According to Australia’s newly constituted Climate Council, if the first month of spring had you sweating like it was summer, you probably weren’t alone.
September was the hottest spring opener on record, with the national average temperature a sizzling 2.75 degrees Celsius above usual.
Not only that but the gap between the normal temperature in September and that recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) was the biggest ever observed for any month.
The sweltering September was yet another climate record to tumble this year, with Australians this year already enduring the hottest January, hottest summer and hottest single day ever.
In its second report, the new Climate Council warned Australia was breaking all the wrong records when it came to weather.
“Temperature records are broken from time to time in Australia but it is the sheer number of records being broken that is really unusual,” the council’s Professor Will Steffen said in a statement.
He said Australia was on track to smash yet another worrying climate benchmark, the warmest calendar year to date.
Australia is experiencing persistent heat across the continent, with temperatures from October 2012 to September 1.25 degrees above the long-term average.
Since 1910, average temperatures have risen by 0.9 degrees Celsius, with a significant increase in the frequency of hot days and nights noted by the CSIRO and BoM.
The Climate Council said a 0.9C temperature rise may not seem like much but even small increases could exacerbate the intensity of extreme weather experienced in Australia.
The latest assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded global warming was driving the frequency and intensity of extremely hot days and heatwaves.
Professor Steffen said Australia was no stranger to very hot days but climate change threatened to make extreme heat a much more common and, in the case of bushfires, dangerous occurrence.
The Climate Council was formed after the new conservative Liberal-National government abolished the Climate Commission, headed by Professor Tim Flannery, in mid September.
The council, headed by Professor Flannery, already has raised nearly $1 million in donations to continue its work of providing expert independent information about climate change to the Australian public.
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Aint seen nothing yet!!