Australian Scientists Link “The Angry Summer” to Climate Change
March 6, 2013
The Australian government’s Climate Commission for the first time has issued a report that directly connects recent extreme weather events to climate change. At least 123 weather records in Australia fell during the period reviewed in the report. A four-month heat wave in late 2012 culminated in January 2013 in massive bushfires that tore through the eastern and southeastern coasts of the country in Australia’s most populous states, New South Wales and Queensland. These record-setting temperatures were followed by torrential rains and flooding that left six people dead and $2.4 billion in damages across the same region. While climate scientists have long been reluctant to link individual weather events directly to climate change, the author of the report–”The Angry Summer”–argued that the extremes of recent weather events suggest an acceleration of change to Earth’s environment.
Wildfires are common throughout Australia due in part to the country’s hot and dry climate. Many wildfires start in the remote countryside known to Australians as the bush. (ACT Emergency Services Agency)
Speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the commission’s leader, Tim Flannery, stated, “If you look at the last decade, we’re getting three times as many record hot days as we are record cold days, so the statistics are telling us, too, that there’s an influence on extreme events–they’re shifting. Over the last 50 years,” he noted, “we’ve seen a doubling of the record hot days, we’re getting twice as much record hot weather than we did in the mid-20th century.” The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the author of the report, Will Steffen, as saying, “Statistically, there is a 1-in-500 chance that we are talking about natural variation causing all these new records. Not too many people would want to put their life savings on a 500-to-1 horse.” Professor Steffen is the director of the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University.
Additional World Book article:
- Australia 2008 (a Back in Time article)
- Australia 2009 (a Back in Time article)
- Australia 2010 (a Back in Time article
- Australia 2011 (a Back in Time article)
- The Great Meltdown (a special report)
- Probing the History of Climate Change (a special report)
- What We Know About Global Warming (a special report)
