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.
Searching for respite from the heat in one of Rome’s fountains.
Max Roxxi/Reuters
Parts of Europe are having a devastatingly hot summer. Already we’ve seen heat records topple in western Europe in June, and now a heatwave nicknamed “Lucifer” is bringing stifling conditions to areas…
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.
Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie told Q&A that heatwaves were ‘worsening’ in Australia and ‘hot days’ had doubled in the last 50 years. Let’s take a look at the evidence.
Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie, speaking on Q&A.
Q&A
Michael Courts, The Conversation e Lucinda Beaman, The Conversation
Response from a spokesperson from the Climate Council in relation to an article on CEO Amanda McKenzie’s claims about worsening heatwaves and increasing numbers of hot days in Australia.
Nowhere to hide? With 2°C of global warming, the stifling heat of January 2013 would be the norm for Australia.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Global warming of 2°C, the higher of the two Paris targets, would see current record-breaking temperatures become the norm in the future, potentially bringing heatwaves to both land and sea.
Sydney’s summer was the hottest on record.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Heat records have tumbled across New South Wales as the state suffered through the weekend’s heatwave. A new analysis shows that climate change made this kind of event much less of a rarity.
Cities are facing more heatwaves, but not all strategies to keep us cool are equal.
Sydney image from www.shuttrstock.com
Most of our hospitals were not designed to cope with the health impacts of future extreme weather. And hospital infrastructure has not been adapted to secure health care during such events.
Climate change can cause higher pollen counts.
Lukasz Szmigiel/Unsplash
Irrespective of whether climate change contributed to the thunderstorm in Melbourne last week, we can be sure Australia’s climate projections herald new risks to health that cannot be ignored.
More heatwaves in store, but the exact effects on people are harder to predict.
AAP Image/Joe Castro
Heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest type of natural disaster. But while we know a lot about the weather patterns behind them, more research is needed to forecast accurately their impacts on people.
When New South Wales burned in 2013, Tony Abbott was quick to point out that individual events can’t be attributed to climate change. But they can.
AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy
The science of attributing extreme weather events to human-induced climate change has evolved rapidly in recent years. But how we communicate it to the public has not kept pace with this advance.
Australia’s oceans are heating up.
Richard Rydge/Flickr
The new State of the Climate report outlines Australia’s rising temperatures and its regional rainfall declines - and the trends that are locked in for the coming few decades due to greenhouse emissions.
Huge swathes of Tasmania have burned this year.
Warren Frey/Tasmania Fire Service
A comprehensive analysis of Tasmania’s natural disaster risks has identified bushfire as the biggest threat, alongside emerging issues such as disease epidemics and heatwaves.