Today, as I had a look at the latest BOM forecast showing that Melbourne will be over 30˚ for the next seven days – and the forecast goes no further – it is painfully clear to me that we are seeing a move into another phase of runaway climate change.
As you should be able to see from the latest BOM synoptic forecasts, what is happening is that a stationary monsoon low far south over the continent, and two equally stationary anticyclones to the southwest and southeast of the continent are blocking any cold fronts or cool changes over the southeast and over the west coast. This has produced an endless spell of record hot weather over the historical winter rainfall zone between Northwest Cape and Cape Arid due to continuous flow of hot easterly air without countering flows from the milder ocean.
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Synoptic forecast for next four days. Note creation of a super-monsoon over the interior of Australia with cold fronts far to the south of Tasmania. This super-monsoonal circulation is likely to be stable for many weeks, even months, beyond the last forecast day (two days later than this map reaches)
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What the map above shows is that there is not the smallest sign of any cool change over the southeast of the west coast even after the last forecast day of January 27. Instead, what appears to be happening is that the super-monsoon will simply intensify and intensify into the last few days of January, and further into February and March. The persistent block south of Cape Leeuwin will be stationary and forbidding any cool changes for many months. This will mean that Melbourne‘s forecast ten consecutive days (minimally!) over 30˚C will not end until the close of March at the very earliest! Thus, Melbourne will have had sixty-three consecutive days over 30˚C before there is any prospect that a retreating super-monsoon will allow the weather to finally cool. The historic record was eight, occurring four times in:
- 31 January, 1890 to 7 February, 1890
- 28 January, 1898 to 4 February, 1898
- 25 January, 1951 to 1 February, 1951
- 15 February, 1961 to 22 February, 1961
In fact, the most consecutive days over 25˚C in the virgin period up to 1973 was a mere seventeen between 16 January 1951 and 1 February 1951.
This will apply even more to morning temperatures – the possibility of a morning under 20˚C, let alone under the 14˚C that we would average but for our own obscene greenhouse emissions performance, is probably nil until May at the earliest. In the worst-case (and most likely) scenario, we will never see a morning under 14˚C ever again.
There is no doubt that the public is aware runaway global warming is occurring, even if a majority are largely unaware just how responsible Australia is for this looming disaster. This seen via a table of largest greenhouse emitters from Dimitri Lafleur’s 2018 ‘Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports’:
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Country
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Percent of Present Global Emissions (extraction-based)
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Percent of Cumulative Emissions (extraction-based)
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China
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23.54%
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13.23%
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United States
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12.44%
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27.07%
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Russian Federation
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9.46%
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12.15%
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Saudi Arabia
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4.47%
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4.69%
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India
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4.20%
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2.85%
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Australia
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3.22%
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2.38%
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Iran
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2.83%
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2.62%
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Indonesia
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2.80%
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1.77%
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Canada
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2.77%
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2.92%
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South Africa
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2.35%
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2.31%
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Mexico
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1.78%
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1.92%
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United Arab Emirates
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1.43%
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1.23%
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Top 12 countries
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71.29%
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75.04%
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Top 12 countries excluding US
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58.85%
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48.07%
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As this shows, Australia is the world’s sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and
its contribution is increasing substantially over time. This demonstrates how ineffective policies to reduce Australia’s emissions are, and/or how deep the hegemony of the car and coal lobbies upon government policy is. Either way, Australia’s bad performance is untenable, as has been demonstrated by Julian Bolleter, Bill Grace, Sarah Foster, Anthony Duckworth and Paula Hooper in their recent ‘Projected Extreme Heat Stress in Northern Australia and the Implications for Development Policy’, where they show that attempts to develop the natural-resource-glutted interior are likely to be untenable under virtually certain 3˚C rises in temperature — rises that, it must be stated, would have been avoided if the rest of the world had in the middle 1990s insisted upon
Australia achieving zero net emissions no later than 2010 and preferably by 2005. Bolster and his team demonstrate that wet-bulb temperatures in northern Australia are certain to reach levels not seen anywhere since the Eocene and
ipso facto deadly for mammals who lose the ability to remove heat.
What neither Bolster and his team nor the Bureau of Meteorology have the courage to say — fear the powerful and rich will sack them is undeniable but unspoken — is that
- immediate and radical changes in Australia’s energy, transport and land-use policy are decades overdue
- Australia is every bit as much a rogue state for its abysmal environment performance as the Gulf monarchies are for this and for their support of Islamic terrorism
- global class struggle to ostracise Australia and the Gulf States — with the target of a workers’ revolution to expropriate their oil sheikhs and fossil fuel barons — was overdue in 1996 and is up to forty years overdue now
- runaway anthropogenic climate change is likely to be fatal to a substantial proportion of the human population in the relatively proximate future due to wet-bulb temperatures far above the historic maximum of around 31˚C or 87.6˚F
As a final word, Diogo S. A. Araujo, Francesco Marra, Cory Merow and Efthymios I. Nikolopoulos have noted that historical 100-year (or, more probably, 300-year) droughts are likely to become the norm by 2100 under likely emissions scenarios. In Central Chile and Zona Sur historical 300- or 500-year droughts
have already become the norm since 2010 due to the greenhouse pollution of Australia and the Gulf States, yet even radical media like
Red Flag Magazine fail to note this fact. These facts, much more in fact than Arctic warming, are what confirm runaway man-made climatic change, and what we are seeing today shows how rapid it can become in the absence of demolition of the existing corporate power structure.
