Hot August Night - a half century of change, maybe
When Neil Diamond released his iconic double-vinyl live album, Hot August Night, the music critics slid into meltdown. Some were revelled in the passion of the performance, many slammed its nonsensical lyrics. Album sales records were broken.
The album, its cover featuring the long-haired artist in his immortal, evocative pose was recorded live in Los Angeles Greek Theatre in August 1972, a traditionally hot month for the city.
The northern hemisphere seasonal skew of the album’s name did not impact sales in Australia, where diehard fans were happy to overlook the fact that August was anything but hot and vacuumed up over 700,000 copies to send it 14 times Platinum.
Fast forward to 2024 and we’re starting to get the idea of a hot August in Australia - in some areas as acutely as the crowd packed into the Greek Theatre that night.
The climate turntable is turning winter into spring a little quicker, with farmers and horticulturalists noting that crops are maturing more quickly and flowers blooming earlier. Even home gardners are being surprised by earlier abundance of colour each year.
With 2024 shaping up as the hottest year on record, a high pressure system has parked itself over the country, driving temperatures up to close to 40 deg C in parts of South Australia, 16 deg above average for this time of year.*
Even Melbourne in the south-east has recorded only four days of below average temperature in the first 26 days of August, the remainder being above average and the past week averaging more than 3 deg C above.
Climate change sceptics would love to suggest that early spring arrivals are nothing new for Australia. Indeed, the data shows we have experienced this in the past. It’s the same songbook from which climate change denialists sing that a cold winter snap is proof that the Earth is not warming.
However, climate change has nothing to do with a single day, even a single month, even a year. It is to do with emerging patterns, trends and extremes measured over extended periods. As this graph shows, while this warm Australian August may be similar to some in the past, the frequency of the pattern has increased dramatically since the 1972 release of Hot August Night.
Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
It’s no surprise that this aligns with the period anthropologists mark as the commencement of the Anthropocene, when human s became influencers of natural cycles rather than adaptors to them.
To do this, humans create and consume energy, much of it still extracted from carbon deposits extracted from the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves, the natural safe storage deposits that have ensured the past 15,000 years of life-nurturing Goldilocks climatic conditions.
Civilisation’s thirst for energy is set to increase pressure on climate and environment. The information age will uplift power demands, making it even more urgent to find alternative, clearner energy sources.
Data centres supporting exponentially burgeoning storage requirements, data security overlays, blockchain and cryptocurrency exchange, rapidly evolving artificial intelligence processing and ever-increasing processing speed. Large centres, of which there is a growing number, consume the energy equivalent of 50,000 homes. Their large arrays of servers require about 19 million litres of water a day to keep machinery cool and data flowing.^ Over the horizon, the arrival of quantum computing will only escalate this.
The question is will renewable energy generation and battery storage be enough to achieve migration from fossil fuel generation and what will be the future environmental and other compromises we may have to make? The static in the political conversation on this is intense as leaders fine tune messages pitched to the fears and preferences of constituents, rather than guidelines from science.
Have another listen, or spin up Hot August Night for the first time. Pay attention to the weird lyrics. Many make no sense, they just rhyme … sometimes. Then think about the climate conversation and the maelstrom of facts and fiction, information and disinformation, science and personal bias surrounding energy solutions.
A lot has change in 50 years, but there is a real danger our dialogue is unimproved.
* The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/40-c-in-august-a-climate-expert-explains-why-australia-is-ridiculously-hot-right-now-237398
^ Australian Energy Council, https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/data-centres-a-24hr-power-source