“Southern Australia is freezing. How can it be so cold in a warming climate?”

Essay by Eric Worrall

Our old friend Senior Lecturer in Climate Science Andrew King on why global warming is producing so much cold weather.

Southern Australia is freezing. How can it be so cold in a warming climate?

Published: July 5, 2024 2.34pm AEST
Andrew King
Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

People living in southern Australia won’t have failed to notice how cold it is. Frosty nights and chilly days have been the weather for many of us since the start of July.

As winter continues, we are left wondering how unusual the cold is and whether we can expect several more months of this. Warmer conditions are in the forecast but winter has a long way to go. Further cold snaps could occur.

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What’s causing the cold?

A persistent and strong high-pressure system has been hanging around over southeast Australia. The atmospheric pressure was so high it approached the Australian record of 1,044.3 hPa set on June 7 1967. An initial observation of a new record has since been disregarded, but nonetheless this is an exceptional, near-record high-pressure pattern. 

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In winter we expect cold weather across most of Australia and occasional cold snaps that bring widespread frosty and icy conditions. However, this current cold weather is pretty unusual and we are seeing some records fall.

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As this week shows, we still occasionally get daily cold records in the current climate. But it’s much harder to get record cold months, and record cold years at a given location are almost impossible. 

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Read more: https://theconversation.com/southern-australia-is-freezing-how-can-it-be-so-cold-in-a-warming-climate-233977

Bitterly cold winter high pressure systems also coincide with low wind output. There have been problems for months with Aussie wind output.

May 2024 – Another wind drought pulls combined renewables output below last year

June 2024 – ‘Dark doldrums’ hits wind power supply

July 2024 – Coal power on comeback trail as wind, solar falter

Climate scientist Andrew King, who wrote the article above, thinks the answer to Australia’s future energy needs is renewables. In 2022 Andrew King channelled Greta Thunberg with a demand for a faster energy transition.

But renewables have not been a lot of help during this year of wind droughts. Not only are they subject to prolonged outages during unfavourable weather conditions, King himself admitted his own science suggests storms might get worse – which begs the question of why people who think the weather might turn nasty would even consider advocating for solutions which are profoundly vulnerable to bad weather.

Regardless of what the future holds, Australia would likely have suffered prolonged blackouts at night during recent freezing cold wind drought nights, if the real fossil fuel powered energy network hadn’t been ready to be switched on at a moment’s notice, to prop up the fake renewable system.

Maintaining two systems in parallel, the fake renewable system, and the real fossil fuel powered system, is what is driving up energy bills. It is time for Australia to choose, between a system with a proven track record of reliability, and a useless renewable system which we know will regularly let us down.