365 Days of Global Warming Awareness 191 – Regional Profiles. Australia & New Zealand 1: Overview

We’ll now be entering a different phase of the Awareness series. Having looked mostly at global patterns, I think it will be useful to examine and learn about the different regions of the planet.  Not only is it interesting to learn (and I speak for myself too here!) about an unfamiliar part of the world (or, if I chance to have any international readers, closer to home!). But it’s also good to further our understanding about how global warming is specifically impacting those other parts of the world, to give more breadth, detail and urgency to each of our own thinking (also the better to combat misinformation).

There will be several posts—not a rigorously uniform number, more a function of the available information—about areas all over the world, whether a single country or group of them, or more widespread areas such as Oceania or the western Indian Ocean. My bias as an American has been clear throughout this whole series and it’s time to rectify that somewhat with a lengthy perusal of the effects of global warming, not just globally, but on specific areas worldwide.

Today’s introductory post will focus on Australia, and tomorrow’s on New Zealand. Australia is a continent, including Tasmania and surrounding islands (not New Zealand, which is 1500 miles east and on a separate continental plate). It extends from roughly 153° to 112°W longitude, and from 44° to 11°S latitude, and covers 7,617,930 km²/2,941,300 mi² (roughly the size of the continental US). A significant portion of the country is tropical, and its furthest southern extremity is classified as “cool temperate”.  

The southeastern coast features mountains, including the areas of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The city of Adelaide sits on the south coast, and Perth on the southwest. The city of Darwin, which is small in terms of population, but huge in importance for extraction industries like uranium, sits in the middle of the northern coast, and has its own time zone offset by 30 minutes from its neighbors. The interior of Australia is mostly desert, particularly in the west, so settlements are sparse. The entire country, including Tasmania and other islands, has been home to the Aborigines for over 50,000 years. Australia has two principal seasons: the wet season, from October to April, or austral summer, with monsoonal rains from the northwest; and the dry season, from April to October, or austral winter.

Tomorrow: introduction to New Zealand.

Be brave, and be well.