at under 2 degrees, the number of heatwave-related deaths in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will more than double to an average of 300 year by 2080, under current population growth.

This scenario would also see the mercury top 50 degrees in extreme events in these cities, and the frequency of days topping 35 degrees will rise between 25 per cent and 85 per cent depending on the location around the country.

Agriculture across the country is expected to suffer major financial stress as the atmosphere heats, although financial impacts are hard to forecast due to shifting growing zones, adaptive livestock and plant breeding, and advances in drought adaptation.

The Murray Darling Basin is home to 2.4 million people and agricultural production is worth an annual average of $2.6 billion.

The river system is already struggling with over-extraction for irrigation and the report highlighted findings from the CSIRO that 2 degrees of warming would reduce streamflows by 20 per cent.

Reduction in long-term average inflows to the River Murray

Source: Australian government

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a scientist on the IPCC working group of scientists, as the Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report was released on Tuesday.

“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres reiterated his plea for the world to reverse the current trend and cut greenhouse emissions in a last-ditch hope of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

“Science tells us that will require the world to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050,” he said. “But according to current commitments, global emissions are set to increase almost 14 per cent over the current decade.

Key risks identified for Australia

Loss and degradation of coral reefs and associated biodiversity and ecosystem service values in Australia due to ocean warming and marine heatwaves (very high confidence).
Loss of alpine biodiversity in Australia due to less snow (high confidence).
Transition or collapse of alpine ash, snowgum woodland, pencil pine and northern jarrah forests in southern Australia due to hotter and drier conditions with more fires (high confidence).
Loss of kelp forests in southern Australia and south-east New Zealand due to ocean warming, marine heatwaves and overgrazing by climate-driven range extensions of herbivore fish and urchins (high confidence).
Loss of natural and human systems in low-lying coastal areas due to sea-level rise (high confidence).
Disruption and decline in agricultural production and increased stress in rural communities in south-western, southern and eastern mainland Australia due to hotter and drier conditions (high confidence).
Increase in heat-related mortality and morbidity for people and wildlife in Australia due to heatwaves (high confidence).
Cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts on cities, settlements, infrastructure, supply-chains and services due to wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and sea-level rise (high confidence).
Inability of institutions and governance systems to manage climate risks (high confidence).

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