Extreme Climate Change: Damage and Responsibility

As early as February 2016, climate scientists were making evidence-based predictions that 2016 would become the hottest year in the observational record. Their predictions played out with dire consequences. An aerial survey of the Great Barrier Reef in April 2016 estimated that over 90% of the coral had experienced bleaching. A rapidresponse scientific analysis determined that the catastrophic die-back event would not have been possible without climate change increasing sea surface temperatures that are strongly associated with bleaching.

For Australia, this was just one element of a period of persistent heat. Following the comparatively cool and wet years of 2010 and 2011, when Australia was under the influence of a La Niña episode, an unprecedented period of heat began. During this extreme period, hundreds of Australian temperature records were broken.

I am 33 years old, having lived the last 31 years in a world where average monthly temperatures worldwide have been warmer than the average for the twentieth century. That’s 372 consecutive months.

In 2013 alone, Australia experienced its hottest day, week, month, season and year on record. The Bureau of Meteorology added additional colours to a January weather forecast to accommodate the never before recorded extreme temperatures expected for the following days. Some of these records were broken again in 2014, and again in 2015. The unprecedented heat has not yet abated.

This catalogue of record-breaking temperatures constitutes far more than a note in the margin of Australia’s climate history. These years of excess heat have been accompanied by severe impacts that relentlessly affected Australian