melbourne

Hot times in Australia

illconsidered | February 12, 2009

As I mentioned briefly before, I have just returned from Australia and as you could imagine, the heatwaves and wildfires were a hot topic(how funny am I?). So the death toll is expected to exceed 200 people. Southern Australia has been experiencing extreme drought for many years now, so the whole place is a tinder box. Increased risk of wildfires is an anticipated, and probably already observed, consequence of global warming. You are never on solid ground when attributing a particular extreme event to such a slow moving change in the average of all events, which is what climate change is,…