World feels the heat of climate change

Scientists warn

Scientists have long warned that a hotter and drier climate would increase the incidence and intensity of bushfires in Australia.

A survey conducted in late November by polling company UComms found that more than half of the 1,500 Australians surveyed agreed that climate change had worsened the threat of bushfires, which are just one of the growing number of climate change-related disasters recorded globally in the past year.

Counting the Cost 2019: A Year of Climate Breakdown, a report released on Dec 27 by Christian Aid in London, listed the 15 most destructive weather events of the year, including droughts, floods, fires, typhoons and cyclones. Each disaster caused damage of more than $1 billion, and four of them resulted in damage of over $10 billion each.

The report said the figures are likely to have been underestimated, as often only insured losses are shown and no account taken of other financial costs, such as lost productivity and uninsured losses.

While the vast majority of deaths were caused by just two events in India and southern Africa, reflecting how the world's poorest people pay the heaviest price for the consequences of climate change, the financial cost of disasters was highest in richer countries, such as Japan and the United States.

The report said all the events were linked to climate change caused by humans. It stated that scientific studies have shown that climate change made a particular event "more likely or stronger", while in other cases, an event was the result of shifts in weather patterns, such as higher temperatures and reduced rainfall that made fires more likely, along with higher water temperatures that fueled tropical storms.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University in the US, said: "If anything, 2019 saw even more profound extreme weather events around the world than the previous year. With each day now, we are seemingly reminded of the cost of climate inaction in the form of ever-threatening climate change-spiked weather extremes."