This
article doesn't say anything we didn't know already, but it strikes
me that while Australia is coming to a realisation about climate
change in this country (New Zealand) linking weather events to
climate change is taboo. Does the government have the power to
control the narrative?
What's
the betting that the narrative in Australia might change after their
election and a new climate-change-denying government?
Humans
play role in Australia’s “angry” hot summer
Human
influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in
Australia's recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s
observational record, new research has found.
27
June, 2013
The
research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global
warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record hot
summers such as the summer of 2013, by more than five times.
Lead
author, Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC
Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science said the study
showed it was possible to say with more than 90 per cent confidence,
that human influences on the atmosphere dramatically increased the
likelihood of the extreme summer of 2013.
“Our
research has shown that due to greenhouse gas emissions, these types
of extreme summers will become even more frequent and more severe in
the future,” she said.
The
study Anthropogenic contributions to Australia’s record summer
temperatures of 2013 has been accepted for publication in Geophysical
Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The
study used climate observations and more than 90 climate model
simulations of summer temperatures in Australia over the past 100
years.
Professor
David Karoly, a co-author on the paper said the observations, coupled
with a suite of climate model runs comparing human and natural
influences in parallel experiments, indicated we have experienced a
very unusual summer at a time when it was not expected.
“This
extreme summer is not only remarkable for its record-breaking nature
but also because it occurred at a time of weak La Niña to neutral
conditions, which generally produce cooler summers,” he said.
“Importantly,
our research shows the natural variability of El Niño Southern
Oscillation is unlikely to explain the recent record temperatures.”
This
analysis of the causes of the record 2013 Australian summer is one of
the fastest ever performed worldwide for a significant climate event.
This
fast-response analysis was made possible because data from many
existing climate models and observations were made available through
Centre of Excellence collaborations with CSIRO, the Bureau of
Meteorology and the National Computational Infrastructure in
Australia.
“The
new data resource means scientists are able to work on understanding
and addressing the problems of extreme climate events sooner,”
Professor Karoly said.
The
researchers are now turning their attention to other recent extreme
climate events.
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