Rapid decarbonisation is needed to reduce further warming of the planet. It’s not too late to avoid the most dangerous climate change impacts.
You may think Australians are good at surviving the heat. But the climate you were born in doesn’t exist any more. Sadly, our farms, wildlife, and suburbs will struggle to cope with the extreme heat projected for coming decades.
To give low-lying island nations a fighting chance at surviving the coming floods, all nations (including Australia) must drastically and urgently cut emissions.
Grayson Cooke, Southern Cross University; Christian Jakob, Monash University, and Dugal McKinnon, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Grayson Cooke, Author provided Clouds have been objects of reverie and wonder throughout human history, inspiring art and imagination, and of course warning of extreme weather events. Clouds are also central players in Earth’s climate. They move water around the globe, reflect sunlight and interact with radiation emitted by the Earth, and in so doing can both cool and warm the planet. How clouds react... View Article
The Glasgow Climate Conference of Parties, COP26, is almost certain to fall short of its first goal to “keep 1.5°C within reach”. Moreover, even if it achieved its other aim to “secure global net-zero by mid-century” there is still a high probability that global temperatures will exceed 2°C if this isn’t matched by increased short-term action as well. That’s the message coming from climate scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX).
Mathilde Ritman describes her journey as a second-year undergraduate student into a CLEX research project with Linden Ashcroft. It led to a publication, a massive learning curve in coding, stints with the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, and opened a path to a career in climate science.
The Australian bushfires of the 2019/2020 summer had far-reaching effects. It has now been revealed in new research published in Nature that the smoke produced a phytoplankton bloom larger in area than all of Australia, thousands of kilometres away in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and South America.
Drought is a major risk to Australia with extended periods of drought affecting our social, economic and environmental systems. The newly released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains significant new assessments of the science and future projections of drought.
To better understand the implications of the latest climate science for Tasmania, this brief combines information from the IPCC AR6 WG1 report, with regional assessments that contributed to the UTAS Blueprint for a climate-positive Tasmania, and expertise from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX). The regional information is based on Tasmania-specific downscaled modelling undertaken by Climate Futures for Tasmania.
Climate Australia host Lee Constable is joined by the chief investigators in the Drought team of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes – Prof Nerilie Abram, Prof Jason Evans and Dr Andrea Taschetto. Along the way, Lee discovers why drought is such a tricky topic to explore for climate scientists and why understanding how droughts may change in the future is one of the wicked problems of climate change.