11/02/2020

(AU) Zali Steggall To Unveil Climate Change Bill And Push For A Conscience Vote For MPs

The Guardian - 

Now is the time for ‘modern Liberals’ to speak for their community rather than toe the party line, independent MP says
Zali Steggall says it is time to take the party politics out of climate policy, which is why she is calling for a conscience vote on her bill. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
  • Aims to limit global warming to well below 2C, pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
  • Net zero carbon emissions target by 2050.
  • To achieve the target, the minister creates an emissions budget.
  • Establishes a Climate Change Commission to prepare a national climate change risk assessment every five years.
  • The commission is made up of a chair, Australia's chief scientist and five other members - who must have experience in either climate science, business, agriculture, environmental management, energy, transport or regional development.
  • The assessments cover the risks climate change poses to the economy, society, agriculture, environment, and ecology.
  • In response, the minister creates a national adaptation plan.
  • The commission provides the minister with yearly adaptation plan progress reports.
  • Decisions made under the Act must be based on the best available science.
The woman who toppled Tony Abbott in Warringah at the last election on a platform of climate change action now has the whole parliament in her sights as she seeks bipartisan support for a climate change framework bill aimed at transitioning Australia to a decarbonised economy.
Zali Steggall – along with her fellow crossbenchers Rebekah Sharkie, Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie – will release the climate change national framework for adaption and mitigation bill on Monday, ahead of its introduction to the parliament in March.
Steggall and the crossbench have begun a conscience vote campaign online and within their communities. They hope to win over enough government MPs to see the bill, which has been modelled on existing legislation in the UK, New Zealand and Ireland, pass in Australia.
However, the crossbench faces an uphill battle, with Scott Morrison declaring just last week he would not be “bullied’ into more action on climate change.
Steggall has previously called on the self-styled “modern Liberals” to support the legislation, which she said became imperative following the summer of unprecedented bushfires and resulting hazardous air quality that left communities reeling.
With the government’s party room once again at war over climate policy, Steggall said it was time to let individual MPs speak for their communities rather than toe a party line.
“The bill will be circulated to all MPs as well as business, environmental and relevant stakeholder groups on Monday,” she said.
“It is time to take the party politics out of climate policy. It is a matter of principle that we should all be committed to a safer future. I am urging for a conscience vote when I present the bill on March 23 as a private member’s bill. Now is the time for a rational approach to climate change.”
The crossbench group, working with climate action organisations, has already launched petitions calling on MPs to be allowed a conscience vote on the legislation once it is introduced.
Without a conscience vote, the bill is doomed to fail, with the government holding the numbers in the lower chamber.
Steggall said the events of the summer, on top of the climate impacts Australia was already suffering through, should be enough to prompt MPs to follow their conscience and vote on behalf of their constituents.
“This bill is a sensible and bipartisan approach to safeguarding Australia’s future against the impacts of climate change,” she said.
“The devastating fires that ripped through Australia over summer; the drought; and our deteriorating air pollution have shown how the impacts of climate change are a real threat to our way of life.”
Dave Sharma in Wentworth, Tim Wilson in Goldstein and Jason Falinski in Mackellar, as well as Brisbane’s Trevor Evans and North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman are being targeted as potential allies. Newcomer Katie Allen, who won the seat of Higgins at the last election, and Bennelong MP John Alexander, who have both urged their government to take more action on climate policy in recent weeks, are also being urged to vote according to their electorate’s wishes.
Steggall has previously warned of voter backlash if moderate Liberals ignore their wishes on climate action.
“I think they have to be mindful of their electorates feeling disenfranchised if they aren’t voting in accordance with their majority wishes,” Steggall told the Guardian last month.
“The Liberal party is the party of the free vote – I am not asking them to do something they have never done before, and I think crossing the floor to vote for a climate act is something they need to do to represent their constituents.
“If you choose to ignore the amount of people in your electorate [who want stronger climate action] … you do so at your peril.”
Steggall and the crossbench have kept much of the bill under wraps, but have said they are aiming for a statutory long-term target of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as a climate change risk assessment for all sectors.
The group wants the government to focus on a national adaption schedule for Australia’s industries, based on what the science has revealed in regards to impacts of climate change.
To ensure accountability, the group wants to follow the UK’s lead and establish some sort of climate change authority, which would act independently of the government, and report back on the progress each year.
Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, said the opposition was looking to work with the government on a bipartisan climate policy.
“We have been seeking bipartisanship for a long time in relation to this,” he told the ABC on Sunday.
“But to get bipartisanship, we actually need to have a side that we can talk to. Right now, we’re watching a whole lot of people having a war with each other inside their party room … and that’s preventing the conservatives in this country even coming to the table to have a discussion about this.”

