Over in the Guardian, Tim Flannery places Australia's recent record-breaking heat waves, along with the country's shockingly vicious forest blazes—which have already killed some 170 people—in a wider climate-change context:
Climate modelling has clearly established that the decline of southern Australia's winter rainfall is being caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from the burning of coal. Ironically, Victoria has the most polluting coal-fed power plant on Earth, while another of its coal plants was threatened by the fire. There's evidence that the stream of global pollution caused a step-change in climate following the huge El Ni