Australia experienced its third-warmest year on record in 2014, with 2013 its warmest year on record. The heat experienced in 2013 was “unlikely” to have been caused by natural variability alone, the report stated, with such temperatures now five times more likely due to humans releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Other findings of the wide-ranging analysis, the first such Australian climate projection made since 2007, included:
- The interior of Australia is set to warm more rapidly than coastal areas. Alice Springs will experience an average of 83 days a year over 40C in 2090, up from just 17 in 1995.
- Melbourne will swelter through an average of 24 days above 35C by 2090, up from 11 in 1995. Sydney will experience 11 days above 35C by 2090, an increase from three days in 1995.
- Australia is on course for a sea level rise of 45cm to 82cm by 2090, if emissions are not curbed. The report warned that if the Antarctic ice sheet was to collapse, sea levels would be a further “several tenths of a metre higher by late in the century”.
- Extreme rainfall events will increase but overall rainfall is expected to drop in southern Australia, apart from Tasmania, during the winter and spring months – by as much as 69% by 2090.
- There will be more extreme droughts, with the length of droughts increasing by between 5% and 20%, depending on how quickly greenhouse gases are cut.
- Rising temperatures will result in a “greater number of days with severe fire danger”. Meanwhile, soil moisture will fall by up to 15% in southern Australia in the winter months by 2090.
- Snow cover will decline, with the report stating there was “high confidence that as warming progresses there will be very substantial decreases in snowfall, increase in melt and thus reduced snow cover”.
Kevin Hennessy, a principal research scientist at the CSIRO, said it and the Bureau of Meteorology now had a greater confidence than ever in their forecasts of Australia’s climate.
“We expect land areas to warm faster than ocean areas, and polar regions faster than the tropics,” Hennessy told Guardian Australia.
Given Australia’s geographical position, that would mean much of the country was expected to warm faster than the global average.
“Australia will warm faster than the rest of the world,” Hennessy said. “Warming of 4C to 5C would have a very significant effect: there would be increases in extremely high temperatures, much less snow, more intense rainfall, more fires and rapid sea level rises.”
What with rampaging deforestation, chemical run off and industrial emissions and pollutant, I have every reason to believe it. Especially with the freak storms and extreme heat we've been experiencing over the last decade or so.
