What's hot is the alarmism back home Back last night from New Zealand, where tour operators on the South Island were apologising for the unseasonal cold, with summer snow falling on mountains from Southland to Kaikoura. In Queenstown, though, a tourist from Chicago still gloated to me how he'd dodged the record-breaking cold gripping the US: But back in Melbourne I am plunged back in the same global warming madness, with a local heat wave treated by warmists as a proxy for a world-wide heating. The Climate Council of professional alarmist Tim Flannery once again hypes the scare with the ABC's help: Heatwaves in Australia are becoming more frequent, hotter and are lasting longer, a report released today by the Climate Council says. The interim findings of the report, Australian Heatwaves: Hotter, Longer, Earlier and More Often, come as southern Australia swelters through a heatwave. After notching up two consecutive days over 40 degrees Celsius, Melbourne is on track to record its second-longest heatwave since records began in the 1830s... The longest heatwave in Melbourne was in 1908, when there were five consecutive days over 40C. Decades of man-made warming and we still can't beat a 1908 record?