Australia, insurance, car, home, live, holidays

Rain events are becoming more intense,heatwaves are becoming more common and there is less snow cover as climate change takes hold of Australia.Credit:Peter Rae

“It’s not surprising that when the rain comes,there is more to it – it is more intense,” she said.

Greater Sydney’s average annual rainfall has actually decreased by 9 per cent in the past 30 years,according to 2019 data from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO,driven particularly by drier periods in late winter and spring. It’s a trend that climate scientists have observed across south-east Australia,where there has been a decline of around 12 per cent in rainfall during April to October since the late 1990s.

Sydney passed its mean annual rainfall of 1213mm,only three months and one week into the year. The total rainfall for the city stood at 1223.8mm on Thursday morning.

Dr Brown said there had been distribution changes in the annual rainfall,with intensifying summer rainfall and winter rains decreasing along the south-east of Australia.

She added that there are certain things that climate scientists can predict,such as how greenhouse gases will drive increasing temperatures,but that there was still a lot of uncertainty about what the future will look like.

The oceans are one of the most important indicators of climate change playing out as they absorb a lot of the carbon dioxide and heat from the atmosphere,making water more acidic,melting ice sheets faster and seeing sea levels rise. This in turn will continue driving weather systems,making them more extreme.

University of Melbourne senior lecturer in climate science Dr Andrew King said that in the past few decades,the number of heatwaves on land and in the ocean had increased,while snow cover in the Australian Alps had decreased. These changes impacted a variety of ecosystems,including in parts of Tasmania where it had become easier to grow certain types of grapes used in wine production.

He added that during extreme weather events,like the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires,the impacts of climate change were evident. “For many,the Black Summer bushfires and extreme heat was a wake-up call that showed how bad Australian summers could be in the future,” he said.

Temperatures across Australia have increased by between 0.2 and 1.6 degrees on average over the past 21 years,according to the latest NASA data. Most of the warming has occurred since 1950.

Of the nine warmest years on record,seven of these were 2013-2019,with 2019 the warmest. But if the global average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees higher than it was during the 1850-1900 period,then years like 2019 will become an average year.

The wet weather is expected to linger for the next few weeks as La Nina begins to weaken and we enter the east coast low peak season,but whether the wet weather will return later this year is yet to be decided. Modelling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows a third La Nina or a neutral phase could be possible next summer. Both the El Nino and La Nina are ends of a weather spectrum,while neutral is in the middle of the two. They are collectively known by scientists as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

However,the NOAA model is just one that meteorologists use to predict climate drivers with both the Australian and European models showing a neutral phase was more likely. Meteorologists will get a better idea of the ENSO modelling after winter.

The goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees is no longer likely to be achieved,the latest report of the United Nations chief climate body warns,and that the window to achieving the goal is closing fast.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),published early on Tuesday morning Australian time,notes that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees would require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest and fall by 43 per cent by 2030. At the same time,methane also needs to be reduced by about a third,the IPCC said in a statement.

A guide to the environment,what’s happening to it,what’s being done about it and what it means for the future.Sign up to our fortnightly Environment newsletter here.

License this article