Hottest autumn fuels fears in Australia

Sydney - Eastern Australia experienced its hottest May on record, the weather bureau said Monday, fuelling fears of the impact of global warming on the world's driest inhabited continent.

The southern hemisphere autumn through March, April and May was characterised by consistently high temperatures, a spokesman for the bureau told national radio.

The four eastern states, including New South Wales of which Sydney is the capital, recorded temperatures between two and two-and-a-half degrees Celsius above average in May.

Weather bureau climatologist Blair Trewin said the records were consistent with a general warming trend and the end of an El Nino weather pattern.

"It would be theoretically possible to get these sorts of events without a long-term warming trend and without an El Nino, but it would be much less likely," he said.

El Nino is the warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that typically happens every four to seven years and disrupts weather patterns from the western seaboard of Latin America to East Africa for 12-18 months.

Climate change has become a major political issue in Australia, where the worst drought in a century is hitting agriculture and the economy, as well as threatening drinking water supplies.

The statistics on the hot autumn came just a day after Prime Minister John Howard, previously a climate change sceptic, announced that he had accepted the need for a carbon trading scheme to fight global warming.

The scheme will involve setting a cap on the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change and granting businesses permits to cover a set amount each year.

Companies wishing to emit more carbon dioxide than their allocated quota would have to buy permits from companies with a surplus, thereby creating an economic incentive to reduce pollution.

But critics have attacked the plan -- which will come into effect only in 2012 -- as too little, too late.

"The problem is that there is a dangerous threshold that we'll soon cross into very dangerous climate change if we don't limit those emissions," said scientist and climate campaigner Tim Flannery.

Agence France Presse