Heatwave aggravated by climate change

Vanguard February 2013
Max O. 

The Climate Commission’s recent report to the Federal Government says that the current bushfires and heatwave that Australia has experienced this summer are aggravated by global warming.

The Commission’s report - Off the Charts: Extreme Australian Summer Heat - warns of more extreme bushfires and hotter, longer, bigger and more frequent heatwaves, as a result of climate change. It says the number of record heat days across Australia has doubled since 1960 and more temperature records are likely to be broken as hot conditions continue this summer.

 Professor David Karoly, who wrote the report for the Climate Commission states:

“Not every summer will be hotter than the one before. In fact this year is markedly hotter than the last couple of years when we had relatively milder and wetter conditions.

“But what we are going to find on average is more of the hot extremes and faster increases in the future, over the next 10 and 30 years, that we have seen over the last 30 years - more hot extremes, more heatwaves and more extreme fire conditions.

“Climate scientists have been talking about these increases for more than 20 years in Australia. We are now seeing exactly what was predicted more than 20 years ago.”

The report points out that Australia’s average temperature has increased by 0.9 of a degree since 1910, and that small changes in average temperature can have a significant impact on the frequency and nature of extreme weather events. Professor Karoly points out that the long-term weather temperature outlook is dire, based on current projections of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. “We are expecting in the next 50 years for two to three degrees more warming,” he said.

“In other words two or three times the warming we’ve seen already leading to much greater increases in heatwaves and extreme fire danger days.

“So we’re expecting future climate change to lead to much greater increases in extremes in the next 30 to 50 years.”

“What it means for the Australian summer is an increased frequency of hot extremes, more hot days, more heatwaves and more extreme bushfire days and that's exactly what we've been seeing typically over the last decade and we will see even more frequently in the future.”