Climate change looms large as Australia swelters

Australia is baking in a record-breaking "dome of heat", threatening to unleash the worst firestorms since those that claimed hundreds of lives in 2009. Temperatures reached almost 48??C on Monday at the Oodnadatta airport in South Australia, and 43??C on Tuesday in Sydney. The typical January high is 37.7??C at Oodnadatta. The average across the country is tipped to break the previous record of 40.17??C in 1976.

"It's likely to just beat it," Karl Braganza of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology told The Age newspaper on Monday. "It's just an extensive dome of heat over the continent."

At least 90 fires were sweeping through New South Wales by Monday, and 100 people remained unaccounted for in Tasmania following major fires covering 60,000 hectares. Bushfire experts warned that things could get worse. "The current heatwave is unusual due to its extent, with more than 70 per cent of the continent currently experiencing heatwave conditions," says John Nairn, South Australia's acting regional director for the Bureau of Meteorology, in comments to the Australian Science Media Centre.

Ready to burn

Lack of rainfall in recent months has left soils completely dry and unable to release moisture that would take up heat from the air through evaporation. At the same time, vegetation across the continent that had been revived by rains over the past two years is now completely dried out. "Much of this grass is fully dried and is ready to burn," says Gary Morgan of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the fourth and most recent of its assessments of the effects of climate change, predicted that in south-eastern Australia, the frequency of days when extreme fire danger threatens will increase by up to 25 per cent by 2020, and up to 70 per cent by 2050. In its most recent study of the impact of climate change, the Bureau of Meteorology noted that average temperatures across Australia have increased by almost 1??C since 1910, and could rise by up to 5??C by 2070.

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