16 March 2016, The Conversation ,Droughts and flooding rains: it takes three oceans to explain Australia’s wild 21st-century weather. Australia is a land of extremes, and famously of “droughts and flooding rains”. That’s been truer than ever in the 21st century; since 1999 the country has see-sawed from drought to deluge with surprising speed. There was the millennium drought, which lasted more than a decade and culminated in disasters such as Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Then, in 2011, Cyclone Yasi struck Queensland and a large swathe of Australia exploded under a green carpet of grasses, shrubs and trees. Filming of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road was moved from outback Australia to Namibia after the big wet of 2010-11, because Australia’s luxurious growth of wildflowers and metre-high grasses didn’t quite match the post-apocalyptic landscape the movie’s producers had in mind. In Alice Springs, the Henley-on-Todd Regatta was almost cancelled in 2011 because there was water in the normally dry river. Globally, the big wet on land caused a 5 mm drop in sea levels as large amounts of rain were deposited on Australia, South America and Africa. This coincided with an unprecedented increase in carbon stored in vegetation, especially in arid and semi-arid regions of the southern hemisphere. The greening of Australia in particular had a globally significant impact. Meteorologists have struggled to explain these wild variations in Australia’s weather. Dry years with disappointing crops have been linked to the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño phase (part of a cycle called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)). But despite its huge influence, not even ENSO can fully account for Australia’s extreme rainfall patterns. Our research, published this week in Nature’s Scientific Reports, offers an explanation. We found that conditions in the three oceans that surround Australia – the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans – combine to amplify each other’s influences on Australian weather. Read More here
Tag Archives: Extreme Events
16 March 2016, The Conversation, Hot cities: the ‘smart’ response to urban heat threats. Significant urban policy and planning efforts have been directed at the problem of rising heat in cities. “Smart” cities create new relationships and interdependencies between people, technology and urban environments. The concept rests on the efficient, responsive and adaptive capacities of urban infrastructure. But how well does the smart city respond to the devastating scale and impact of urban heat threats such as bushfires and heatwaves? The Australian Medical Association has warned heat is a “silent killer”. It notes that more Australians die each year due to heat than on the roads. Heatwaves have contributed to more deaths in Australia than any other natural disaster. Bushfires are also expected to increase, with significant impacts on Australian cities and urban communities such as the greater Melbourne region. This is a pressing issue for Australian cities and urban regions, at a time when Australian climatologists are warning of the increasing frequency, severity and duration of heatwaves and bushfires. Smart urban infrastructure New digital technology is entering cities, homes and workplaces. These are performing complex tasks. Self-driving cars and cashless payment systems are examples of significant change. But they also increase a city’s vulnerability in the event of a system breakdown or failure. The ways that these dependencies make cities highly vulnerable during a crisis are poorly understood. For example, smartphone-enabled bushfire and heatwave warning systems are one of the key policy responses proposed and trialled as part of the smart city. But, the benefits and challenges of such responses are still largely unknown. While the invisibility of smart city technology and infrastructure may rise to the surface and become exposed in the face of urban heat-related threats and crises, an array of important considerations lurk in the shadows. Read More here
18 March 2016, ECOS, Building disaster resilience systematically. The cost of replacing essential infrastructure damaged by disasters in the next 35 years is estimated to reach $17bn according to the latest set of reports from the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities. The reports, Building Resilient Infrastructure and the Economic Costs of Social Impact of Disasters, outline the costs associated with replacing essential infrastructure damaged by disasters and provide an overview of the direct costs of physical damage with the total economic cost of disasters. In 2015, the total economic costs of disasters exceeded $9bn, a figure that is projected to double by 2030 and reach $33bn per year by 2050 – funds that could be apportioned elsewhere on other major national projects. And as Heinrich Eder, CEO of reinsurer Munich Re, noted, these projections are based only on economic and population growth; they do not even include the increasingly detectable effects of climate change. These are big, and socially traumatic, numbers. Long-term they have the same sort of potential to create holes in national and state budgets as our ageing population does—the subject of repeated Intergenerational Reports and eventual decisions about adjusting retirement age. It is clear to us, based on our work, that investing much more in disaster resilience as a nation will reduce physical damage, avoid social disruption and trauma, and lessen this capricious burden on state and national budgets. In fact, estimates suggest that well-targeted investments in resilience could result in significant savings for the government. Read More here
11 March 2016, Science Daily, Science can now link climate change with some extreme weather events. Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released March 11. “In the past, many scientists have been cautious of attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. People frequently ask questions such as, ‘Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?’ Science can’t answer that because there are so many relevant factors for hurricanes. What this report is saying is that we can attribute an increased magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events to climate change,” said David Titley, professor of practice in Penn State’s Department of Meteorology and founding director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, who chaired the committee that wrote the report. The committee found that scientists can now confidently attribute some heat waves and cold events, and to a lesser degree droughts and extreme rainfall, to human-caused climate change. Even a decade ago, many scientists argued that research could not confidently tie any specific weather events to climate change, which the committee reports today is no longer true today. Read More here