Unprecedented?

It is not know if the child was used as bait.

Were you to go by recent reports, climate change is inflicting damage of the sort never, ever seen before.  A small selection of headlines, quotes and links making that point over the past few days:

• Thousands of Australian animals die in unprecedented heatwave
• Greens call for emergency water measures in wake of unprecedented fish kill
• The unprecedented Baaka/Darling River fish kill which claimed more than one million fish…
• “…what’s currently happened is, as I understand it, unprecedented…”
• “The scale of this disaster is extraordinary and unprecedented…”

It is pity — alas, not an unprecedented one — that various journalists, alarmists and politicians don’t know how to type “trove.com” into their browser search bars. They would pretty quickly find a wealth of precedents for dead fish. Who knows, but some of the brighter newsroom scribblers might even come to grasp that Australian summers can sometimes be rather hot.

Dubbo Liberal, January 30, 1951:

Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 1929:

Grenfell Record and Lachlan District Advertiser, December 5, 1929:

Sporting Globe, December 21, 1929:

Perth Daily News, Jul 16, 1932:

The Trove archive contains many more accounts of mass fish deaths in the Murray and Darling, some dating from the nineteenth century. For a more contemporary report on summer temperatures, readings the BoM appears determined to ignore, see Jo Nova’s latest post.