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Adelaide has been declared the hottest city in the world on Thursday by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organisation.

The city is on course for its hottest day ever recorded, as South Australia and Victoria swelters through another day over 40C.

It is set to reach 46C by 4.30pm on Thursday, Adelaide's fourth consecutive day above 40C. The temperature could pip the 46.1C record set in the city in 1939.

It was another uncomfortable night for Adelaide residents on Tuesday, with the temperature hitting 35.5C at midnight. The city’s central bus station, which is air conditioned, has been opened 24 hours a day for people to sleep in.

Large fans with water mist sprayers have also been set up at the Rundle Mall. The council said it is advising people to drink plenty of water, dress in cotton lightweight fabrics, avoid going out in the heat and use air conditioning and fans if possible.

Port Augusta is set to reach 47C, with nowhere in South Australia due to be cooler than 37C.

Adelaide is set to endure five consecutive days over 40C, while Melbourne is on course to have four days above this temperature, the first time this has happened since 1908. The Victorian capital is forecast to reach 44C on Thursday.

The heatwave, which has sat over south-eastern Australia since the start of the week, is showing signs of shifting further into New South Wales. The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast 43C for Wagga Wagga on Thursday and Friday, dipping slightly to 42C on Saturday.

A total fire ban is in place across South Australia and Victoria, with overnight lightning triggering dozens of fires. Victoria’s Country Fire Authority said Thursday would prove a “difficult day” for firefighters, warning that conditions on Friday, when wind strength is set to increase, will be “critical”.

More than 70 people have been hospitalised in South Australia this week due to the heat. In Victoria, the ambulance service has warned people not to leave children locked inside cars, having attended to 11 such cases, including an incident where a child was apparently deliberately left in a car outside a bottle shop.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which oversees energy demand, said Victoria and South Australia have increased power usage to levels not seen since 2009.

The Victorian government said up to 100,000 homes and businesses could suffer power blackouts due to the surge in demand in the coming days.

AEMO said some areas may experience “localised interruptions over the coming days as a result of the extremely hot conditions, and forecast high winds and lightning in some parts of Victoria and South Australia”.

The hot weather also has grape growers in South Australia’s wine regions fretting. They fear the heat could destroy up to 20% of their crop.

And in Melbourne, three Australian Shakespeare Company outdoor performances were cancelled on Tuesday evening due to high temperatures. The company said it didn’t expect planned performances of the Wind in the Willows and Alice in Wonderland to be disrupted again.

Tony Leggett, senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, told Guardian Australia the current heatwave is slightly different from the high temperatures in 2009 that led to the deadly Black Saturday fires in Victoria.

“We’ve been looking at the synoptics and there are a few differences that suggest we could have fewer fire problems this time, although of course there are lots of other variables in there other than just the weather,” he said.

“In 2009, we’d had a decade of dry conditions and the bushland had dried out. We are only just seeing the bush start to dry out this time, but if we got another heatwave in February, we’d expect the fire danger to increase with that.

“It’s difficult to say that this heatwave is induced by anthropogenic warming, the atmosphere is a bit too chaotic for that, but if you look at the trend in overall temperature, it’s logical to say we’ll be having more extreme bursts of temperatures in the future. The trend line is ever upwards.”

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Did climate change conspire to burn Serbian tennis player Jelena Jankovic's bum during this year's Australian Open Tennis Championships?

Was global warming a conspirator in causing Canadian player Frank Dancevic to hallucinate a cartoon dog shortly before collapsing on court six?

As the Australian Open continues in Melbourne, so does the heat wave and the scorching temperatures of 41C and over.

Today will likely be the third day straight that the Olympic Park thermometer gets above 41C. The forecast today for Melbourne is a ball-dropping 44C.

Dancevic said it was "inhumane" to ask players to continue in the relentless heat. British star Andy Murray commented it was a bad look for the sport to have ball boys and girls, players and spectators collapsing.

But does human-caused climate change have anything at all to do with the water bottle-melting heat being endured by the players?

First for the usual caveats. Melbourne gets hot, and it has always experienced extremely hot days.

You can't blame climate change entirely for hot weather, but you can say that it increases the risk of extreme hot weather events occurring. The planet's atmosphere has been loaded with extra greenhouse gases, which gives the analogy of loading the weather dice to increase the chances of you rolling a six - or in this case, experiencing extremely hot days or seeing Snoopy.

Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre, told me that over the long term, Melbourne experiences 1.3 days above 40C every year.

But he says that between 2001 and 2013, the average across all those years was 1.9 days above 40C.

"Despite what people would have you believe, 40-degree days in Melbourne are not particularly common, and the city has gone as long as five years (1968 to 1973) without having any," he told me by email.

He says that when it comes to "single day extremes" there is a clear increase for the south east of the country, although it is much harder to see any trends in heat waves.

Dr Sarah Perkins is a researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales and specialises in studying heat waves.

I asked her if human-caused climate change was contributing to charred bums and Snoopy sightings at the tennis.

"It's contributing," she says. "In Melbourne we are seeing an increase in the amount of extreme heat – there's a disproportionate change when compared to the 1C increase we've seen in the average temperature for Australia.

"We are also seeing an increase in heat waves not just in Melbourne, but across Australia.

"Of course, summer is naturally hot and extreme temperature events will occur at this time of year. But we're now seeing much more of these events, that last longer, and are hotter. It's this trend that's concerning.

"Because of the background warming that's already there, there is a greater risk now of us seeing these events happen – so in that respect, it's game, set and match.

"Perhaps the bums wouldn't have been charred quite so much if there was no background warming trend".

She says her studies have shown that since 1980, Melbourne is now experiencing an average of between one and two extra "heat wave days" every year. A heat wave day is a day that can contribute to a string of hot days.

While an extra day or two doesn't sound like much, Perkins says the average heat wave days per year before 1980 was only between five and six.

Perkins also says there are generally three natural climate phenomena related to extreme heat in the south east of the country.

None of these three "modes"– El Nino, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode – were currently in cycles associated with higher extreme temperatures, says Perkins.

"We are seeing extreme events at times when natural variability alone can't explain what's happening."

Perkins has also created a website - scorcher.com.au - which tracks heat waves across Australia almost as they happen (there's a two-day lag time).

The Bureau of Meteorology has also launched a pilot heat wave service to forecast extreme conditions and help the community, including health agencies, prepare.

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Residents asked to cut water use 20% California Gov. Jerry Brown today declared a drought emergency for the state, saying it is facing perhaps "the worst drought that California has ever seen since records (began) about 100 years ago."

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SAN JOSE, Calif.—Record-low precipitation in 2013 has worsened California's drought, draining reservoirs, forcing farmers to keep fallow thousands of acres of fields and leaving some ski resorts high and dry during the busy holiday season.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Does that answer your question?

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Yes, thank-you.

Perhaps a bit early to tie this into climate change. What happens if California gets normal percipitation next year? Will that be attributed to climate change as well?

Have the percipitation amounts in the area been trending lower recently or are they more cyclical?

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Australia is experiencing the most extreme heatwave since, well, the last one in 2013 and 2009.

While the sunburned country is used to hot weather, our infrastructure was not built to cope with several days of above 40°C temperatures. Now Victoria has now seen 4 consecutive days above 41°C, breaking records that have existed since 1855.

In 2009, the heatwave preceded Black Saturday, one of the most devastating bush fires in recent times. The human cost of the 2009 heatwave was more than 374 deaths, in addition to the 173 people who died in the fires.

While there were heatwaves across most of Australia for the past fortnight, the heatwave this week finally hit the south-eastern seaboard, and Melbourne where I live.

In nearby South Australia, the state capital Adelaide became the hottest city on earth, with temperatures in Roseworthy exceeding 46°C. (That's over 114.8°F if you don't follow Celsius.)

Bushfires are raging across south-east Australia, with over 100 blazes burning in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. There are more than 60 burning in Victoria.

Under these conditions, we saw train and tram tracks buckle. Melbourne ground to a halt, when the public transport providers, Metro and Yarra Trams advised commuters to leave work early to avoid massive delays and service cancellations.

It became so hot that the Australian Open tennis competition had play stopped after players collapsed and hallucinated cartoon characters.

Climate change is causing heatwaves in Australia to become more frequent, last longer and to be hotter, according to a Climate Council report:

"As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, more heat is trapped in the lower atmosphere," the report states. "This increases the likelihood that hot weather will occur and that heatwaves will become longer and more intense.

These heatwaves aren't just inconvenient for tennis fans or commuters. They're deadly.

