This is the Friends Vistory Debating Society. I'm John Bachelors, welcoming Jeremy Zachis of

New South Wales to report on the climate, the climate in the Southern Hemisphere in late winter.

Recall that Jeremy's winter is our summer in the Northern Hemisphere. He's coming as we are

coming to the end of our summer in the fall season. Jeremy's coming to the end of his winter.

The expectation is a major shift in the world's climate. Called El Niño,

warm parts of the Pacific will affect the climate as it reaches Australia. Jeremy,

you send me a photograph of Australia. At first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at.

This is Australia without clouds. What explains this? Have you seen this before? Good evening to you.

Good day John. This is rare and this is Australia without clouds. We have seen this before,

but we have seen this before in the summer time. We're talking about January, February,

here in Australia where it's hot, there's absolutely no precipitation in the atmosphere,

and it is a true summer weather pattern. But the thing is, John, we have not seen this before

in the winter time. In fact, this is the first time on meteorological records that we've actually

seen such a dry continent for any period of time. This was approximately 72 hours in Australia

during the middle of winter, and not only was it cloudless, it was also very much humidityless as well.

So it was a very very dry continent for about three days from Tuesday to Thursday this past week,

and John, this is just really a dire sign of things to come because if it's this dry now and winter

time when we're expecting to have relatively high humidity, lots of rain and lots of clouds covering

the continent, so not allowing the earth to bake and basically get warm and store the heat.

As we get towards summer, we're going to get not only more cloudless days and less rain,

we're actually going to have basically a heat-soaked land, so it's land that is already hot,

which is going to generate an even warmer weather pattern during the summer. So John, as amazing

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