Tag Archives: heat wave

Counting my Blessings

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This is the coldest time of year in the Prairies. Below -20 °C it all feels about the same, but the fuel lines in cars freeze more easily, and outdoor sports are no longer safe. We all become grouchy creatures of the indoors for a few months each year. But as much as I hate the extreme cold, I would rather be here than in Australia right now.

A record-breaking, continent-wide heat wave has just wrapped up, and Australia has joined the Arctic in the list of regions where the temperature is so unusually warm that new colours have been added to the map legends. This short-term forecast by the ACCESS model predicts parts of South Australia to reach between 52 and 54 °C on Monday:

For context, the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 56.7 °C, in Death Valley during July of 1913. Australia’s coming pretty close.

This heat wave has broken dozens of local records, but the really amazing statistics come from national average daily highs: the highest-ever value at 40.33 °C, on January 7th; and seven days in a row above 39 °C, the most ever, from January 2nd to 8th.

Would this have happened without climate change? It’s a fair question, and (for heat waves at least) one that scientists are starting to tackle – see James Hansen’s methodology that concluded recent heat waves in Texas and Russia were almost certainly the result of climate change.

At any rate, this event suggests that uninformed North Americans who claim “warming is a good thing” haven’t been to Australia.

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A Summer of Extremes

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Because of our emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, a little extra energy gets trapped in our atmosphere every day. Over time, this energy builds up. It manifests itself in the form of higher temperatures, stronger storms, larger droughts, and melting ice. Global warming, then, isn’t about temperatures as much as it is about energy.

The extra energy, and its consequences, don’t get distributed evenly around the world. Weather systems, which move heat and moisture around the planet, aren’t very fair: they tend to bully some places more than others. These days, it’s almost as if the weather picks geographical targets each season to bombard with extremes, then moves on to somewhere else. This season, the main target seems to be North America.

The warmest 12 months on record for the United States recently wrapped up with a continent-wide heat wave and drought. Thousands of temperature records were broken, placing millions of citizens in danger. By the end of June, 56% of the country was experiencing at least “moderate” drought levels – the largest drought since 1956. Wildfires took over Colorado, and extreme wind storms on the East Coast knocked out power lines and communication systems for a week. Conditions have been similar throughout much of Canada, although its climate and weather reporting systems are less accessible.

“This is what global warming looks like,”, said Professor Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona, a sentiment that was echoed across the scientific community in the following weeks. By the end of the century, these conditions will be the new normal.

Does that mean that these particular events were caused by climate change? There’s no way of knowing. It could have just been a coincidence, but the extra energy global warming adds to our planet certainly made them more likely. Even without climate change, temperature records get broken all the time.

However, in an unchanging climate, there would be roughly the same amount of record highs as record lows. In a country like the United States, where temperature records are well catalogued and publicly available, it’s easy to see that this isn’t the case. From 2000-2009, there were twice as many record highs as record lows, and so far this year, there have been ten times as many:

The signal of climate change on extreme weather is slowly, but surely, emerging. For those who found this summer uncomfortable, the message from the skies is clear: Get used to it. This is only the beginning.