'Black Summer' far from over in Australia

Canberra has been shrouded in smoke for weeks. Fires burning on the outskirts of the Australian capital, and in the country's alpine region, show that the devastating bushfire season is far from over.

As politicians began arriving this week in Canberra for the opening of the new parliamentary session for 2020, the one thing on their mind was climate change.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison used the first day back on Tuesday to honor those who died fighting the country's worst bushfire season and called it Australia's "Black Summer".

During his speech, Morrison announced a royal commission into Australia's bushfire disaster that has killed 34 people, razed more than 186,000 square kilometers of bush and farmland, destroyed 3,000 homes, and killed an estimated one billion animals. Climate change is a subject that has deeply divided the left and right of Australian politics. But since the bushfire season began back in September－much earlier than usual－even some of the skeptics are starting to reconsider.

And if they needed any more convincing, on Monday more than 250 scientists with research expertise across the fields of climate, fire and weather science signed a public letter showing the peer-reviewed links between climate change and bushfires.

The letter called for immediate action from the Australian government to reduce "total emissions" of greenhouse gases, engage constructively with international agreements, and agree to a target of zero emissions by 2050.

Jim Radford, principal research fellow with the Research Centre for Future Landscapes at Melbourne's La Trobe University, said it is clear that Australia is on the front line of global warming.

"We should be global leaders in mitigating human-induced climate change through deeper cuts in carbon emissions, both here in Australia and indirectly through the coal we export," he said. "But sadly, we are not."

Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, said that in many ways the open letter is "the product of despair as scientists witnessed the deadly fire season unfold".

"Scientists have been warning policymakers for decades that climate change would worsen Australia's fire risk, and yet those warnings have been ignored," she wrote in the letter.

Australia has almost the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person of any country.

"We need to pull our weight in reducing our emissions and influence the rest of the world to take urgent and coordinated action," Abram wrote.

In the same letter, University of New South Wales fire researcher Jason Sharples said: "It's important to remember that what we are seeing now are the dangerous and costly impacts of just 1 C of global warming. Yet while our climate changes rapidly, Australia's climate change policies stand still and the world is on track for 3 C or more of warming by the end of this century."

In January, the Bureau of Meteorology released its 2019 Annual Climate Statement, showing that 2019 was both the hottest and driest year on record for Australia.

David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Tasmania, said: "As a society, we are running out of time to adapt to climate-change-driven bushfires, and policy failure will lead to escalating disasters that have the capacity to eclipse the worst disasters we have experienced."