The sun sets in a market in Thailand, but the heat doesn’t always let up Sirichai raksue/Alamy Stock Photo
EVEN by Australian standards, last summer was a scorcher. January 2017 was the hottest ever recorded in Sydney and Brisbane,聽and great swathes of the south-east endured temperatures that often exceeded 40掳C for weeks on end. In South Australia, soaring electricity demand caused an outage that left 90,000 homes sweltering through a blackout with no air conditioning. Across New South Wales, 87 bush fires blazed. It was so hot that dairy cows dropped dead in the fields.
This kind of heatwave isn鈥檛 a blip. that saw Sydney鈥檚 temperature climb to over 47掳C earlier this month 鈥 the highest recorded in the city for 79 years聽 鈥 and could see both it and Melbourne experiencing mega鈥慼eatwaves with highs of 50掳C by 2040. 鈥淕oing out to 40聽or 50 years, basically the summer we just had will be normal,鈥 says Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick at the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. 鈥淚t hasn鈥檛 really sunken in yet in Australia.鈥
Australians are not alone: most of us fail to聽take the 鈥渨arming鈥 in global warming seriously. If you live somewhere temperate, you might even welcome a rise of a few degrees as offering more opportunity for picnics, barbecues and relaxed afternoons in聽pub gardens. That is unwise. Even now, heatwaves are deadly, and as global warming聽increases . Human physiology is not designed to cope with the temperatures predicted for…