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10/02/2020

(AU) Climate Change Could Lead To Increase In Dangerous Firestorms That Were Once 'Rare'

Sydney Morning Herald - Laura Chung | Nick Moir

Scientists fear climate change will cause a once "rare and unique" weather event to become more common, as they race to develop predictive modelling and tools to help them better understand pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCB), commonly referred to as firestorms.
Jason Sharples, a professor of bushfire dynamics at the University of NSW, records the frequency of these storms around Australia and said between 1998, when relevant records started, and 2018, there were 62 confirmed pyroCBs.
But this bushfire season has seen that figure jump.
Lightning from a pyroCB storm breaks through while bushfires rage nearby. Credit: Nick Moir
Since September last year, at least another 30 pyroCBs have been recorded Australia-wide, while a further 15 possible storms are still being investigated.
"It's concerning, obviously, but I think this season comes down to extreme dryness and energy that the fuels were able to put out as they burnt," he said.
He notes that in previous years, the pyroCB pattern was irregular - with one or two events every three years or so, but recently these storms have increased in frequency.


Bushfires can create their own weather, generating ‘pyrocumulonimbus’ clouds and storms.

Professor Sharples is also a volunteer firefighter in the ACT and said he has been through an area ravaged by a pyroCB once. It was in the aftermath of the Black Saturday 2009 fires and he said the scene was "like a bomb had gone off".
"It was like a giant had taken a blow torch to it [the town]. You really get a moonscape feel," he said.

'Phenomenal increase'
A pyroCB event occurs when the intense heat from the fire causes air and smoke to rise and draws in cooler air.  If the air cools enough, the moisture in the plume condenses and forms a pyrocumulus cloud.
Under the right conditions, the cloud can mix with ice particles and cause lightning, producing a thunderstorm - known as pyrocumulonimbus.
The storms can cause unpredictable changes in fire behaviour, making it more dangerous for firefighters and nearby communities.
Fire researcher at the Bureau of Meteorology Mika Peace said over the past few decades, the knowledge about how fire and weather interact has increased.
"Since then, there's been a massive research effort in understanding pyroCBs and more recently predicting them," she said.
Dr Peace said in the 1950s and '60s, fire information focused on what was happening on the ground. Since then, scientists have turned their attention to what is happening above them too.
"This season has been unprecedented [for pyroCBs]... we've seen multiple pyroCBs developing on the same day over individual fires," she said.
In past fire seasons, these incidents were "rare and unique", said NSW RFS manager of the planning and predictive services unit Simon Heemstra.
But this season,  there has been a "phenomenal increase" in pyroCB events.
Dr Heemstra said one of the dangers of pyroCB events is the long-range spotting of fires up to 30 kilometres away from the main fire front.
Photographs show spot fires breaking ahead of the Clear Range Fire along the Monaro Highway on February 1. Credit: Dean Sewell
Other dangers include fire tornadoes, downbursts of air causing the fire to hit the ground and burst outwards and lightning which can cause new fires up to 60 kilometres away.
"Some days, state operations issued five or six alerts for different fires around the state because of pyrocumulus columns. [PyroCB] are a big concern. We'll be seeing more and more as a feature for the future," Dr Heemstra said.
Scientists note climate change will alter ground-level weather and the upper atmosphere, making conditions more conducive to pyroCBs. This risk highlights the need for more predictive modelling and tools.
At the moment, predicting where pyroCBs will hit is difficult, with the RFS erring on the side of caution as the consequences are too severe if something goes wrong.
The Herald's chief photographer Nick Moir, who has spent the last few months documenting the bushfires and their devastation, said he has been close to several pyroCB events this season, including a run-in at the Gospers Mountain fire.
Over this fire season, NSW experienced several pyroCB events, including during the Gospers Mountain fire. Credit: Nick Moir
"I was underneath it when it went pyrocumulonimbus, there was rain, hail and lightning all around the area. I was in a burnt-out area so I was safe, but there were strong winds, and, in particular, lightning ahead of the actual fire front and the storm," he said.
Former Tasmanian fire chief Mike Brown spent 39 years fighting fires and has only seen one pyroCB which was in the 2013 Dunalley fire, east of Hobart.
"It created strong winds and severe updraft, we had an aircraft working on that fire and they reported they had the worst turbulence they had ever experienced," he said.
"You’re organising tactics according to winds going a certain direction, but then suddenly [when the pyroCB occurs] there are unpredictable winds and weather patterns that are causing unpredictable and extreme fire weather conditions."
Mr Brown said at the time fire crews noticed burning material and embers being carried up high into the sky. Following the fire, they noticed scorched birds all along the beaches and believe they were burnt to death when the embers caught them unawares.
While this fire season has been marked by devastation, it provides a unique opportunity for scientists around the world to learn more about pyroCB events: what causes them, the safety risks associated with them and what they mean for the future of firefighting.

