Tale of two hemispheres: World watching Australia’s record heat
"Ice in the north, fire in the south: Climate change is here, and so are deadly extremes"
Australia is seeing record-breaking temperatures while the US is frozen solid. What the hell is going on? One map has revealed the scary truth.
Emma Reynolds and AP news.com.auFebruary 1, 20195:21am
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There is worse to come, with a blast of Arctic wind racing through Maryland and Baltimore City Health Commissioner Mary Beth Haller calling the temperatures “dangerously cold”.
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MAP REVEALS GLOBAL PROBLEM
Despite the cold in the US, global temperatures are still rising, and a map from the University of Maine Climate Change Institute shows the temperature were an average of 0.3C higher on on January 29 compared to the baseline.
Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common, with research showing the frequency of winter polar-vortex events has increased over the past four decades.
The past four years have been the hottest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, and ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years.
Temperatures are rising fast twice as fast in the Arctic as the rest of the planet, which means there is less disparity in temperature between the North Pole and continents at lower latitudes.
That affects air pressure levels, which weakens the jet stream. This can disrupt the natural flow of the polar vortex, leading to the unusually cold weather at lower latitudes that we are now seeing in the US.
A Graphic News map explaining the polar vortex and jet stream activity.Source:Supplied
The US is looking to Australia .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/climate/global-warming-extreme-weather.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage .. to provide context for its big freeze, with the New York Times reporting .. https://www.nytimes.com/ .. on the extreme heat, bushfires, business closures and power shortages gripping the country. Australia’s drought “has gone on so long that a child in kindergarten will hardly have seen rain in her lifetime”, wrote the newspaper, noting that New Zealand had also broken heat records, despite typically being so temperate many people have neither heating nor air conditioning.
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HOTTEST IN 80 YEARS
Extreme heat and drought is devastating the health and livelihoods of tens of millions of people worldwide, especially in South Asia, and destroying crops.
A PLOS Medicine study has predicted a fivefold rise in heat-related deaths for the US by 2080 and 12 times more in the Philippines.
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