Os efeitos do Aquecimento
Global estão a tornar a vida insuportável na Austrália .
E como vai ser no Verão em
Portugal ?
OVOODOCORVO
Australia’s
new normal … as city temperatures hit 47C people shelter from the
deadly heat
In
Sydney’s baking suburbs, fans have sold out – and fears about the
effects of climate change are mounting
Alex McKinnon
@mckinnon_a
Sunday 19 February
2017 00.04 GMT
Nahid is resting on
a bench outside a Target clothing store, her groceries beside her. A
cheery, middle-aged woman with a soft Egyptian accent, she is eating
a cone of bubblegum ice-cream as though it contains the secret of
life. When I ask her if she’s enjoying her ice-cream, it takes her
30 seconds to stop laughing.
“On the weekend I
was sick! Sick from the heat! It was like a virus,” she exclaims.
“My nephew, he was throwing up from the heat! He couldn’t even
take water, he was so sick.
“They say it’s
going to be this bad in March too! Normally it is a little cooler in
March, but this year…” Nahid shakes her head sorrowfully.
Australians are no
strangers to hot weather. But for the past week large parts of the
continent have suffered a heatwave of unusual length and intensity.
Temperature records were beaten in cities and rural towns around the
country. Shops across Sydney ran out of fans, and New South Wales
energy minister Don Harwin urged people to beat the heat by going to
the movies. More than 40,000 homes in South Australia experienced
blackouts as electricity networks struggled to cope with the
increased demand placed on the grid by air conditioners.
For those lucky
enough to live near the coast, there’s an easy solution: go for a
swim. Sydney’s beaches have been packed, as they are every summer,
with city dwellers and tourists desperate to cool off.
But in the
far-western Sydney suburb of Penrith – 60km from the coast –
options for getting out of the heat are few. Penrith has the dubious
honour of being Sydney’s hottest suburb, with summer daytime
temperatures four or five degrees higher than in the inner city.
During last week’s heatwave, the suburb sweltered through an
unheard-of 46.9°C – a record for the city. “Penrith has had
about 12 days above 40 degrees this summer, which is clearly
unusual,” says Karl Braganza, climate monitoring manager at the
Bureau of Meteorology.
When it gets that
hot, Penrith mayor John Thain recommends that people don’t even
venture outside. “The burn factor here’s so quick: it’s really
important for people to stay safe,” Thain says. “Last weekend
people were just hunkered down at home.”
NSW rural fire
service warns people not to get caught in front of bushfires
For locals who want
or need to leave the house in such heat, there’s one overriding
option: Westfield Penrith Plaza, a sprawling shopping complex just
off High Street. Crucially, it has air conditioning – a feature
that has attracted Nahid and swarms of other Penrith locals on yet
another boiling Sydney day. Children hang around after school is let
out; mothers with young children are anxious to prevent heat-related
tantrums; and pensioners kill time until the sun goes down and the
heat begins to dissipate.
Step through
Westfield’s sliding glass doors into the outside world, and the
heat hits you like a car door. Strolling a few hundred metres up High
Street is like wading through pea soup. You sweat from places you
never knew sweat could come from – the backs of your knees, the
small of your back, your feet. Middle-aged women sport sun umbrellas,
a criminally overdue fashion accessory in Australia; pedestrians
huddle in what little patches of shade they can find while they wait
at crosswalks.
In the Australian
Arms Hotel, where the only women present are those working behind the
bar, dozens of men are cooling off after a day’s work. Brian, a
big, taciturn Englishman with a beer belly and a long bushranger
beard, is a fan of the Australian climate, but the heatwave has
forced him to revise his position somewhat. “They said it was 47
degrees last week, but in your backyard, with the sun coming off the
concrete and everything, it’s more like bloody 51,” he says.
The heatwave is
officially over, but the reality of Australian summers getting hotter
is much more serious and far-reaching than a few more hot days each
year. Almost every Australian capital city experienced
higher-than-average temperatures in January; in Sydney and Brisbane,
it was the hottest month on record. That scorching January came after
2016 was the country’s fourth-hottest year on record – a year
that, in turn, followed on from 2013, the hottest year the country
has ever recorded.
That increasing heat
has made an already dry continent even more prone to devastating
bushfires. NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons
describes fire conditions during the heatwave as “the worst
possible... they are catastrophic. We haven’t seen this in NSW to
this extent, ever.” Fire conditions were even worse than on “black
Saturday”, Australia’s worst-ever bushfire disaster, in 2009, in
which 173 people died. Less dramatic, but just as worrying, is the
rising number of deaths from heat stress, which already kills more
Australians than all other natural disasters combined. A shockingly
high number of Australians died of heat stress on 27 January – the
day after Australia Day, a national holiday where outdoor activities
like swimming, barbecues and going to sporting matches are
commonplace.
It wouldn’t be
unreasonable to assume that the Australian government’s response to
this steadily unfolding public health and safety crisis would include
some acknowledgement of the elephant in the room – climate change.
That’s certainly the opinion of the Bureau of Meteorology, which
warned in its state of the climate report, published in late 2016,
that “the duration, frequency and intensity of extreme heat events
have increased across large parts of Australia”, and that
“Australian temperatures are projected to continue increasing”.
“There’s a clear
trend where those extreme hot days across the continent are
increasing, and quite dramatically over the past 20 years,”
Braganza says. “Regarding fire weather – which includes things
like wind speed, humidity, the drought factor – we’ve seen a
shift in most of Australia’s fire-prone regions towards a longer
fire season and an increase in the frequency and extremity of fire
events, as well as fire danger days.”
But the country’s
current administration, headed by the conservative Liberal Party and
the rural-based National Party, is deeply hostile to any substantive
action on climate change, and the recent heat has seemingly done
little to change their minds.
Conservative
governments in Britain, Germany and elsewhere have taken steps to
reduce their nations’ carbon emissions, often suffering politically
as a result. But no such political courage seems to exist in
Australia. Instead, absurdity reigns. At the height of the heatwave
last week, treasurer Scott Morrison, one of the most powerful
politicians in the country, brandished a lump of coal at
parliamentary question time, declaring coal to be the future of
Australian energy. “This is coal. Don’t be afraid! Don’t be
scared!” Morrison proclaimed to the laughter of his government
colleagues. They passed the lump of coal around among themselves as
Morrison claimed the opposition Labor party, which has proposed
ambitious renewable energy targets, are suffering from “coalphobia”.
It was reminiscent of the stunt pulled in 2015 by US Republican
senator James Inhofe, who infamously threw a snowball on the floor of
Congress as “evidence” that global warming is a myth.
Morrison’s actions
typify the government’s attitude to climate change – not just
indifference, but an active hostility towards anything that threatens
the country’s large coal industry. Last year prime minister Malcolm
Turnbull and a number of his ministers blamed another South
Australian blackout on the state’s renewable energy supply, despite
advice from the public service stating that the real cause was a
large storm that knocked over several major transmission lines.
Turnbull’s
predecessor, Tony Abbott, made Australia the first nation on earth to
roll back climate change legislation when he abolished the carbon
trading scheme introduced by his Labor predecessor. Turnbull himself,
once a keen advocate of renewable energy, has performed an abrupt
about-face since assuming office in 2015; he now sings the praises of
so-called “clean coal”, a hypothetical technology with dubious
environmental and financial returns.
If Australian
summers grow ever hotter in the years ahead, the public’s patience
for such inaction is likely to wear thin. Perhaps moving parliament
to Penrith – or somewhere without air conditioning – might help
Australia’s politicians move things along.
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