Australia is being hit by more days of extreme heat and high fire danger, trends that may accelerate as the planet heats up, says the latest State of the Climate report by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. The biennial survey found mean temperatures nationwide had risen 0.9 degrees since 1910 and will be another 0.6 to 1.5 degrees warmer by 2030, compared with the 1980-99 average. Further, southern Australia is drying out. By 2050, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at the pace of the past decade, temperatures will rise between 2.2 and 5 degrees above the 1980-99 average, the agencies said. “We expect there to be a continuation of (the) warming and probably an acceleration … in the decades to come,” said Penny Whetton, a climate projection expert at CSIRO.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 20:26:16 +0000
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