These days as a climate scientist, the line of separation between the research I do in my professional life and the events unfolding in the world at large is growing ever thinner.
The extreme events that our community has been talking about for decades are now becoming part of our lived experience, season after season, year after year across the entire planet. What we are seeing play out now is much faster than many of us ever imagined.
Barely a week after sweltering through an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author meeting discussing the UN group’s sixth global climate assessment report during an unseasonable European heatwave, it’s been surreal to return home to find much of Australia’s eastern seaboard engulfed in unprecedented bushfires crisis. In spring.
Right now there are about 80 fires in Queensland and a further 60 blazes raging through New South Wales. The maps show the east coast terrifyingly lit up like a grotesque Christmas tree. Many of these fires are burning out of control as the relentlessly gusty winds ground the firefighting aircraft needed to bring the blazes under control.
It is shocking to see such extreme and widespread fire weather conditions so early in the spring. In fact, this year the bushfire season actually started in winter, two months earlier than normal. Most alarmingly, some of these fires are occurring in subtropical and coastal areas that don’t usually burn.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given about 98% of NSW and 65% of Queensland is currently drought affected. Many regional towns like Stanthorpe are coming close to running out of water, having to resort to trucking in supplies to avoid water shortages. And now, even more water is needed to fight the blazes bearing down on regions already struggling with severe drought conditions.
Australia’s second-warmest January to August on record has baked the landscape dry, turning usually wet rainforests into fuel under catastrophic bushfires conditions.
All of this comes off the back of summer of 2018-2019, which was Australia’s warmest on record. Extraordinarily, we broke the previous 2012-2013 record by a margin of almost 1C, with 206 new records set across the country in 2018-2019.
The heat was particularly extreme in NSW, where monthly mean temperatures in January were 5.86°C above average, making it the state’s hottest January on record by more than 2°C.
Just to be crystal clear: these record-breaking conditions are all signals of the warming trend we have been experiencing in Australia since the start of the Bureau of Meteorology’s records in 1910. Nine of Australia’s 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005, and that long-term trend shows no sign of turning around any time soon.
As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington national park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning.
This region of eastern Australia is part of the Gondwana rainforests of Australia, which contains the largest remaining stands of subtropical rainforest in the world, and the most significant areas of warm temperate rainforest in the country.
These usually moss-drenched forests are packed with the oldest elements of the world’s ferns, and primitive plant families dating back to the Jurassic era, some 200m to 145m years ago.
Although these remarkable rainforests have clung on since the age of the dinosaurs, searing heat and lower rainfall is starting to see these wet areas dry out for longer periods of the year, increasing bushfire risk in these precious ecosystems.
It has been hard to watch the news coverage of these exceptionally rare rainforests burning. Just like the dying off of 50% of the Great Barrier Reef, the potential loss of these areas is something I never thought I would witness in my lifetime.
The world has justifiably been grieving the recent accelerated destruction of the Amazon, but fewer Australians appreciate our own ecological disaster unfolding on our doorstep.
The Gondwana rainforests of Australia are evolutionary relics that have immeasurable conservation value to the global community. If rapid climate change destabilises the cool and wet conditions needed for these ancient rainforests to survive, they may be lost to humanity forever.
Although there are natural seasonal fluctuations in the Indian and Southern Ocean that are influencing the dry and windy conditions we are currently experiencing, all of Australia’s weather and climate variability is now occurring in a world that is 1°C warmer than it was since pre-industrial times.
The human fingerprint on Australian temperatures has been clearly detected since 1950. This means that all natural variability is now being modified by human influences on the climate system, leading to changes in observed climate variability and extremes.
Since the 1970s, there has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and a longer fire season, across large parts of the country.
Under the world’s business-as-usual emissions scenario we are currently on, Australia’s average temperature will typically increase 4°C by the end of the century. To be blunt, the catastrophic fire weather conditions we are experiencing now will become increasingly common as the planet continues to warm.
It’s clear to me that the extreme events we are experiencing right now in Australia and all over the world, are a sign of things to come. Events that were considered extreme in today’s climate will become average in the future as records continue to be broken and the “new normal” emerges.
What we expect to see in our future climate is playing out right now, not decades in the future. As we begin to drift away from the safe shores of historical variability, the only certainty is that life in the “new normal” will be outside the range of human experience.
All of this begs the obvious question: what will it take for Australians to wake up to the climate crisis we now face?
The harsh reality is that this event is likely to be forgotten once the fires are finally out and the media interest has moved on.
Despite being one of the worst bushfires in Australian history, alarmingly, the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, which killed 173 people, destroyed around 2,000 homes and incinerated millions of plants and animals, didn’t serve as a wake-up call.
The deeper we sink into denial, the more we commit ourselves to a reality where our children learn about environmental icons such as the Great Barrier Reef and our magnificent rainforests through history books, instead of being able to experience their wonder for themselves.
Choosing to turn away from this moment to act will be the ultimate betrayal of future generations.
Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University. She is a lead author of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report, and an expert advisor to the Climate Council. Her book Sunburnt Country: the History and Future of Climate Change in Australia is available through MUP
