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A dozen lives have already been lost in the floods on the NSW North Coast and in south-east Queensland and in Sydney 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes on Thursday as the Hawkesbury and Georges rivers broke their banks.
The damage bill will be billions of dollars.
Yet, if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced quickly and the planet warms by 3 degrees this century, these extreme weather events will only grow more damaging, according to a United Nations report on the impacts of climate change released on Monday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change update of previous reports says it has ever higher confidence in predicting “compounding and cascading” effects of climate change.
Bushfires and droughts will grow in severity and frequency; floods will be more severe; it could be too hot for normal outdoor activity in parts of northern Australia; the Great Barrier Reef will likely die; snowfields will shrink or disappear.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said Lismore was hit by a “1-in-1000 year” flood but this phrase is meaningless now that floods are becoming more frequent and breaking records every year.
The federal government belatedly seems prepared to accept the scientific consensus that there is a direct link between specific instances of extreme weather and climate change.
Emergency Management Minister Bridget McKenzie told ABC TV that “given all the predictions of climate change we are going to see more intense and irregular events”. She added: “The IPCC is dead right.”
Yet her government is still not taking all the steps needed to avoid the worrying predictions of the IPCC’s report.
While the Coalition government took an important step before the recent Glasgow Summit by adopting a target of zero net emissions by 2050, it is still lukewarm, at best, in its efforts to cut emissions.
The Coalition’s interim target of a 26-28 per cent cut in emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, is less than other comparable countries and the ALP’s election promise of a target of 43 per cent.
More importantly, it is not consistent with keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1.5 degrees, seen as a threshold for mitigating the most serious impacts of climate change.
Rather than taking the lead in cutting emissions, the government too often sides with the fossil fuel lobby.
Ms McKenzie is a key supporter of the NSW coal industry.
When tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes last week launched an $8 billion takeover bid for AGL, which involved closing down the company’s coal-fired power plants more quickly than planned, Energy Minister Angus Taylor described the plan as “a significant risk to electricity consumers”.
The government is missing a huge opportunity.
Australia’s resources of wind and solar put it in an ideal position to reduce the role of coal and gas in its power grid, unlike Europe which is desperately trying to end its dependence on imported Russian gas.
Alongside faster reductions in emissions, Australia must better prepare for the inevitable natural disasters that lie ahead.
NSW will have to invest more in emergency response infrastructure. Many vulnerable people trapped in their homes by rising waters waited too long to be rescued.
Governments tend to over-promise but under-deliver when it comes to promising emergency financial assistance.
Around flood-prone areas, the government faces a difficult choice of whether to invest in more dams and levees or whether to abandon some areas and offer help to residents to move to higher ground.
The flood waters will recede in the next few days but the myriad threats posed to Australia by climate change will only compound for decades.
Links
- ‘Atlas of human suffering’: More drought, fire and flood, less snow and coral, UN report says
- As floodwaters recede, hundreds return to pick up the pieces
- Floods (and other disasters) will test Perrottet
- (AU Financial Times) Catastrophic Floods Pile Pressure On Australian Government
- (AU SMH) The Facts We Need To Face If Australia’s Coastal Towns Are To Survive Devastation
- (AU SMH) The Climate-Change Changes The Politicians Don’t Want To Talk About
- Alan Kohler: Politicians Are Failing Us On Climate Change. They Must Do This Instead
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