From bushfires raging in searing tinder-dry conditions tosurging floodwaters and destructive tornadoes, Australia has witnessedstaggering climate extremes during its summer of 2013. Already this month thecountry's largest city Sydney has endured its hottest day on record, a 45.8degree Celsius scorcher during a heatwave so extreme heat scales on governmentforecast maps had to be redrawn.
Just a week later, ex-tropical Cyclone Oswald dumpedtorrential rain on coastal areas of Queensland, leaving four people dead,swamping 2,000 homes and forcing dramatic rooftop rescues of those trapped bythe deluge. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who toured bushfire-hit areas insoutheastern Victoria state even as turbid floodwaters swamped the nation'snortheast, said the contrast was not lost on her.
"I was looking at blackened landscape, burnt trees,black earth; saw some homes that were just completely destroyed," shesaid. "They were the images in my eyes directly yesterday, and thenwhenever I saw an image coming from Queensland, it's of wild weather andcascading water... flooded homes..." "Doesn't that say somethingabout Australia? If you had the ability to take some water from one part andjust put it on another part and put those fires out in Victoria, then you would.But life's not like that."
Climate change expert David Karoly, an adviser to thegovernment's Climate Commission, said while there have always been floods andfire in Australia, recent events were consistent with global warming and couldbecome more frequent with climate change. "On average, over a number ofyears, we would expect more heavy rainfall and more hot extremes and moreextreme bushfire weather conditions," he stated. "So Australia is aland of drought and flooding rains, yes. More droughts and worse floodingrains."
Australia experienced an extended period of exceptionallywidespread hot weather in January, resulting in the nation experiencing itshottest day on record on January 7 with the average maximum temperature hitting40.3 degrees. "It was a very extreme event, a very unusual event,"said Markus Donat, a climate researcher at the University of New South Wales,adding that the dices were loaded for more of the same due to global warming."Of course in a warmer world you will have more days exceeding thethreshold for unusual temperatures," he said. "The probability of awarm extreme event becomes higher."
The hot weather exacerbated bushfires in Tasmania, New SouthWales and Victoria, destroying more than 100 homes, and saw the weather bureauintroduce new colours to its weather scale to cover projections for new highforecasts. Separately, tropical Cyclone Oswald touched down on the Queenslandcoast, and after it was downgraded the storm brought high winds, torrentialrains and even, to the east coast town of Bundaberg north of Brisbane,tornadoes.
Australia has weathered unprecedented natural disasters inrecent years, with 173 people perishing in the 2009 bushfires in Victoria andfloods in Queensland in 2011 claiming 35 lives and causing millions of dollarsin damage. With some areas flooding in Queensland just two years after theywent under water in the 2011 disaster, the question of climate change and urbanplanning has arisen.
