Climate Extremes is leading research that will ultimately help businesses and governments better assess the risks posed by compound events.
Tipping points exist in the climate system, and it is very unlikely that all tipping points are known. Different tipping points are understood with different levels of confidence, they operate on different timescales, can interact to trigger cascades of abrupt changes, and some tipping point changes are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.
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.
The Paris Agreement requires countries to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that the global average temperature remains well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. But how likely are we to meet these targets?
Australian researchers in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes have made major contributions to the 2021 IPCC Working Group 1 report, through the authorship of the report, review and the many scientific papers cited in the report.
Irrespective of tipping points, climate change adaptation efforts will be less costly and disruptive to society – and will stand a better chance of success – if warming can be limited to 1.5°C rather than 2°C or higher. We therefore in no way advocate for policies that forgo pursuing the ambition to limit global warming to 1.5°C, regardless of whether that target remains feasible or not.
Climate sensitivity describes how sensitive the Earth’s temperature is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One measure of climate sensitivity for projections of future climate is the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). ECS is the increase in the global average temperature between the pre-industrial era and a future doubled carbon dioxide climate once equilibrium of the climate has been reached.
The Royal Society has called for an international next-generation climate modelling centre (pdf), based on new cutting-edge high-performance computing and data services to support efforts toward net-zero emissions and to enable effective climate adaptation.
In a world first, CLEX researchers have produced a 400-year-long record of El Nino activity. This gives us an entirely new insight into the behaviour of these high impact events and reveals unprecedented changes over the past 30 years.
Large areas of northern Queensland experienced extreme rainfall and severe flooding in late January and February 2019. This briefing note examines the impacts and some of the likely causes of the event.