HOTTER

2018 kicked off with an absolute stinker of a Saturday on the south coast of Australia. It was so hot that once you walked out of the ocean, your hair was bone dry before you’d even got to the car park. Tourists were morphing into lobsters within minutes. Surf wax was melting all over the show – on the floor of the boot, onto the inside of your arm.

That blistering old northerly screamed across the dunes, sending beach tents cartwheeling down the sand at breakneck speeds. Up in the car park, the newsreader on the radio was crackling out words like “43 degrees” and “wind gusts” and “80km per hour”. It was cooking. You could smell what the desert must smell like; feel the hot dust slamming into the back of your throat with every breath.

Beyond the beach it was even hotter. Sections of the Hume Highway actually melted from the heat. Parts of Sydney reached a searing 47.3 degrees, the city’s hottest day since 1939. Bushfires raged across South Australia and Victoria. Thousands of bats and flying foxes dropped dead from the trees. Farmers stared out across paddocks of withered and burnt crops.

Extremely hot weather is nothing new for Australia and many places across the world, but the past 10 years have seen an unprecedented rise in global temperatures. The science is now irrefutable: climate