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'Good' Climate Policy Can No Longer Be Our Goal. It's Time To Reach For Perfect

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

The Gillard government actually implemented a carbon price. Why are we so lacking in ambition now?
‘Let us be honest: the government is paving the way to climate-change hell with bad intentions.’ Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images
While listening this week to the Guardian Australia editor, Lenore Taylor, on the Full Story podcast speaking with sadness and exasperation about the past 30 years of climate change policy, I thought about good intentions and perfection.
We often hear that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. It’s one of those sayings that, when you really think about it, is just a squib.
The reality is these good intentions that are paving our way to hell are not so much good as ignorant, and quite often (such as with much of Indigenous policy) outright racist. They are really considered good only by those seeking to excuse the action in the first place.
And while good people might occasionally do wrong with actual good intentions, there is a much higher strike rate of people with bad intentions doing bad things.
That the road to hell may be paved with good intentions means we should ensure our good intentions are not ignorant or biased; and it sure as heck does not give an excuse to those with bad intent.
We certainly have seen a plethora of bad intent with respect to climate-change policy since 1990.
Similarly, you could probably fill a long list of quotes by people over the past decade or so who have suggested of climate change policy that “we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good”.
And yet rather than this suggesting we need to compromise, what it has come to mean is that we should excuse policy that is bad, because it is not perfect.
If we are so worried about the perfect being the enemy of the good, wouldn’t we at least see some evidence of someone in the major parties actually suggesting a policy that could be described as perfect?
The science of climate change tells us we need to reduce emissions and the sooner we do it the less the impact will be.
And yet rather than see any “perfect” policy with this aim, instead we get supposedly good policy accompanied with caveats – talk of the need for transitional fuels such as gas or that a coalmine is fine – hey, let’s not be perfect! (And please don’t not argue about just how good something has to be before perfect becomes its enemy).
So bad has this become that the carbon price instituted by the Gillard government is now considered some perfect policy too far beyond our political grasp.
Why are we so lacking in ambition?
And given the other side have an ambition fuelled by bad intentions, it might be worthwhile when trying to compromise to ensure negotiation starts from a position rather closer to perfect than just “good”.
Because let us be honest: the government is paving the way to climate change hell with bad intentions.
The government is replete with climate-change deniers who intend to block and retard any action to reduce emissions.
They will do this through obfuscation and outright misinformation – such as the lies about the impact of the ALP’s electric car policy during the last election, or the current lies about the bushfires.
On Wednesday, Peter Dutton told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing that “obviously, as we’ve all pointed out, we’re experiencing hotter weather, longer summers, but did the bushfires start in some of these regions because of climate change? No. It started because somebody lit a match. There are 250 people, as I understand it, or more that have been charged with arson. That’s not climate change.”
It’s also not the truth.
The prime minister has equally betrayed his bad intentions on the issue.
He told the media on Thursday that, “I’m not going to allow a confined, narrow debate when it comes to understanding what it means to live in the climate we’re going to live in. It’s not just about emissions reduction. That’s important. But it’s also about resilience and it’s also about adaptation”
His intent is clearly to actually narrow the debate by excluding as much as possible any discussion of emissions, and instead to focus on building dams as though that is some saviour for a country affected by climate change and by greater periods of drought.
Scott Morrison – and other members of his cabinet – have no good intentions when they suggest Australia is doing well by meeting and beating out Kyoto commitments.
Those commitments are frauds.
The Howard government purposefully ensured Australia alone could include land use because the Kyoto base year of 1990 involved a spectacular level of land clearing, as does 2005, the base year for our Paris agreement.
