Dec. 18, 2019 07:55AM EST
Tuesday was Australia's
hottest day on record, according to preliminary results from the
country's Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The country recorded an
average maximum temperature of 40.9 degrees Celsius, beating the previous
average of 40.3 degrees recorded on Jan. 7, 2013.
And that record could be
broken again this week as an unusually early extreme heat wave is
set to bake the whole country, The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported.
Senior BOM climatologist Blair
Trewin said that temperatures Wednesday and Thursday could be a degree above
the 2013 record.
"[It's] a really extreme
event on a nationwide perspective," Trewin said, according to The
Washington Post.
Many different places in
Australia could break their December heat records, and parts of New South Wales
could break their overall heat records. Perth, in Western Australia, already
set a record when it recorded three 40-degree-Celsius days in a row for the
first time in December.
It got so hot in the city that
resident Stu Pengelly successfully cooked a 1.5 kilogram (approximately 3.3
pound) pork roast in an old car over a 10 hour period Friday, 7 News reported.
"It worked a treat!"
Pengelly said in a Facebook post.
But he also issued a warning.
"My warning is do not
leave anyone or anything precious to you in a hot car, not for a minute,"
he wrote.
Heat waves are the deadliest
Australian extreme weather event and they kill thousands more
people than bushfires or floods, BBC
News reported.
This week's heat could also
make another dangerous extreme weather event worse, according to The Washington
Post — the bushfires still raging in the states of New South
Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
"There are difficult
& dangerous fire conditions forecast over coming days," the New South
Wales Rural Fire Service said on Twitter, according to The Washington Post.
On Wednesday, BOM said that Australia had seen its highest levels of
fire weather danger during spring of 2019. More than 95 percent of the country
experienced above average fire danger as measured by the Forest Fire Danger
Index, and almost 60 percent broke fire danger records for the spring.
Both the record heat and the
record fire season are made more likely by the climate crisis.
September to November of 2019 marked Australia's driest and second warmest
spring on record, The Guardian reported.
Overall, Australia has warmed
by a little more than one degree Celsius since 1910, and nine of the country's
10 hottest years on record have taken place since 2005, BBC News reported. 2019
will likely be among the four hottest.
There is also an immediate,
more localized reason for the current heat wave, as BBC News explained:
The dominant climate driver behind the heat has been a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) - an event where sea surface temperatures are warmer in the western half of the ocean, cooler in the east.
The difference between the two temperatures is currently the strongest in 60 years. The warmer waters cause higher-than-average rains in the western Indian Ocean region, leading to flooding, and drier conditions across South East Asia and Australia.
But the climate crisis makes
natural shifts like this worse.
"Australia's climate is
increasingly influenced by global warning and natural variability takes place
on top of this background trend," BOM said, according to BBC News.
Climate change is also
influencing the IOD itself.
"While the IOD is a
natural mode of variability, its behaviour is changing in response to climate
change. Research suggests that the frequency of positive IOD events, and
particularly the occurrence of consecutive events will increase as global
temperatures rise," BOM said, according to The Washington Post.
Despite Australia's
susceptibility to climate change, it is also one of the leading emitters of
greenhouse gases per capita, according to BBC News. Prime Minister Scott
Morrison, who supports coal use, has been criticized for failing to adequately address the
climate crisis and the bushfires it has spawned.
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