US temperatures plunge, soar in Oz
IN THE north-eastern US, temperatures dipped far into the negatives in recent days.
The streets of Boston were flooded with icy waters that carried dumpsters away. Cars in nearby Revere, Massachusetts were nearly buried in frozen floodwaters.
Wind chills in parts of New Hampshire could hit 100ºC below zero.
In Australia, however, it’s summer – and a remarkably hot one. So hot that part of a freeway has been “melting”.
Such is the extreme weather greeting 2018 from opposite ends of the globe.
As winter in the US brought a historic “bomb cyclone” that unleashed heavy snow and days of bone-chilling winds to the east coast, summer in Australia, particularly in the south and south-eastern parts of the country, is delivering a “catastrophic” heat wave, with maximum temperatures hovering in the triple digits and fires scorching thousands of hectares of dry lands.
On Friday, ahead of the heat wave predicted for the weekend, police in Victoria on Australia’s south-eastern coast warned drivers that a 10km stretch of a freeway in the central part of the state has melted. A spokesperson for VicRoads, which manages Victoria’s road systems, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that hot weather caused the tar to become “soft and sticky” and the road surface to bleed.
Streets melting is not unheard of. It happened in India two years ago during a heat wave that killed thousands. Photos taken from New Delhi showed distorted road markings caused by melting tar.
Paul Holman, an ambulance commander in Victoria, said that Saturday was “the first extreme-heat day of the year”.
“This heat is a killer. It’s going to be like a blast furnace tomorrow, and you need to adjust what you do,” he told local media on Friday. “You need to take care. So put off the sporting events, put off the outside events, stay inside.”
Temperatures across Victoria, home to the city of Melbourne, climbed above 40ºC on Saturday but dropped yesterday.
Australia’s heat wave – and the US bomb cyclone – both come on the heels of the second-warmest global year on record since the 1800s.
A new report, citing signs of climate change such as thawing of Arctic ice and wildfires, says 2017 was 0.1ºC cooler than 2016, the warmest year on record.
But 2016 included the tail end of a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific, and that bumped up temperatures that year, as well as in 2015, according to the report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European agency.
Scientists have said cold spells like the bomb cyclone do not refute that Earth as a whole is warming or that the average temperature of the climate system is steadily rising.
To explain, Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffendaugh used a sports analogy to The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney: “Steph Curry is, every year, near the top of the NBA (National Basketball Association) free-throw percentages, he makes on the order of 90% of his free throws year in and year out. If you turn on the TV and see him miss a free throw, or see him miss two free throws, that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that he’s no longer a good free-throw shooter.”