Forgotten history: 50 degrees everywhere, right across Australia in the 1800s, by Joanne Nova.

Don’t believe your lying eyes — Australian newspaper archives are full of temperatures recorded higher than 121°F in the shade, which is 50°C. All of these temperatures in the map below are found in historic newspaper archives. …

How scary is global warming when Australia knew many days of 48°C and 49°C and some at 50°C, 120 years ago? The BOM [Bureau of Meteorology] — supposedly so concerned about the State of Our Climate — show little interest in talking about our history or in analyzing it, or even mentioning it. …

In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days. The maximum was at or above 102°F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.

By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109°F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F.

On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels).

Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains. It got hotter and hotter and the crowded trains ran on more days of the week.

Read this newspaper account from 1896, of people dying left and right from heat.

The BOM can fiddle and “adjust” temperature numbers with their “world-class” but confidential homogenization algorithms until the cows come home, but people were dying of heat in Australian towns 122 years ago, when carbon dioxide levels were at much lower levels. No one is dying today, and that isn’t just due to air conditioning.