Australian researchers in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes have made major contributions to the 2021 IPCC Working Group 1 report, through the authorship of the report, review and the many scientific papers cited in the report.
Irrespective of tipping points, climate change adaptation efforts will be less costly and disruptive to society – and will stand a better chance of success – if warming can be limited to 1.5°C rather than 2°C or higher.
In an hour-long talk to a business forum, Andy Pitman said: “there is no link between climate change and drought”. Given the audience were not climate scientists, or interested in the physics of the climate, this statement was one word too brief.
Large areas of northern Queensland experienced extreme rainfall and severe flooding in late January and February 2019. This briefing note examines the impacts and some of the likely causes of the event.
Weather and climate extremes occur on a wide range of time and space scales. Weather extremes occur on shorter timescales and are regionally or locally specific while climate extremes tend to be on longer timescales and can impact a region through to the whole globe.
Computer models used to simulate global climate agree the climate will warm in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, a recent paper by Bador et al. (2018)1 includes results that highlight our uncertainty about exactly how extremely wet conditions will change in Australia.
