Is the northern hemisphere heatwave an omen for a brutal summer for Australia? | 7.30

[Music] cannot control [Music] there's a fire emergency across southern Europe in Croatia Greece and Spain [Music] as fires see the Hills inside the cities this summer is merciless from The Fountains of Rome yeah I drink water like drink about six of these since morning to the approaches to the Acropolis tourists and workers alike seek relief but this isn't merely a European crisis what is unusual I would say is the the simultaneous occurrence of heat waves around the world we've always seen with here and there during summer what's different now is that we're seeing heat waves all around the globe at the same time we've had a very major heat wave in South Asia a couple of weeks ago with records being broken we had a Beijing set its all time June temperature record with 41 degrees Celsius in just a couple of weeks ago now we're having a severe heat wave in the southern us and Texas [Music] place on Earth this week is in California's Mojave Desert hello from Death Valley National Park in America it's 5 40 in the afternoon and 123 degrees Fahrenheit it's cool down already foreign works in the Furnace Creek Visitors Center and towards you so it may be more like putting your head inside a hair dryer life here is unsustainable oh you can't exist outside for long periods of time when it's that hot our own safety policy for the National Park Service here in Death Valley National Park is that when it's above 120 degrees Fahrenheit so above 49 degrees Celsius we don't allow our employees to work for more than 10 minutes outside without taking the rest of the hour for a break inside a car with air conditioning death Valley's Rangers can't shelter all the time because the extreme temperatures attract some overheated people it gets pretty hot in Las Vegas but never 120. when I realized it was going to be over 120 I came out the first day the record high for Death Valley 56.6 Celsius was a century ago but the valley is getting hotter Abby what is this extended Heat Wave doing to the debate in America about climate change here to believe in even it's hot then when it's cold scientists have calculated that just with one degree of global warming we're already making extreme heat waves five times as frequent so for example the heat wave that would have occurred once every 50 years is now occurring once every 10 years and at the same time is being more intense so that's how extreme Heats values are being broken so easily now a couple of hours drive to the east in Las Vegas a German Australian expert on sustainable buildings tries to stay hydrated on the city's famous strip at the moment we have quadrupled we have four times the normal mortality rate we have uh tourists yesterday collapsing on the Strip because they didn't carry water keeping his cool isn't easy the University of Nevada's Stefan Lehman has been warning for decades that our cities are unprepared for heat like this we need to completely rethink architecture and the built environment how do we provide continuous shade for pedestrians but also how do we build roofs that reflect the solar radiation so the TD doesn't become a baking oven it doesn't store and trap the heat uh and absorb it Las Vegas like Australian cities is utterly dependent on air conditioning but at the moment it doesn't go below 33 degrees Celsius it's not really cooling down enough anymore so we have a significant Urban heat island Stefan Lehman says there are reasonably simple ways to cool the suburbs like white roofs that reflect the Heat and extensive tree planting for instance planting Urban forests Urban growth with native trees native three species that need less water left thirsty but have large leaves so they provide a lot of shade so you have a big Shadow under the crown of the tree that a good way to also cool down the surface underneath and I mean you feel it yourself when you walk over a black asphalt car park these Northern extremes could be mirrored this summer in Australia the Heatwave in northern hemisphere has no direct implications for us right now but it does have a common cause and in El Nino years the global temperature tends to spike upwards and so we would see more heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere and then when our summer rolls around tend to see more heat waves in Australia as well the United Nations meteorological arm says there's a 90 probability of El Nino in the second half of this year what it does is tends to tilt the odds towards hotter and drier so you can think of it as loading a dice and so we now have one face for the dice which is effectively drier hotter and we still have to roll the dice so we don't get a hot dry year every time but it certainly increases the chances that we do

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 78,366

Keywords: abc news, australian news, abc news indepth, documentaries, long-form journalism, weather, heatwave, climate, el nino

Id: r4nnTX6g1x8

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023