But climate experts have long predicted that wide swings in heat and cold, as well as drought and flood, will become more and more frequent worldwide as the average global temperature warms due to greenhouse gasses.
NASA’s Goddard Institute has processed the weather observations for 2008 and found it was the 9th warmest on record, despite seeming to have been much cooler than any in the recent string of record hot years.
That pause in our warming climate last year prompted some to proclaim that it was proof global warming doesn’t exist. But NASA points to the La Niña ocean cooling in the Pacific as the primary cause of 2008’s and early 2009’s brief global cooling.
However, cooling has not extended to the current southern summer in Australia, where the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the state of Victoria sparked the country’s most deadly bushfire outbreak ever.
“Over the last few days, we Australians have looked our own future in the face,” Senator Christine Milne told reporters, referring to how further global warming may spark more intense firestorms.
Australian fire weather experts said the early February heat wave in the southeast of the country produced temperatures so far off the scale they use in forecasting wildfire dangers, that it makes their prediction formula useless.