Canada, and particularly the Canadian Arctic, is warming at a considerably higher rate than the global average. The consequences for Canada could be devastating.
Older records can tell us a lot about Australia’s pre-industrial climate, before the large-scale burning of fossil fuels tainted global temperature records.
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.
Andrew King, The University of Melbourne and Ben Henley, The University of Melbourne
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.
An annual assessment of the health of Australia’s environment shows mostly stable conditions in 2017, but ecosystems on land and at sea suffered ever higher temperatures.
This year is poised to go down as the hottest non-El Niño year ever recorded, with record low polar ice and extreme weather that left many regions battling bushfires and hurricanes.
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.