Canberra, Oct 31 (IANS) Australia’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.51 degrees Celsius (C) since records began in 1910, a landmark report has found.
National science agencies, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), published the latest State of the Climate Report on Thursday, which they have prepared every two years since 2010.
The 2024 report found that the changing climate has caused an increase in extreme heat events, longer bushfire seasons, more intense heavy rainfall events and sea level rise, reports Xinhua news agency.
It said that oceans around Australia are continuing to warm and that higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have led to more acidic oceans, particularly south of Australia.
According to the report, Australia’s temperature has warmed by an average of 1.51 C since 1910, exceeding the maximum warming goal of 1.5 C set under the 2016 Paris Agreement, and sea surface temperatures have increased by an average of 1.08 C since 1900.
Eight of Australia’s nine warmest years on record have occurred since 2013, including the warmest year on record in 2019. On a global scale, 2023 was the warmest year on record.
Jaci Brown, a CSIRO research manager and co-author of the report, said that the highest average sea surface temperatures on record occurred in 2022.
“Increases in temperature have contributed to significant impacts on marine habitats, species and ecosystem health, such as the most recent mass coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef this year,” she said in a statement.
“Rising sea levels around Australia are increasing the risk of inundation and damage to coastal infrastructure and communities,” she said.
The global mean sea level has risen by 22 centimetres since 1900, the report said, with half of the rise having occurred since 1970.
In 2023, the global annual mean concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 419.2 parts per million (ppm), and the CO2 equivalent of all greenhouse gases reached 524 ppm, the highest levels on Earth in over 2 million years.
The report warned that projected global warming and sea level rise through 2040 are already locked in due to greenhouse gases that have already been emitted.
Karl Braganza, climate services manager at the BoM, said that warming that has already occurred has led to an increase in extreme fire weather in Australia and longer fire seasons across large parts of the country.
In 2019, there were 33 days when Australia’s national average maximum temperature exceeded 39 C, more than in the years between 1960 and 2018 combined.
Since 1970, April to October rainfall in southwest Australia has declined by 16 per cent. In the country’s southeast, April-October rainfall has decreased by nine per cent since 1994.
“The lower rainfall in the cooler months is leading to lower average streamflow in those regions, which can impact soil moisture and water storage levels and increase the risk of drought. Droughts this century have been significantly hotter than those in the past,” Braganza said.
“However, when heavy rainfall events occur, they are becoming more intense, with an increase of around 10 per cent or more in some regions,” Braganza said.
The highest rate of ocean warming in Australia has occurred in the Coral Sea, home to the iconic Great Barrier Reef, and off the coasts of the southeast Australian mainland and the southern island state of Tasmania.
–IANS
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