Emergency services, including paramedics and firefighters have been mobilised in large numbers to respond to the increase in heat-related injuries. Heart attacks surged 300% during the heatwave and authorities expect an increase of 50% in mortalities caused by the extreme heat, mainly the elderly, infirm and children.

Also widely reported in Melbourne are localised, staged blackouts.

On Wednesday, the Victorian premier Denis Napthine, who has introduced an effective ban on the construction of wind turbines, talked about the need to "reduce the supply to some households".

He's talking about cutting the electricity to homes, during the hottest part of the day.

"The Government is insisting that priority is given to electricity supplies for hospitals, nursing homes emergency services, public transport and major infrastructure," he said in a radio interview, and he also noted that essential services "will be exempt" from power cuts.

The black outs were exacerbated by repair delays at one of Victoria's major power stations and problems with the Basslink power cable from Tasmania.

It is important for people to understand several important facts.

Firstly, peak demand in 2014 was less than during the 2009 record heat wave. According to Roger Dargavel, senior energy analyst from Melbourne University's energy institute:

peak demand on Tuesday (with a maximum temperature in Melbourne of 42.8 degrees) and Wednesday (41.7 degrees) was only a touch over 10 GW, well under the 2009 record.


Energy demand in Victoria has declined over the past five years by around 3% per year, despite quickly growing population. This is largely due to increases in energy efficiency, decline in energy intensive manufacturing and the massive uptake of household photovoltaic solar systems (around 3 GW nationally is installed).

In fact, according to the Clean Energy Council, without rooftop solar "acting to reduce the demand from large-scale power stations, it is very likely that Victoria would have set a new record for power use". So we can thank renewables that there weren't blackouts due to lack of supply. (Despite this, Tony Abbott has cut funding for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and premier Napthine has halted wind turbine approvals.)

Secondly, energy supply is not a natural phenomenon. It is not like water that flows downhill. The electricity supply is something that is determined by people. At some point, a person decides to turn off the electricity for a certain area. (This obviously excepts blackouts due to disasters.) In the case of the blackouts being referred to by premier Napthine, the decision makers are the energy distribution companies.

Thirdly, the energy market in Australia and Victoria is national, and largely privatised. In Victoria, the energy assets were sold off in the 1990s (along with a host of other essential services) by the conservative premier Jeff Kennett. The argument used to justify the privatisation was that it would result in lower prices.

Energy prices, as well as supply, are determined by "market forces". That is, the privately owned power companies sell electricity to the highest bidder. What's more, privatisation introduced the profit-motive, so that electricity companies have an incentive to increase their prices. In the three years before 2013, electricity prices rose by 66% or $680 per year, only around $54 of which can be attributed to the carbon price during 2013 (the first full year of its operation).

Additionally, Australia has a national energy market. This means that the grid connects between states, so when there is an excess of supply in one state, it can be sent to another state; and when there is an increase in demand in a state, supply can be sent from a neighbouring state.

Today, Fairfax reported that several large commercial users of electricity voluntarily reduced their energy consumption. This was due to price surges on the wholesale market. The wholesale market is regulated by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which operates the national electricity trading market. It is a corporation jointly owned by Australians state and federal governments, and industry.

The blackout during the heatwave in Melbourne was caused because someone in a private company decided to cut the power to everyday peoples' homes.

The decision-makers in these companies are profit driven. They are selling energy in a market. And these companies sell to the highest bidders. The fact that several bulk buyers reduced their energy consumption demonstrates this.

According to the ABC, prices increased in Victoria energy retailers are paying around $750 per megawatt hour and as high as $1800/MWh, up from $48 on Monday and an average of around $60. Prices once reached $12,900/MWh, so, as Roger Dargaville noted "the system is under stress but a long way from cracking".

The State Government can effectively exempt essential services like the water pumps, hospitals, and public transport by guaranteeing that they will pay the price, however high.

Householders however, cannot. So power companies prioritise industrial energy users over people. This means cutting power to homes and sending it to industry.

The point of this post is blog that while the extremes of heat that we are experiencing may be a natural phenomenon, the consequences are caused by humans.

When people have their power supplies cut and their health is impacted, when infrastructure cannot cope and people are left stranded, and when companies and governments continue to pump billions of tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, it is because of someone's decision.

And if you don't care about the people, at least think of the cute koalas.

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