What ‘global boiling’ means for our summer
Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. You’ve heard of global warming, but what about global boiling? That’s the term now being used by the United Nations after the world lived through its hottest July ever. Today, a climate scientist on what it means for our summer and whether the extreme conditions can be stopped.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: My name is Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick. I’m an associate professor at UNSW Canberra, and I look at climate extremes.
Sam Hawley: Sarah, the situation in Greece right now is pretty scary. There are something like 667 fires burning.
News report: There have been more evacuations from Greek resort islands as the week-long battle to contain wildfires continues.
News report: Every day, every night we are here and we don’t make anything. We burn almost everything. We fight. We fight. Everybody. All the people they fight.
Sam Hawley: Some places have been left just in ashes. As Australians, we know how this feels, don’t we?
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. Like I cannot get over how eerily similar the images coming out of Greece are to what happened in our Black summer just a few years ago.
News report: We have a Circle of flames around all the houses in Kaipara.
News report: I’m about to go down and have a look at what’s left of my house.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: Same people escaped the beach and left their possessions behind.
News report: The sirens started up and at that point, I was praying.
News report: Holy ****. Holy ****. That behind me is Mallacoota.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: It looks just like what happened in Mallacoota just after Christmas a few years ago. So it’s now it’s scary to see that other parts of the world have to go through what we went through as well.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, of course. The Greek prime minister, he’s told his parliament that Greece is at war and things are only going to get worse.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Unfortunately, our country finds itself in a battle with the climate crisis, the threat of our time, which challenges the planet, especially the Mediterranean.
Sam Hawley: What Sarah is happening in the Mediterranean to exacerbate the effects of climate change. What is going on there?
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: So what’s going on? It’s summer over there. You do expect hotter weather to fall during the hotter parts of the year. That’s a bit of a no-brainer. But what’s happened is they’ve just had such relentless heatwaves over the past few weeks. And not only have conditions been really hot, but they’ve just lasted forever.
They’ve been no reprieve. It’s just gone on and on and on. And when we have these sorts of conditions, what happens is that the heat acts to dry out the land surface even faster. It accelerates that kind of local-scale warming. And that means that basically, the vegetation is ripe to be ignited. If you get an ignition source, whether it’s from a person or a lightning strike, it will go up in flames. And in the Mediterranean, it’s warming faster than the global average.
As a globe, we’ve warmed by roughly 1.1°C. But generally speaking, the Mediterranean region is warming at twice that rate. So they’re seeing these changes in heatwaves and bushfire weather much more quickly than some other parts of the world.
Sam Hawley: So it’s so hot in Europe, but many parts of Asia and the United States are searing too. That doesn’t seem normal.
News report: It’s un it’s unreal. I can’t believe it. It’s too hot. It’s just too hot.
News report: In the subway, the subway stations, a sauna. It’s free, but it’s not. It doesn’t feel good.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: In one way. Yes. As I said, you know, it’s summer. It does get warm there. And we do expect Asia, particularly South East Asia, they kind of have their heat waves a little bit earlier on, just before the monsoon breaks. And we did see that in some parts of Asia and Pakistan and India earlier this year.
It does seem odd, however, that they’re all hot at the same time. And this does kind of pertain to what’s going on at the local scale and the sorts of weather systems that are coming through. But generally speaking, we don’t usually see the US or parts of the US having heat waves at the same time as Europe. So it just goes to show that that sort of background warming from climate change is exacerbating these conditions everywhere.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, and July, this July is super hot.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: It is. It’s. Well, it’s the hottest month on record. And like, seeing what’s happening to the Northern hemisphere, even what’s been happening here, lots of Australia has been experiencing quite a warm middle of winter. It’s no surprise and it saddens me to not be surprised by these results, but this is exactly what we’ve been expecting.
Sam Hawley: Yeah. And the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, says it’s now the era of global boiling. So forget about global warming.
Antonio Guterres: Era of global boiling has arrived. Climate change is here. It is terrifying and it is just the beginning.
Sam Hawley: That does not sound good.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: No, it doesn’t sound good. Know even kind of makes me a bit scared and sad, to be honest. You know, it’s we are getting to this stage now where things are ramping up. We don’t have hope unless we have drastic changes to limit warming to 1.5°C. And by drastic, I mean geoengineering that we just don’t have the scale of technology for yet. And this is happening at less than 1.5 degrees warming. What’s going to happen if we do reach 2 or 3 degrees warming, That’s when the boiling, you know, will be even worse.
Antonio Guterres: The air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable, and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.
Sam Hawley: In, Sarah in our hemisphere, two scientists who watch Antarctica, they’re concerned that sea ice has not recovered as expected this winter. So there are huge areas that have failed to freeze.