Saying we will meet and beat our targets is like bragging that you are meeting your target of drinking less beer by comparing how many glasses you drink per day now to what you drank on the day of your 21st birthday party.
Last week Morrison told the National Press Club the United States were doing great because of its increase in gas-produced electricity and that “between 2005 and 2017 US emissions fell by about 13 per cent, that’s just a click over what we have achieved, which is 12.8 per cent by the way.”
What he failed to note was those drops occurred prior to the election of Trump and its withdrawal from the Paris agreement and that it is not on target to meet what were the US’s Paris targets.
His suggestion that Australia is nearly doing just as well is also one of bad faith.
Yes, from 2005 to 2017 we reduced our emissions by 12.8%, just below that of the US, but only if we include land use. If we exclude that very dodgy measure, the US’s emissions still fell by 12%, but Australia’s actually rose by 6.2%.
We are not doing our bit, and you would only argue we are if your intention was to ensure that good policy is not merely blocked but bad policy is pushed.
There has been some talk this week about new Greens leader Adam Bandt’s call for a “Green New Deal” and whether or not Australia should adopt such a US-style political term.
To be honest I’m not all that fussed about the marketing, so long as the policy has large ambition.
We need some good intentions and we need to aim for perfection.
The challenges and forces against action on climate change are large and powerful. As the past 30 years have shown us, being content to argue for a “good” third- or fourth-best policy is no way to win this fight, and neither is allowing those with bad intentions to tell us that what they want is good.

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UK's Kew Gardens To Help Protect Australia's Plants After Wildfire

Reuters - Elizabeth Howcroft

LONDON - Britain is to protect Australia’s plants and trees by helping the emergency collection of seeds in areas devastated by wildfires and storing some of the rarest specimens in the world’s biggest wild seed bank.
Dr Elinor Breman of Kew Millennium Seed Bank poses for a photograph in a sub-zero seed store at a facility in Wakehurst, southern Britain February 7, 2020. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London will help the emergency seed collection and store precious specimens at its Millennium Seed Bank (MSB), a giant trove of seeds which acts as an insurance policy for plants and trees.
Over 2.3 billion seeds from 190 countries are stored in air-tight glass containers stacked in huge -20°C freezers underground and can be used to grow a new generation of plants in years to come. It currently has 41,000 different species.
For the collecting, Kew scientists will work alongside colleagues in the Australian Seed Bank Partnership.
“We ... are pleased to be able to support their efforts, as part of our ongoing partnership to address biodiversity loss through seed-banking in Australia,” said the MSB’s Elinor Breman in a statement.
She added: “Kew’s scientists will work with the ASBP to conduct emergency seed-collecting in areas devastated by the bushfires and longer-term germination research, which will hopefully aid the international effort to restore habitats more quickly in this precious and biodiverse region.”
Kew has worked with Australian seed banks since 2000, sharing expertise on seed collection processes, conservation and research so that the seeds of plant species considered rare or threatened can be banked and conserved for the future.
So far, 12,450 seed collections representing 8,900 Australian species, all of which are saved in local seed banks, have been duplicated and stored in Kew’s MSB.
Australia’s wildfires have burned through an area the size of Greece since September, in what the government there has called an ecological disaster.
The protected species of Wollemi Pines - prehistoric trees which outlived the dinosaurs - survived the wildfires.
Others were not so lucky: wood-chopping company Kangaroo Island Plantation Timbers suspended trading in its shares after severe fire-damage meant 90% of its tree crop was no longer productive.
The collaboration with Kew was announced by visiting British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.
“This further collaboration between the Australian Seed Bank Partnership and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will help protect Australia’s precious biodiversity following the terrible bushfires,” Raab said.
“We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Australian people in the face of this challenge,” he said.

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09/02/2020

Climate Change: Loss Of Bumblebees Driven By 'Climate Chaos'

BBC - Helen Briggs

Bumblebee collecting pollen from a flower. Getty Images
Key points
  • University of Ottawa researchers looked at data from bumblebees over a 115-year period
  • Bumblebees' chances of survival have declined by 30 per cent in a generation
  • The research centred on increased frequency of heatwaves, droughts and other extreme events
"Climate chaos" has caused widespread losses of bumblebees across continents, according to scientists.
A new analysis shows the likelihood of a bee being found in any given place in Europe and North America has declined by a third since the 1970s.
Climbing temperatures will increasingly cause declines, which are already more severe than previously thought, said researchers.
Bumblebees are key pollinators of many fruits, vegetables and wild plants.
Without them, some crops could fail, reducing food for humans and countless other species.
Dr Tim Newbold of University College London (UCL) said there had been some previous research showing that bumblebee distributions are moving northwards in Europe and North America, "as you'd expect with climate change".
He added: "But this was the first time that we have been able to really tie local extinctions and colonisations of bumble bees to climate change, showing a really clear fingerprint of climate change in the declines that we've seen."
Bumblebee declines are already more severe than previously thought, said lead researcher Peter Soroye of the University of Ottawa in Canada. "We've linked this to climate change - and more specifically to the extreme temperatures and the climate chaos that climate change is producing," he said.
North American bumblebee on a flower. Antoine Morin
Bumblebees are among the most important plant pollinators. Declines in range and abundance have been documented from a range of causes, including pesticides, disease and habitat loss.
In the new study, researchers looked at more than half a million records of 66 bumblebee species from 1901 to 1974 and from 2000 to 2014.
They found bumblebee populations declined rapidly between 2000-2014: the likelihood of a site being occupied by bumblebees dropped by an average of over 30% compared with 1901-1974.

'Alarming' losses
Bees have been hardest hit in southern regions such as Spain and Mexico due to more frequent extreme warm years. And, while populations have expanded into cooler northern regions, this has not been enough to compensate for the losses.
Jonathan Bridle and Alexandra van Rensburg of the University of Bristol described the findings as "alarming". Commenting in the journal Science, they said: "The new study adds to a growing body of evidence for alarming, widespread losses of biodiversity and for rates of global change that now exceed the critical limits of ecosystem resilience."
There are around 250 species of bumblebee in the world. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), declines have been documented in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, caused by a variety of threats that range from habitat loss and degradation to diseases and pesticide use.


