David Karoly’s Climate Crisis – Fewer Frost Mornings in Melbourne? – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Should we shut down Western industrial civilisation to bring back the frost?

‘Global weirding’: How our ‘normal’ is becoming more extreme

Fires in winter and devastating floods — the weather is getting “weirder” and more extreme.

David Karoly remembers regularly seeing frost when he was a young boy on his way to school in Melbourne — now it’s become an unusual sight for the city.

The decline in frosty days is one of many weather-related changes that people around the world are noticing and describing as “weird”.

Climate change has already driven global temperatures up by an average of 1.55C compared to pre-industrial levels, and 2024 was the hottest year on record.

Individual “global weirding” events may or may not be linked to climate change but Karoly, who is an internationally recognised expert on climate change, says they are happening more often.

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Read more: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-is-global-weirding-how-normal-is-becoming-more-extreme/rl8k19za5

Karoly goes on to describe some big storms and other events, but I’m pretty sure severe storm events also happened before the industrial age. As the article said, events “may or may not be linked to climate change”.

I think we should look for a little more confirmation before spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a problem which “may or may not” exist.

As for frost in Melbourne, I lived in Melbourne for a while as a kid. I remember frost in Melbourne – living in a cheap uninsulated wooden house, you felt the frost before you saw it. Frost may be fun if you are watching from a warm room with a roaring fire, but experiencing frost in a cheap 1950s house with a small fireplace and an asbestos sheet outdoor toilet somewhat diminishes the magic.

We were not especially poor – lots of people lived in low quality houses.

Unfortunately lots of people in Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia still live in low quality houses. With Aussie energy bills skyrocketing thanks to Australia’s green energy zealotry, one in four Aussies struggle to pay home heating bills.

Even those lucky enough to still have a fireplace which works, providing fuel for that fireplace is more challenging than when I was a kid. You potentially face severe penalties in today’s Australia for collecting firewood from wilderness areas. And while using a wood fire for home heating is not illegal in Melbourne, clean air laws are much stricter than when I was young. If you burn anything other than expensive kiln dried wood or smokeless fuel, you could face legal repercussions.

Frosty mornings in Melbourne are certainly not something I would fight to preserve.

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