The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states that global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat-waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of dangerous and costly weather disasters. Not news to many who have seen this coming for a long while, but Australian climate commissioner Will Steffen says it’s one of the most important papers released in the past decade. Read More

By Julian Drape (AAP) in The Australian (29 March 2012):

ONE of the Federal Government’s leading climate change experts says a United Nations report is an early warning that the world will face more deadly extreme weather events unless it tackles global warming.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released overnight states that global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of dangerous and costly weather disasters.

In the past, the IPCC, founded in 1988 by the UN, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming.

For the policy makers summary of the report go to:

http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-SPMbrocure_FINAL.pdf

The latest report is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes which recently have cost on average about $77 billion a year in damage.

Government climate commissioner Will Steffen says it’s one of the most important papers released in the past decade.

“It’s showing us, for the first time, that we can see the fingerprints of the human-driven warming in some of the extreme events that we’ve seen,” Professor Steffen said via a phone hook-up from London where he is attending a sustainability conference.

“This is an early warning sign that if we don’t get this underlying warming trend under control there’s going to be a lot more heatwaves, droughts and intense rainfall events.”

Prof Steffen, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, says Australia is one of the most vulnerable continents when it comes to extreme weather events.

The IPCC report suggests that in Australia there will almost certainly be an increase in days over 35 or 40 degrees Celsius. Heatwaves are likely to become more frequent and last longer.

Dry spells also are likely to last longer in southern Australia, and when it does rain there’ll be more extreme precipitation.

The strength of cyclones will probably increase and they may come further south, even if there are fewer of them.

“The rather modest changes in average temperature and average rainfall that we’ve seen so far really manifest themselves in terms of things that matter for people in terms of these extreme events,” Prof Steffen said.

Examples include killer heatwaves in central Europe in 2003 and southern Australia in 2009 “that led to more deaths in Melbourne than the Black Saturday bushfires”.

There was also “little doubt” that recent flooding in southeastern Australia was made worse by sea temperature warming and higher evaporation rates.

The 594-page IPCC report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

Prof Steffen is one of six members of Labor’s climate commission that was established in early 2011 to provide information and expert advice to the government and the Australian public.

Earlier in March, the commission warned Australians not to fooled into thinking the world wasn’t warming just because much of the country experienced a relatively wet and cool summer.

A commission report stated it was wrong to be blinded to the long-term trend by year-to-year variability and suggested recent heavy rainfall and flooding could have been caused by climate change.

Source: www.theaustralian.com.au