Summer heat broke 205 records and more extreme weather is to come, Climate Council of Australia reports

If you thought the weather over this past summer was off the charts, you weren’t imagining things.

Key findings:

• More than 205 temperature records were broken around Australia in 90 days
• The extreme heat in NSW was at least 50 times more likely to occur due to climate change
• Australia’s ageing energy system is inefficient and incapable of handling rising temperatures

The summer of 2016/17 has been dubbed the ‘angry summer’ by climate scientists who’ve been investigating just how extreme things got.

They’ve found that during a 90-day period, 205 weather records were broken.

Professor Will Steffen is a scientist with the Climate Council of Australia, and the lead author of the report Angry Summer 2016/17: Climate Change Supercharging Extreme Weather, released today.

“If you look at the east of Australia, particularly New South Wales and Queensland, the records that have really been tumbling there are high temperatures, heatwave type records,” Professor Steffen said.

“Over in the west in Perth and up in the Kimberley in the north-west, they’ve been setting extreme rainfall records, so we’ve seen extremes of all types across the continent in the past three months.

MORE: Summer heat broke 205 records and more extreme weather is to come, Climate Council of Australia reports – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)