Australia’s Weird Summer.

[A]

Australia is a big, big place. A plane flying from coast to coast in a straight line (Perth to Sydney, say) covers a distance of some 3,288 km (2,043 miles). By comparison, the distance between London and Moscow is about 2,499 km (1,553 miles).

So far, Summer 2021-22 over this vast land has been varied: mild and rainy in the east – Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and eastern Tasmania; hot and fiery in south-west Western Australia; decidedly humid from the Northern Territory down to northern South Australia, by a combination of a unusually strong monsoon and La Niña.

(source)

Earlier last year western Sydney suburbs were affected by floods. So, the NSW State Government wants to the increase the capacity of the Warragamba Dam, thereby drowning the heritage area surrounding the lake that damn dam created. You know, to prevent future floods caused by anthropogenic extreme weather events.  The best solution to the problems environmental vandalism creates is … further environmental vandalism.

What’s that witticism attributed to Einstein? Ah,yes, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

----------

The new year in WA began hot:

(source)

The thing is that even along the coast temperature soared above 50ºC:

(source)

(source)

And the heat moved south:

(source)

The all-too-predictable consequence of that: bushfires around the south-western, more populated region of WA. Quite likely, the scale of the fires is smaller than what we saw in the Black Summer of 2019-20, but the images themselves seem quite similar:

(source)

(source)

The similarity seems to extend to the behaviour of the fires and their assessment by experienced firefighters. Prompted by a journalist during a presser today (“Are we seeing early extreme weather? Is that weather’s duration a result of climate change and is that your assessment and the experts' assessment?”), Darren Klemm (20 years experience), WA Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner answered (edited for comprehension):

“I refer to it as a changing climate, that’s the way I feel as a service practitioner. I feel the challenges we are having with these fires and floods, for example, what’s been experienced up north over the last week, they tend to become more intense and an example of that is that on Friday night the fire at Denmark doubled in size overnight; so for one of the most southern parts of our state, to have a fire double in size overnight is not something we have seen before”.

----------

I’ve always thought them West Aussies’ secession ideas kind of crazy. But I have to admit, it sort of makes more sense now. Similarities aside, currently things over there are different.

----------

Meanwhile, around the Red Centre of the continent:

(source)

Rising waters made both the Stuart Highway (not shown) and the Adelaide-Darwin Rail Corridor (running roughly in parallel to the famous The Ghan passenger railway) impassable. 

[B]

Therefore the freight transport from the south of SA to the towns further north was cut.

(source)

Image Credits:

[A] Author: SCHolar44. Source: WikiMedia. File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. My usage of the file does not suggest any kind of author's endorsement.

[B] Author: NordNordWest. Source: WikiMedia. File available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication].