As it happened: BoM officially declares El Niño weather event; rift over treaty deepens among No campaigners

That’s where we’ll leave our live coverage of today’s events, thanks for joining us.

We’ll be back on deck with you tomorrow morning. Here’s what you need to know tonight.

• The Bureau of Meteorology urged people to prepare for extreme heat and bushfire this summer as it declared the onset of an El Nino and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, two weather events that make Australia hotter and drier.
• The Australian National University in Canberra will ramp up its security after a young man faced court for allegedly stabbing two students and attacking two others with a frying pan.
• In its first budget since 2010, NSW Labor will deliver a $7.8 billion deficit this year before delivering a modest surplus of $844 million next financial year.
• Premier Daniel Andrews has sought to justify a possible tax on short-stay accommodation and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Airbnb is placing more stress on renters in his electorate.
• The Antarctic’s sea-ice has reached a record low and the consequences could be devastating, polar experts have warned.
• One of the aviation industry’s most senior economists told a Senate inquiry that Australia’s domestic airline competition has weakened substantially since COVID-19.
• The Reserve Bank Board considered raising interest rates by a quarter percentage point earlier this month due to the risk of inflation remaining too high for too long.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.Credit: Paul Jeffers

It was an auspicious day for the Bureau of Meteorology to call an El Nino as Sydney sweltered through the equal-hottest September day on record.

“Sydney’s provisional maximum temperature of 34.6ºC on Tuesday was the city’s equal highest September temperature on record, matching the same value from September 26, 1965, said Weatherzone meteorologist Ben Domensino.

Sydney sweltered through record September temperatures on Tuesday.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“On an average September day, Sydney would typically see maximum temperatures peaking around 20ºC.”

A large low-pressure system expanding across Australia caused a pool of hot air to spread across the continent, bringing record heat, Domensino said.

Bushfires are burning in many states as a result. An emergency warning has been issued for the popular Tasmanian holiday of Coles Bay this afternoon as an out of control bushfire burns towards the town and campers.

The police officer son of former NSW premier Kristina Keneally has denied he was trying to boost his career when he wrote in a statement that a man made threats to kill police, which was later debunked by a recording of the conversation.

Daniel Keneally, 25, was on duty at Newtown Police Station on the evening of February 24, 2021 when he answered a call from Luke Brett Moore, who was phoning police stations across the state to criticise the practice of strip-searching.

Daniel Keneally (right) leaves court this week with his lawyer Paul McGirr.Credit: AAP

Keneally claimed in a statement, written that evening, that Moore referred to a specific detective in Goulburn during the call, and said he wanted him “off this planet”, “good as gone” and “dead”.

Moore was charged with using a carriage service to menace and threaten to kill and was refused bail, spending three weeks in custody. When he produced the recording he had made of the phone conversation, charges were withdrawn.

Keneally was charged in October 2022 with one count of fabricating evidence with intent to mislead a judicial tribunal, to which he pleaded not guilty.

On Tuesday, prosecutor Daniel Boyle suggested to Keneally that he “made up” the conversation he detailed in his statement.

“Absolutely disagree,” Keneally said.

Read the full story.

Farmers are feeling the heat from El Nino, with some producers already in drought.

The weather pattern, declared on Tuesday afternoon, is expected to deliver warmer, drier conditions across eastern Australia, and parts of NSW are already drought-declared.

Peter Lake, who farms near Grafton on the NSW north coast, is experiencing drought conditions after battling floods 12 months ago.

Farmland ravaged by drought in 2019.Credit: Janie Barrett

“It turned from mud to concrete in a couple of weeks and suddenly everything was just dry. From flood to drought, climate change is making the changes more extreme,” Lake said.

Charity Rural Aid reported a 240 per cent spike over the past four months in demand for emergency drinking water from producers.

“The declaration is a formalisation of what they’re already living and experiencing and managing against,” John Walters from Rural Aid said. “The spike in fodder and water requests reflect the dry conditions.”

Queensland grain and cattle farmer Pete Mailler said he’s been preparing for an El Nino event for months, while other farmers have already been destocking.

“I changed crop selections and am busy fencing to make smaller paddocks to better manage our pastures,” he said.

“We’ve already been proactively managing for an El Nino this year, we expect a hotter and dryer spring and summer, we can’t afford to wait for the BoM to make their announcement to begin preparing.”

Sunshine Coast farmer Mick Dan wanted more support for farmers in times of need.

“We will be okay this summer, but if it’s a protracted El Nino event we will start to suffer.”

AAP

Australian National University will ramp up security after a young man who was known to police faced court on attempted murder charges for allegedly stabbing two female students with a knife and attacking two other men, including with a frying pan.

