At 11am in Melbourne the temperature was 47C in the shade

Originally posted by jitttlatw07 ↑

Can they explain the 1851 extreme heat wonder what the Co2 levels were back then?

In The Australian Summer, Extreme Weather Is Becoming Normal

It's not even Christmas and already we are seeing signs of extreme weather conditions in Sydney, Melbourne and other parts of eastern Australia.

Scientists tell us extreme hot weather will become even more frequent and severe in Australia in the coming decades as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.
An increasing number of studies attribute periods of extreme heat around the world to increasing greenhouse pollution. In Australia, days of extreme heat increased markedly towards the end of the 20th century. In the first decade-and-a-half of this century the trend has continued -- and accelerated

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/suzanne-harter/in-the-australian-summer-_b_8832024.html

BUSHFIRE - BLACK THURSDAY, VICTORIA 1851

The Victorian bushfire known as 'Black Thursday' occurred on 6 February 1851, though fires had been burning for some weeks, At 11am in Melbourne the temperature was 47C in the shade with a hot wind blowing from the NNW.

Fires raged out of control from Barwon Heads, Victoria, to Mount Gambier, South Australia, while the smoke haze spread as far as Tasmania. Approximately 12 people died and 5 million hectares – approximately a quarter of the state of Victoria - was burnt.

Losses included one million sheep and thousands of cattle with many properties and communities destroyed. The fire affected the Wimmera, Portland, Gippsland, Plenty Ranges, Westernport, Dandenong and Heidelberg with extensive damage in Victoria’s Port Phillip district.
INFORMATION SOURCES

https://www.emknowledge.gov.au/resource/282/1851/bushfire---black-thursday-victoria-1851

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So there was a heatwave in the 19th century? So what? Australia's probably had heatwaves since it moved apart from Gondwana.

It's the trend that's important - would have thought on a stockmarket website that would be take for granted, but no, you guys look at one day's mega-trading after a favourable announcement and assume that it's a long term trend.

Abstract

The last decade has produced record-breaking heat waves in many parts of the world. At the same time, it was globally the warmest since sufficient measurements started in the 19th century. Here we show that, worldwide, the number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming. This implies that on average there is an 80 % chance that a new monthly heat record is due to climatic change. Large regional differences exist in the number of observed records. Summertime records, which are associated with prolonged heat waves, increased by more than a factor of ten in some continental regions including parts of Europe, Africa, southern Asia and Amazonia. Overall, these high record numbers are quantitatively consistent with those expected for the observed climatic warming trend with added stationary white noise. In addition, we find that the observed records cluster both in space and in time. Strong El Niño years see additional records superimposed on the expected long-term rise. Under a medium global warming scenario, by the 2040s we predict the number of monthly heat records globally to be more than 12 times as high as in a climate with no long-term warming.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0668-1