Bumblebee decline from the University of Ottawa

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(AU) Delivering Accountability In The Face Of The Climate Crisis

Asia & the Pacific Policy Society - Greg Raymond

The effects of climate change are spurring endless debate on what to do next, but without adequate oversight, governments can’t be held to account for their climate policies, Greg Raymond writes.
The Parliament needs support if it is to make any headway on climate policy. PHOTO: Aditya Joshi on Unsplash
Australia’s institutions of governance are failing. This is the unavoidable conclusion the public has reached as the nation experiences its unprecedented bushfire crisis.
Australian decision-makers have known since at least 2008 that climate change would devastate our country, yet the political process has been unable or unwilling to implement the strategies needed to reduce emissions, nor to exert influence globally to encourage others to do the same. Why is this?
One aspect of this problem is clearly the relationship between science and politics. While science transforms our lives continuously, it only rarely intrudes into politics in significant ways. For the most part, scientific research into vital areas like weapons, medicine, and farming are handled by well-established ministries like defence, health, and agriculture. Each of these has its own policy-making ecosystem, of journalists, think-tanks, and academics feeding experience and expertise into crucial decisions.
It is rare that science comprehensively transforms our lives in a very short amount of time. The rise of science itself in Renaissance Europe was one such juncture when figures like Galileo and Newton changed worldviews fundamentally in ways that eventually relegated religion into a more subordinate place in human affairs.
Dealing with climate change is likely to be a challenge of similarly transformative proportions, touching on all aspects of life. Even a successful transition from fossil to renewable energy may not be enough to avoid the immorality of bequeathing a wrecked environment to future generations.
The importance of science in managing the implications of the Anthropocene – the era in which human actions on planet earth are of equal or greater importance than natural processes in affecting our physical environment – is only gradually being recognised.
Climate change is currently the most crucial aspect of the Anthropocene, since the rapid warming of the planet will almost certainly have devastating consequences for the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
But the all-encompassing nature of this problem, and the scale of the response required, has overwhelmed our political institutions. It is exposing the periodic weaknesses of democracies, where instead of grasping the necessity of leading uncomfortable change, governments and partisan media organisations collude in fostering regressive identity politics.
Accountability is at the heart of successful liberal democracies, and when accountability is not delivered, problems fester. But, accountability can only be delivered where there is agreement on what constitutes success and failure. A significant problem at the heart of Australia’s torrid climate policy debate is the absence of agreed metrics for measuring Australia’s performance.
The concepts required to understand climate change, and to make policies to combat it, are relatively new, and journalists are much less confident in using these to analyse policies and hold politicians to account than in other issues.
Compare the effectiveness of journalists on economic issues to that of climate policy. The language and concepts of managing budgets – like budget deficits or monetary policy – are over a century old. Journalists, quite naturally, are well schooled in these, and it helps them to hold governments to account.
The bushfire crisis has shown us that the environment must surely rank as a concern of importance equal to the economy – indeed, it is inextricable from it, as the economic cost of the 2011 floods, and now the 2019-2020 bushfires, have shown. But journalists and the media, sophisticated and adept in matters of economic policy, the language of debt, deficit, interest rates, and government expenditure, are much less sure-footed when it comes to climate change concepts.
Whether it be the relationship of individual disasters to broader climate trends, or the quality of our carbon abatement policies, both in absolute terms and in relation to what is required globally to avoid catastrophe, they, perhaps understandably, aren’t as familiar with what is required of the government, and so struggle to keep it accountable.
Given that time is running out to address climate change before the planet reaches tipping points – after which natural processes, such as the release of methane from Siberia’s permafrost, will make even the most ambitious policies irrelevant – trying to improve the capacity of our political system to navigate the problem of climate change is imperative.
One possibility that should be considered by the next government, or the current government if it is prepared to undertake real reform, is establishing a Parliamentary Carbon Office (PCO), modelled on the principles of the Parliamentary Budget Office.
APCO would have a similar mission; to improve transparency around climate change and carbon issues, and to evaluate the economic and environmental costs of climate change policies prior to elections.
The PCO would inform the Parliament by providing independent and non-partisan analysis of climate change, emissions policy, and the financial implications of proposals. By developing a standardised approach, a PCO would ease the burden on journalists currently struggling to reconcile the different methodologies employed by various actors with various agendas.
It could also overcome the problem of key ministries such as Treasury and Environment being used to produce partisan talking points for the executive, rather than provide impartial recommendations. It is important to note, this was a key rationale for the founding of the PBO.
The time for ‘business as usual’ thinking has clearly passed. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently commented, we must have the “courage to think in new ways, the strength to leave well-trodden paths, the readiness to venture into new territory, and the resolve to act more quickly … guided by the conviction that unfamiliar approaches can succeed.”
Giving Parliament greater capacity for supporting accountability could help sterilise the toxic politics of climate change while moving us towards better solutions for meeting this fiendishly complex existential challenge.

