Australia wouldn't be Australia without blissfully beautiful summer days. Sure, getting a third-degree burn on your arm from an iron-hot seatbelt isn't great, but we cling to the thought of a warm afternoon during those 'cold' months we call a winter.
There are some pockets of Australia, mainly rural areas, which get brutally hot every year. However, those temperatures could soon be seen in places like Sydney and Melbourne.
The two biggest Australian cities aren't strangers to boiling hot summer days, with the mercury getting into the high 30s or even the low 40s every now and again. But new modelling from the Australian National University predicts those excruciatingly hot days could reach the low 50s in just a few decades.
Credit: PA
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Author Dr Sophie Lewis told the Guardian: "Our study wanted to look at what the maximum temperatures in an extreme summer of the future would be. That is what we need to know to plan for the future. We know that two degrees of global warming doesn't sound like much of an increase but it in fact will lead to extreme weather events becoming more severe."
Walking on asphalt barefoot would become virtually impossible on those types of days but you would be able to cook an egg.
Dr Lewis adds: "The only thing we can do to prevent these extremes is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and deeply as we can, though some warming is already locked in the system so we will see some increase in the extremity of temperatures regardless."
Sitting on a bus or train to get to the beach during summer is already painful enough, but imagine it being 10 degrees hotter.
The summer between 2012-13 was regarded as one of the worst in history, even going on to be dubbed the Angry Summer. Over the 90-day period, a whopping 123 weather records were broken, and there were parts of rural Queensland which had overnight temperatures in the mid-30s.
That summer claimed the hottest day for the whole of Australia at 40.3˚C, which Sydney recorded its warmest day since 1939 with 45.8 ˚C. But the place that claimed the hottest in the entire country was Moomba in South Australia with a ball-sweating 49.6°C.
Melbourne's heatwave went on longer than expected due to continued blackouts.
The Australian National University hopes the report will convince government authorities to start planning for this scenario now, rather than when we're all fanning ourselves in a pool of our own warm sweat.
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Topics: World News, Melbourne, hot, heatwave, Sydney, Australia