This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor to Sydney, New South Wales,

Jeremy Zuckus reporting on climate. This is the Southern Hemisphere, it's wintertime.

What is striking, Jeremy's reporting, is that the winter resembles the winter in New England,

perhaps not as severe, but in the same direction, which is unusual, Jeremy tells me, for Australia.

Jeremy, we have snow, we have cold, we have ice, we struggle through January, and by the time we get to March we go, will this ever end?

How is it for you these days?

You know, John, look, it is exactly the same.

In fact, we have snow, we have ice, we are struggling to get through the days, and the

temperatures overnight are dropping down to minus 5, which is around about 25 Fahrenheit.

Now this is incredibly unnatural for Australia

because our winters typically, firstly,

they stay above zero degrees Celsius,

so above 32 Fahrenheit.

Two, we typically don't have ice in the morning because by the time we all wake up the

temperatures well above freezing or at least a couple of degrees and the ice is starting to

thaw and disappear. And 3. We just normally don't get that much snow, especially

not down here in southern Sydney in the lowlands, where over the last few weeks we've been getting

smattering of snow. And a lot of this is very strange it's very unusual it wasn't exactly

unexpected because about four weeks ago the Bureau of Meteorology warned us that there was some very

weird weather coming courtesy of a high pressure system in the Pacific Ocean that was

pushing the cold air back on land here. The Antarctic cooled down rapidly and then

heat it up again very, very quickly.

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