Australia: hottest ever March

Source: The Guardian.
Photograph: Steven Saphore/AAP

From The Guardian:

An abnormally hot summer in Australia ended with the warmest March on record, new data from the Bureau of Meteorology shows.

The latest monthly climate breakdown shows that despite two severe tropical cyclones in the northern states, temperatures across Australia were 2.13C above the average throughout last month in part due to an unusually dry summer in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

“One of the standout features of March was there was above-average temperatures just about everywhere; more than 99% of the country,” Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist at the bureau told Guardian Australia.

“Really a few things came together: the overall, long-term background trend [of rising temperatures] means you’re starting from a higher base, which increases the probability of records.


The record temperatures in March follow records in January, while February was in the top five on record. Last year was Australia’s third-warmest year on record. It beat out the previous third-place holder, 2017.

The 2018 state of the climate report from the bureau and CSIRO found Australia was experiencing more extreme heat, longer fire seasons, rising oceans and more marine heatwaves consistent with a changing climate.

[Read more here]

Just a single data point, either high or low, does not a trend make.  But if your observations about your local climate can be explained by a long-term, utterly logical, global trend, then it is news.  It is information.  This summer in Oz had been beastly.  Record extreme heat, record droughts, record floods.  Unbearably hot nights.  Now Oz, always has hot summers.  From time to time it has droughts and/or floods.  But these are worse than ever.  And this summer was extraordinary.  As the statistics have borne out.  

This unendurably hot summer isn't some quirky fluke.  It's part of a long term trend.  And because we, and the world, are doing nothing about that trend, we know that even if next summer is not so bad, the summer after that, or the one after that one will be.  An inexorable rise in trend temperatures implies new records, again and again.  We need to act on global warming now.  Don't vote for politicians who piously pretend they care while doing nothing except pocketing bribes from oil and coal companies and delaying action as long as they can.  We need to start cutting emissions now, and we need to aim for a 5% cut each year.  As Churchill used to say in his memos: Action this day.