123 weather records broken in 90 days of summer - ABC Online

Australia has experienced some very extreme weather in the last few months.

The Climate Commission's report looks at what we've experienced.

"This has been quite an extreme summer. We've seen 123 weather records broken in 90 days of summer.

Among those, particularly a lot of heatwaves being broken and rainfall records being broken.

All of that is consistent with what climate scientists have been telling us is going to be happening in the future.

It has now come to pass. Our climate has changed" said Tim Flannery, Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission.

Climate scientists have often refused to point to one weather event as sign of climate change but Flannery explains that this series of events over summer is different;

"In the past it has been very difficult to link any single climatic event or weather event with climate change, so a flood or whatever.

Because statistically it is a big exercise to make sure you have a high level of significance with that.

What we are seeing now is changes around the world where we are getting a lot of extremes all at the one end and a lot of record breaking events.

When you get a great slew of record breaking events, they are by definition conditions we have never seen before.

They are indicative of shift in the climate" said Flannery.

Many deniers of climate change point to problems with the period of time records have been kept for.

"We've got to work with the data we've got. Records have been kept in Sydney for I think something like 150 years. Of course they have got better and better as time has gone on, we've got satellite surveillance and all sorts of things now we didn't have in the past.

When we deal with weather records, that is the database we work from.

Even when you look at the last fifty years, they are still record breaking events".

Adam Spencer asked Flannery about the idea that many people have that world temperatures aren't much different to the 1990's:

"They will pick on things like the met bureau in Britain's revision of their four year forecast, and say, 'see that proves that the world isn't warming'.

And that's just not the case.

If you look at what happened with the met bureau, late last year, they did what they do every year.

Which is just to revise their four year forecast. This year, they happened to revise it down a tiny bit. It is still set for an increase but down a tiny bit.

There is a lot of misinformation in this area but the bottom line is the world continues to warm.

You look at the heat record in the ocean, which is where 90 percent of the heat goes, that is going up steadily" said Flannery.

A caller to the program, Danny from Macmasters Beach, expressed a viewpoint that has been talked about a lot in New South Wales recent weeks in realtion to the state's desalination plant; "A few years ago we were saying our dams would never fill again. Looking at the weather now, how do we put faith in the science?"

Flannery responded by referencing what he said when the desalination plant was first built:

"I've been consistent with what I said then and what I said then was that there was a risk that some of Australia's major cities were going to face serious difficulty accessing fresh water.

We'd had a 12 year drought, our catchments were at record low and there was an issue, and there continues to be an issue.

Just because there is a wet period now doesn't mean that we aren't going to go back into those very dry conditions.

Our climate is becoming more extreme as we have seen through this summer. We need to be able to deal with those extremes as we go on. We need to have the capacity to do that. The population is growing year by year, water use goes up and we need to have plans in place to deal with that".

China is often mentioned in relation to climate change and Spencer asked Flannery about how China is addressing their pollution.

"Everything I hear from China is that they are seeing this as their great smog, like the London smog of 1952, this is the moment when the country is going to focus on this for a whole series of reasons.

Of course they have capped their coal use now, they said 4 billion tonnes is absolutely it. If that happens that is going to be absolutely revolutionary, we'll see China's emissions peak a lot earlier than people have been predicting.

This is still something that is in the realm of conjecture but at least we are headed in a positive direction".

Positive is also the way Flannery views Australia since the introduction of the carbon tax.

"With the current policy settings, the emissions from Australia's electircty sector have declined by 8.65 % over recent months.

We can also see that the cost was less than was projected. We can also see that Australia's emissions are likely to have peaked either last year or will peak this year instead of continuing to escalate into the future.

That's a positive story and it is something that is being seeing now in many countries" said Flannery.

"The challenge now is to reduce emissions steeply, unless we can do that over this coming decade we face more climatic uncertainty in the future."