Now we know the colour of the Gorilla in the Room.
It’s purple.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
When (Australia’s) weather bureau model started churning out predictions for next Sunday and Monday of more than 50 degrees, chart producers quietly extended the scale beyond the level previously used. It showed those days as deep purple in parts of South Australia – indicating 50-52 degrees Celsius.
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That purple patch is a problem for climate denialists, as I discussed in a previous post:
The problem for the denialists, who have been so effective at attacking science, casting doubt and justifying delay, is that they must have an explanation for what is actually occurring in the environment. It’s not enough to say that, well, these are freak events, it’s happened in the past, there’s no link to temperature change, which isn’t actually happening, or happened before, and it’s not the carbon but sunspots, volanoes or radiation, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it.
Sorry, either you have a theory to explain what’s going on, or why the one that does is wrong, or you don’t have a reason to be quoted repeatedly. A message that says, please ignore that gorilla doesn’t resonate when the gorilla keeps getting bigger.
Or hotter.
Brisbane-based Peter Berkeley sends us this:
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UPDATE: The New York Times reports on all the extreme events that are happening simultaneously here.
Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.
“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”