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Antarctica Logs Hottest Temperature On Record With A Reading Of 18.3C

The Guardian - 

A new record set so soon after the previous record of 17.5C in March 2015 is a sign warming in Antarctica is happening much faster than global average
The Argentinian Esperanza base in Antarctica – seen in March 2014 – recorded its hottest day on record on Thursday. Photograph: Vanderlei Almeida/AFP via Getty Images
Key points
  • Experts say Antarctica is one of the fastest warming regions globally
  • Antarctic ice sheet melting increased six-fold between 1979 and 2017
  • Increased temperatures are predicted to cause major sea level rise
Antarctica has logged its hottest temperature on record, with an Argentinian research station thermometer reading 18.3C, beating the previous record by 0.8C.
The reading, taken at Esperanza on the northern tip of the continent’s peninsula, beats Antarctica’s previous record of 17.5C, set in March 2015.
A tweet from Argentina’s meteorological agency on Friday revealed the record. The station’s data goes back to 1961.
Antarctica’s peninsula – the area that points towards South America – is one of the fastest warming places on earth, heating by almost 3C over the past 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Almost all the region’s glaciers are melting.
The Esperanza reading breaks the record for the Antarctic continent. The record for the Antarctic region – that is, everywhere south of 60 degrees latitude – is 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.
Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington, was a member of an ad-hoc World Meteorological Organization committee that has verified previous records in Antarctica.
He told Guardian Australia it was likely the committee would be reconvened to check the new Esperanza record.
He said: “Of course the record does need to be checked, but pending those checks, it’s a perfectly valid record and that [temperature] station is well maintained.”
“The reading is impressive as it’s only five years since the previous record was set and this is almost one degree centigrade higher. It’s a sign of the warming that has been happening there that’s much faster than the global average.
“To have a new record set that quickly is surprising but who knows how long that will last? Possibly not that long at all.”
He said the temperature record at Esperanza was one of the longest-running on the whole continent.
Renwick said higher temperatures in the region tended to coincide with strong northwesterly winds moving down mountain slopes – a feature of the weather patterns around Esperanza in recent days.
He said there were complex weather patterns in the area, but the Esperanza reading was likely a combination of natural variability and background warming caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
He said: “The reason the peninsula is warming faster than other places is a combination of natural variations and warming signals.”
Prof Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, has carried out research at James Ross Island at the northern tip of the peninsula.
“It’s an area that’s warming very quickly,” she said, adding it can occasionally be warm enough to wear a T-shirt.
Previous research from 2012 found the current rate of warming in the region was almost unprecedented over the past 2000 years.
Abram said: “Even small increases in warming can lead to large increases in the energy you have for melting the ice. The consequences are the collapse of the ice shelves along the peninsula.”
Meltwater can work its way through cracks in ice shelves, she said. Because ice shelves already float on the ocean, their collapse does not directly contribute to rising sea levels.
But Abram said the shelves acted as plugs, helping to keep the ice sheets behind them stable. Melting of ice sheets does contribute to rising sea levels because they are attached to land.
Dr Steve Rintoul, a leading oceanographer and Antarctic expert at CSIRO, said: “This is a record from only a single station, but it is in the context of what’s happening elsewhere and is more evidence that as the planet warms we get more warm records and fewer cold records.”
The lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica – and anywhere on Earth – was at the Russian Vostok station, when temperatures dropped to -89.2C on 21 July 1983

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