Heat Waves In Australia Are Getting More Frequent, and Hotter

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 17, 2014 @06:50AM from the too-bad-the-cold-last-week-disproved-global-warming dept.

vikingpower writes "In a landmark report on bushfires and climate change (PDF), the Australian Climate Council concludes that heat waves in Australia, as driven by climate change, are becoming more frequent — and that they get hotter. 'It is crucial that communities, emergency services, health services and other authorities prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme fire conditions,' says the Council in the report. Sarah Perkins, one of the report's co-authors, was interviewed by The Guardian Australia. '"While we can't blame climate change for any one event, we can certainly see its fingerprint. This is another link in the chain." Perkins said her latest work had analyzed heatwave trends up to 2013. She said the trend "just gets worse – it's a bit scary really."' In 2009, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization signaled that a Southeast Australian heatwave was the hottest in 100 years."

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Re:A Third Possibility by Carnivore · 2014-01-17 07:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

There is a nonzero chance that your third possibility is correct. But nonzero is all I'm going to give you. Have a look at the amounts of greenhouse gasses put into the atmosphere by a large natural phenomenon, vulcanism
Looks like the numbers are from 2009 or so. Summary: It takes ~3 days of humans' output to equal one year of volcanic greenhouse gas emissions.
The factors that are out of our control contribute a tiny fraction of our total.