IPCC warns window to save ourselves from climate change is 'rapidly closing' (Photo: AAP)
As the rain bucketed down 10 days ago, residents of a nearby house in our
neighbourhood in the outskirts of Brisbane were woken by a loud cracking.
Their newly built home had begun slipping down the hill.
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| Get prepared for extreme weather and see how one town survives and adapts to intense bushfires and severe storms in AR. Read more |
It took two days to be able to make out the carnage — the white and yellow home usually in clear view across the valley from our back verandah was obscured by the blinding rain.
When it finally eased, we could see the front stairs were gone, the front house-poles splayed down the hill, and the right-hand side of the house was slumped awkwardly, peering over the steep incline.
No doubt they'll need to pull the house down and start again.
Records will continue to tumble
Insane to see how high floodwaters got in Gympie - this unusual sight greeted an @Energex crew today. pic.twitter.com/cbjwuC2bVf
— Dan Smith (@0DanSmith) March 1, 2022
Mt Glorious just to the north of Brisbane received more than 700 millimetres in 24 hours.
Further north, Maryborough endured its second major flood in as many months.
Gympie, used to semi-regular flooding, was under more water than it had been in more than 100 years.
The Mary River, which intersects both towns, was at its highest peak in Gympie since 1893.
In Brisbane, bridges and causeways were flooded. Then entire streets. Nervous residents watched as the river pushed into more houses with each high tide.
Residents of Brookfield in Brisbane's west reported emptying more than 1,000 mm of water from rain gauges between Thursday and Sunday.
As the system tracked south, some Lismore locals thought they'd be safe taking shelter on, or in, their roof spaces.
But the floodwaters didn't stop rising – 1974's record flood markers throughout the town were eclipsed by the swelling brown water.
Volunteers in tinnies and on jet-skis were going rooftop to rooftop, ferrying residents to higher ground. In some cases they had to cut people out from inside roof spaces.
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Lismore residents were using tinnies to pluck neighbours from
rooftops.
(AAP: Jason O'Brien) |
This is the second "one-in-100-year" flood in 11 years in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales.
Two years ago, these regions were in the grips of bushfire.
Descriptors like "rain bomb" are being bandied about as politicians and reporters search for new adjectives to describe the system that dumped more rain on parts of the south-east than the fabled 1974 floods.
Just like in 2011, the word unprecedented has been thrown around a lot.
This is the new precedent; the new present.
And yes, weather systems are variable, rainfall especially.
Of course a one-in-100 year event doesn't guarantee it'll only happen once every 100 years. And yes, it's a La Niña year when rainfall totals are expected to be higher. And yes, we've always had extreme weather.
It will take time for scientists to determine how much climate change contributed to the devastation, this time.
But this is what climate change looks like. Big weather, tumbling records, one extreme following another.
And it's going to get worse.
Big polluters 'guilty of arson of our only home'
Climate forecasts say that warming will cause more intense storm events. A hotter atmosphere is capable of carrying more moisture before it's released. A warmer ocean carries more energy to fuel storm systems.
We're only at around 1.1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.
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Leaders at the Glasgow summit failed to commit to targets that will
keep warming below 2C this century.
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PHIL NOBLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) |
As the IPCC outlined in its 2018 report, the threat of temperature and rainfall extremes — both negative and positive — will continue to rise sharply between 1.5C and 2C in parts of Australia.
Last week the IPCC released its latest report on the impacts of climate change and projected impacts to ecosystems.
Increased bushfire area, higher drought-induced tree mortality, longer duration of hot days, lost agricultural productivity are already being measured in Australia, they reported.
"This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world's biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home," he said.Flooding from intense rainfall is already Australia's most expensive disaster. The latest IPCC reportwarned it's going to get worse.
Yet in the midst of it all, the IPCC report has barely rated a mention in Canberra.
Silence supports the status quo
The IPCC has been releasing these reports now for 32 years, publishing more than 60 major reports to 2022.
Since 1990, scientists have warned that there needs to be a radical shift from our dependence on fossil fuels. At that stage we had some, but not much, time up our sleeves.
Our politicians back then had a good idea of what was at stake. They were warned about climate change at a CSIRO briefing in 1986.
In 1990, then environment minister Ros Kelly under the Hawke government proposed an emissions target to cabinet.
But as the years went by, under pressure from the fossil fuel industry and others, commitments wavered and emissions climbed.
All the while the IPCC and climate scientists' predictions only got firmer, more refined and more urgent. And now we're starting to live them.
including our own, continue to subsidise fossil fuels and bet heavily on unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage, and continue to finger-point and what-about on their share of global emissions, instead of just doing their very best to get emissions down.
It feeds the inertia if we follow the sentiment that "now's not the time" to talk about climate change — at times when we've all got our hands full cleaning up its mess.
Kicking the can down the road has allowed the status quo to get us where we are today: on borrowed time, with the prospect of overshooting an adaptable 1.5C of warming practically a given.
But when we're not in the midst of a bushfire, a flood or a drought, we tend to forget the urgency. Other more immediate problems require our attention.
If we're lucky right now, we might get a reprieve: a few years without a major natural disaster, likely exacerbated by a warming world.
But as climate scientists and the IPCC continue to warn us, the breaks between extreme events are going to get shorter. And when the disasters come, they'll bite harder.
Why should we wait for the next one to talk about it? Or the one after that?
While images of flooding still fill our news bulletins, it's important to remember that these events aren't happening in a vacuum.
Climate change is happening around us, and now is not the time for avoiding the subject.
No ducking, no delaying.
It's time to take it on.
Links
- Window to save ourselves from climate change 'rapidly closing', IPCC warns
- Understanding floods
- Calls to phase out fossil fuel subsidies after speculation about net-zero emissions target
- Scott Morrison plays down Australia's overall emissions compared to China's, but that's not the whole story
- Premier defends move to shut schools despite lack of storms, says climate change played a role in wild weather
- How unusual is all this rain we're having? The answer? Very
- Why water inundates a home during one flood but spares it the next
- 'Managed retreat' from coastal living could soon be reality, climate report warns
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