Australia's Angry Summer

The Climate on Steroids

From Ten News (of all places!)

The report from the Climate Commission

Here is a link to the Climate Commission report, "The Angry Summer".

Key facts: 

1. The Australian summer over 2012 and 2013 has been defined by extreme weather events across much of the continent, including record-breaking heat, severe bushfires, extreme rainfall and damaging flooding. Extreme heatwaves and catastrophic bushfire conditions during the Angry Summer were made worse by climate change. 
2. All weather, including extreme weather events is influenced by climate change. All extreme weather events are now occurring in a climate system that is warmer and moister than it was 50 years ago. This influences the nature, impact and intensity of extreme weather events. 
3. Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians. The significant impacts of extreme weather on people, property, communities and the environment highlight the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change. 
4. It is highly likely that extreme hot weather will become even more frequent and severe in Australia and around the globe, over the coming decades. The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 
5. It is critical that we are aware of the influence of climate change on many types of extreme weather so that communities, emergency services and governments prepare for the risk of increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather.

Let's repeat one critical sentence:

The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. 

This is The Critical Decade!

I believe it's fair to say that this decade has seen more record-breaking  and more extreme heat, fires, drought and floods than any similar length period in the past century in Australia, with accompanying loss of life, property, distress and chaos.  If we combine all this century's events, it would come close to the devastation wreaked by weather in the whole of the last century combined.  The Canberra fires; the Black Saturday fires; the Lockyer Valley floods; many places experienced two or more 100 year floods in a single year; the big drought and more.  And this is just the beginning.

The reaction by some people is dismissive.  Some will even point to a single event 70 years ago.  "What about the 1939 heatwave?", asks Ronsterm on HotCopper.  The answer is that the 39 heatwave wasn't part of the overall hotter temperatures we're seeing today.  These days we keep seeing records tumble year after year.  Look at a temperature chart for Australia over time - the answer's in the mean temperature for Australia from the Bureau (click here for other trends, such as the trend in maximums) (click image for larger version)

Here again is an animation of part of the Big Aussie Heatwave (click image for larger version):

Others like HotCopper's Watso make inane comments like: "it's colder in the northern hemisphere".  Does he think the arctic ice is melting so dramatically because it is colder? Did the USA just have its hottest year on record because it's colder?  Did upwards of 50,000 people die in the 2003 European heat wave, or 15,000 or more in the recent Russian heatwave because it was so cold?  (Watso could be simply referring to the fact that it's winter in the northern hemisphere while it's summer in Australia - now that would be inane!)

A Shift in the Climate

No - what's happening is that climates are shifting and we are experiencing the effects in day to day weather.

Deniers resort to picking random one-off weather events going back decades to match any one of the destructive weather events that have become more and more frequent in the past thirty years so and are commonplace this century.  

Disaster Fatigue

It's not just that we are experiencing heat, fires, floods and droughts it's that they are no longer one off events.  They are becoming so common that they no longer get the news coverage they used to get in times gone by eg the latest massive floods in Queensland and NSW.  The news outlets figure people down south are suffering flood fatigue.  Imagine what the poor people living in places like Gympie feel.

“I don’t think any other place in Queensland has had five floods in two years, four in 12 months, and two of those back-to-back in the last four weeks,”