What do the recent Townsville floods and Tasmanian heatwave have in common? Both were caused by weather systems that stayed put for days or weeks on end. And global warming could worsen that trend.
Dozens of brumbies were found dead near Santa Teresa in Australia’s remote interior.
AAP Image
Mass wildlife die-offs, such as those wrought by Australia's recent heatwaves, make for grim headlines. But the wider effects of extreme weather are more complex, and can be remarkably long-lasting.
Lochiel Park in Adelaide was Australia’s first large-scale attempt to create homes that use near net zero energy.
Stephen Berry
Air conditioning changed both building design and people's active management of home temperatures. A return to houses designed for our climate can keep us comfortable and cut energy use and emissions.
Parts of Australia have broken multiple heat records over the past week.
Vicki/Flickr
Pollutants from fossil fuel combustion cause thousands of premature deaths nationwide every year. This is just one way our climate change policies impact on the nation's health.
A hot summer will mean wetlands dry out faster than ever, so how will pest mosquitoes respond?
Cameron Webb (NSW Health Pathology)
The forecast arrival of El Niño may mean the east coast of Australia will experience an exceptionally hot and dry summer, but does this mean there will be fewer mosquitoes buzzing about?
People use misters to cool down in Montréal, Monday, July 2, 2018, during a heatwave in the city.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
Climate change poses a threat to our mental health. Building connected communities is one way to combat a rise in suicide rates as global temperatures increase.
A real fire in southern New South Wales - not to be confused with the metaphorical one in the halls of Canberra.
AAP Image/Darren Pateman
With New South Wales suffering winter bushfires and temperature records tumbling around the globe, our leaders in Canberra have picked a bad time to jettison climate policy in favour of political bickering.
Melbourne’s temperatures have periodically spiked far beyond what its residents are used to.
AAP Image/Ellen Smith
From Greece, to the UK, to Japan and even Sweden, a slew of places in the Northern Hemisphere are suffering extreme heat. And the chances of extreme heat records tumbling are growing all the time.
How to move beyond the warm words about tackling urban heat islands to doing something about them.
‘Soft fall’ surfaces are widely used in play areas where children might fall, but can also get very hot in the sun, which undermines this safety benefit.
Brisbane City Council/Flickr
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as "soft fall" materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
In an unchanging climate, we would expect record-breaking temperatures to get rarer as the observation record grows longer. But in the real world the opposite is true - because we are driving up temperatures.
Living in a single-storey unit can lead to much higher air conditioning costs.
Aged-care units can be a lottery of comfortable versus uncomfortable temperatures, depending on the building's construction and where you live within it. That needs to improve.
Sydney is facing 50℃ summer days by 2040, new research says.
Andy/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons
Future extreme heat is worse and coming sooner than you might think. Unless we mitigate and adapt we face increasing death rates.
Soaring heating costs mean many vulnerable Australians endure cold houses and the associated risks to their health.
Paul Vasarhelyi from www.shutterstock.com
The idea of a hot and sunny land is so baked into our thinking about Australia that we've failed to design and build houses that protect us from the cold.
As summer heatwaves intensify across Canada, smaller cities need to follow the lead of Toronto and Vancouver - to protect vulnerable citizens from injury, disease and death.