The ACT’s police union is demanding answers from the territory government over the incident, as detectives probe how accused man Alex Ophel came to be at the Canberra campus on Monday afternoon when he allegedly attacked the international and domestic students.

Deputy vice chancellor Professor Sally Wheeler said campus security would be ramped up at ANU.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

ANU deputy vice chancellor Sally Wheeler said the university wasn’t aware of any threat to its community before the alleged stabbings, and that the institution was now boosting security patrols around the campus as a result of the incident.

“The university has a wide range of measures in place to ensure our community’s safety,” Wheeler said. “We have comprehensive security infrastructure and processes in place, including cameras, [safety] officers, patrols, lighting, emergency phones and contact points. Today, we are ramping this up in the light of yesterday’s events.”

She described it as “an isolated and extremely rare event” that was over within 30 minutes, thanks to the swift response of emergency and security services.

Read the full story.

Returning to politics, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called for respectful debate after footage emerged of protesters calling Liberal senator Alex Antic a “racist dog” as he entered an event on Monday headlined by Coalition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Antic posted footage on Twitter showing a small group of protesters yelling at him as he entered the No event in Adelaide.

Albanese said he “condemned nasty behaviour wherever it occurs”, while Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the vision was disturbing.

Albanese added: “Of course some of the tone of the debate has been unfortunate. That’s the truth. What I would say to people is be respectful. I respect every Australian regardless of whether they’re going to vote Yes or whether they’re going to No.”

On balance, the average temperature of the entire planet rises during El Nino events as warm ocean water wells up off the coast of South America and into the central Pacific.

Many weather agencies had already called an El Nino event as global heat records snapped and ocean temperatures spiked earlier this year.

Antarctica is rapidly losing sea ice.Credit: Samantha Crimmin / Alamy Stock Photo

The northern hemisphere suffered through its hottest summer in history, thought to have been accelerated by an increase in the average global temperature caused by climate change.

Global temperatures have contributed to unprecedented wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, heatwaves across Europe, catastrophic flooding in Libya and a collapse in sea ice coverage in the Antarctic.

In its statement the Bureau of Meteorology said that, in August, sea surface temperatures were the warmest globally for any month since observational records began in 1850, and that July and August 2023 were also respectively the hottest and second-hottest months globally in terms of two-metre air temperature.

Australia’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.48 degrees since national records began in 1910.

In declaring an El Nino event, the Bureau of Meteorology’s Dr Karl Braganza warned Australians to brace for extreme heat and bushfires.

“These climate drivers have a significant influence on the Australian climate, in particular favouring warmer and drier conditions,” Braganza said. “Those conditions are associated or accompanied by an increase in fire danger and extreme heat risk.”

A helicopter drops water on the Wallacia fire near Sydney’s south-west.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“It’s really up to individuals and communities now to prepare for a summer of heat and fire hazards.”

He added conditions were different leading up to Black Summer’s catastrophic fires, which were preceded by years of drought. The landscape is relatively wet after three years of high rainfall, although the sodden vegetation is drying out more rapidly than previous years.

Despite the rapid drying, CSIRO research scientist Dr Nandini Ramesh said the years of rain could work in firefighters’ favour.

“Three rainy La Niña years have provided us with a buffer against drought, with soil moisture and reservoir levels still high,” Ramesh said.

“While the risk of fire weather is higher and preparedness is crucial, this buffer means that we are not necessarily guaranteed a catastrophic fire season this year.”

Experts are urging people to use the El Nino declaration as a chance to review and practise their bushfire survival plans.

What’s an El Nino, what effect does it have on Australia, and what gives with the Spanish name?

An El Nino is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that temporarily disrupts the status quo of the Pacific Ocean.

The normally cold waters off South America warm up, causing more rain off its coast. The waters off Australia get colder, so there’s less moisture in the air, less average rainfall and a greater chance of hot temperatures and, potentially, fires.

El Nino events are part of a bigger climate pattern called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Nine of south-east Australia’s 10 driest winter-spring periods were during El Nino events.

Keen to learn more? Read our explainer now (no Duolingo required).

As well as declaring an El Nino event, the Bureau of Meteorology has announced the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) has switched to its positive phase.

The IOD has a similar drying effect on Australia to El Nino, especially across the continent’s south and east. The bureau said the weather pattern can have a particularly strong effect in reducing rainfall across Victoria.

The combination of the two rainfall-reducing, heat-summoning weather patterns will make summer hotter and drier.

Bushfire smoke rises in Sydney as the Bureau of Meteorology warns of hot, dry conditions brought by El Nino.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“When these two things occur together, it can increase rainfall deficiencies over spring,” Dr Karl Braganza, the bureau’s national manager of climate services, said.

“We are already seeing extreme conditions in some parts of the continent. Today we’ve had catastrophic conditions on the south coast of NSW, just to underscore that risk.”