How Climate Change Will Be a Disaster for Australia

How Climate Change Will Be a Disaster for Australia

January 30, 2015

by Denham Sadler

http://www.vice.com/read/climate-change-is-screwing-australia-hardest-of-all

This week Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology released what they're calling their most comprehensive projections to date on how climate change will effect Australia by the end of the 21st century. Unsurprisingly it's not light reading. Australia is to be hit harder by climate change than any other country, and the CSIRO is "confident" that temperatures will increase, sea levels will rise, oceans will become more acidic, and snow depths will decline.

The most worrying aspect of the report is the prediction that temperatures in Australia could increase by more than five degrees Celsius by 2090, the highest predicted rise of any countries.

Compounding this are two reports there will be "more occurrences of devastating weather events," as well as "more frequent swings of opposite extremes from one year to the next." Dr. Wenju Cai, the chief writer of the report, says will all have "profound socioeconomic consequences.”

He predicts that extreme El Nino and La Nina events—which are often associated with bushfires, droughts, and flooding in Australia—will happen once every 13 years rather than the current rate of once of every 23 years. (One example of a La Nina event is the 2011 the Queensland floods that killed 38 people and cost the economy an estimated $30 billion.) "It's a double whammy," Dr. Cai says. "It may be droughts one year, and then the next year there's no relief because there'll be flooding and extreme rain.”

But with a change this big, it needs to happen at a massive level. "We have to have national policies, such as carbon pricing systems of some type, a renewable energy target and we need a continuity of policies," he says.

Steffen says that despite the seemingly disastrous nature of these reports for Australia, there is widespread acknowledgement that action must be taken, and many are already starting to act. We just better hope it's in time.