News report: Scientists are sounding the alarm. In the Antarctic, sea ice levels are at the lowest point for this time of year in observational history. Experts? That’s correct.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: The drop is incredible. Usually, at this time of year, the sea ice does recover because it’s colder and water freezes when it’s colder. But we’re not we haven’t seen that recovery. And not it’s not just a slight shift downwards in terms of recovery. It’s a massive shift. It’s just not recovered at all.
News report: The average maximum temperature at Vostok Station in March is around -53°C. But this month the temperature leaped to -17.7, 15 degrees higher than the previous monthly record.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: What will happen when we go into summer again? It will melt some more and recover less once again. So there are a couple of climate effects that will contribute to sea level rise because there’s more volume in the ocean and also it’s darker. So ice is very light in color and that reflects a lot of the incoming solar radiation out to space, whereas water especially seawater is much darker and will absorb a lot of that radiation coming in, which will then add to the heating of the climate system.
Sam Hawley: And given what’s going on in places like Greece, the question for us, I suppose, is what should we expect as we move into our summer? Yes.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: So this is the million-dollar question right now and it is very difficult to say, well, to be precise about it. So we can’t say just because Europe and America have had some of their most extreme summers on record, ours will be equally as extreme. It’s not necessarily a one-for-one comparison. However, the forecast for the end of winter and going into spring is for hot and dry conditions. We’re no longer in La Niña.
That is done for a while. We are not used to these warm conditions that are coming and it’s probably likely that at some point in the next couple of months, an El Niño will be declared by the Bureau of Meteorology. Yes. So it’s looking like that. We will certainly have a warm summer of sorts, a very warm summer of sorts. But just how extreme that will be, it’s just a bit too early to tell.
Sam Hawley: You mentioned in Greece, there’s a lot of fuel for these fires and we have a lot of fuel here, too, don’t we, because we had a heap of rain in recent years. So that’s a bit concerning. It is.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: Concerning. There’s certainly a lot more growth than what there was a few years ago, but there’s also a lot of moisture still in the sort of undergrowth and the canopies compared to what there was during the Black Summer. So you’ve got to remember that the Black Summer happened after a few years of consecutive years of drought. So not only were there was there fuel, it was super dry.
Now, that’s not to say we don’t have any bushfire risk this year. It does depend on how quickly all that fuel dries out. So we are certainly, I guess, at a heightened bushfire risk than what we have been during the La Niña Summers of the past. But it may not be as bad yet as what we saw in Black Summer.
Sam Hawley: And you mentioned how quickly the Mediterranean is warming. Is Australia warming at that same rate?
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: No, not quite the same. But we are warming faster than the global average. So with the earth warming by about 1.1°C, we’re roughly at about 1.4 to 1 point five degrees Celsius. And that’s because we are surrounded by a fair amount of ocean and it takes more energy to warm ocean or water as it does land. However, the Mediterranean is much different. It’s surrounded by a lot more land than we are, and that’s why they’re seeing a faster average warming trend than we are.
Sam Hawley: I guess one of the big questions we have now is have we failed on the climate challenge? What does the warming that’s already locked in mean for our future?
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: We are certainly locked into some warming like 100%. And I think that if we continue where we currently are or the trajectory that we’re currently on, we will warm somewhere between 2.5 to 3°C. Oh, my gosh. And this is just a rough prediction. We can do more, though.
This is the thing. So as a climate scientist, I used to use the worst-case scenario as the most likely warming by, say, four and a half to five degrees Celsius. When looking at projections. However, the changes that we’ve made, the technology that we’ve implemented, and the pledges that we’ve made as a global community have meant that that’s no longer viable. We don’t use that scenario as the most likely anymore. So that’s, I guess, a good sign that we can make a change.
We’re not making enough now, that’s for sure. But we can make a change. This is kind of like, I hate to put it this way, but this is only a taste of what’s to come. We can tell now that a lot of these changes have happened because of the influence of climate change on our global climate system, and it’s unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse from here on.
Sam Hawley: Gosh. And as you say, we need to do more. But is there still hope? Is there hope that we can’t we won’t get there because none of us want to get there to three degrees, four degrees, or five degrees warming? It just sounds horrible.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick: Not. And I do have hope. I can’t do the job that I do. And, you know, just talk about all this doomsday messaging without having hope. You know, people ten years ago, people didn’t have rooftop solar. Electric cars were just something that you saw in sci-fi movies.
There are options there. They need to be more available. And global politics certainly need to come together more seriously. But it’s not it’s not the time to lose hope. It’s far from it. This is when we need to say buckle in and say, look, we have to do something about this now. We can’t leave this to happen any later.
Sam Hawley: Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is an associate professor at UNSW Canberra, looking at climate extremes. 21 of the Earth’s 30 hottest individual days on record occurred in July. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Laura Corrigan, and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix, our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on ABC News Daily at ABC Net Dot. Thanks for listening.
