Climate Change Is Driving Dangerous And Unpredictable Weather

Fairfax - Professor Mary Heath*

Something strange is going on with the weather. It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Or, wet weather forcing the territory's major flower festival to close for the second day running. In Victoria, farms that were dying  of thirst only months earlier have had dams fill too quickly – flooding parts of the state.
In South Australia we're dealing with a storm that has been described as "cyclonic", "super" and a one-in-50-year event.

It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Photo: Clare Sibthorpe

I live in a sleepy Adelaide suburb, the sort of place where droughts are front of mind, not flooding rains. My house is near a creek that is dry for most of the year. I have lived beside it for almost 20 years with little concern, but a fortnight ago the State Emergency Service issued what would become the first of many warnings.
I arrived home in time to see the creek burst its banks, sending a torrent of muddy water down our street and another a block away. Neighbours at the top end of the street were flooded almost immediately. I spoke to one woman who looked up from the TV to realise a tide of muddy water was coming in under the door and across her carpet.

A large tree toppled over in the inner southern suburb of Springfield in Adelaide. Photo: Twitter/Lauren Rose

I helped move sandbags and direct traffic out of our street, where a lake was rapidly forming. In the end, I was lucky. Having just experienced that "one-in-50-year" event, colour me surprised to discover another on the way a fortnight later.
The bureau warned this would be worse. Given the previous flood, and warnings of gale-force winds, I decided to take precautions this time: lifting precious items onto higher surfaces, packing away anything that could fly away, requesting sandbags, finding candles and getting out the gumboots.
Then the storm that everyone in Australia has been reading about arrived. The power went off, and the rain came.
As I write, rain is still falling and the winds are strong. The flood risk for the state, including my nook, has not yet peaked. Friends and relatives in the north of the state have fallen silent; they may be without power for days rather than hours. My thoughts are with the people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, who are cold and without information.
The striking thing about all of this, from where I sit, is the fact that two once-in-50-year events have occurred in a fortnight. Meteorologists with long careers say they have never seen such a ferocious storm in our state.
The weather is rewriting history, because climate change is here on an otherwise quiet suburban street. Climate change is driving ever more dangerous and unpredictable weather that means predictions of what will happen once in  50 years, based on past data, will bear no resemblance to what we must deal with in the future.
It's time for the politicians, who claim to have our best interests at heart, to stop pretending that we can have power security based on fossil fuels without paying for it with a future that we are only glimpsing now, following the first tornadoes I remember hearing of in our state tearing across the land and ripping steel pylons out of the ground like playthings.

*Mary Heath is an Associate Professor at Flinders University, and has lived in Adelaide since 1975

Links

• South Australian storm a preview of climate change: Climate Council
• Climate Forecast: Australia's Weather Will Get Wilder
• A perfect storm hits South Australia (and the climate change debate)
• Was that climate change? Scientists are getting faster at linking extreme weather to warming