North Queensland experienced extreme rainfall and floods earlier this year while the south east of Australia was experiencing heatwaves and off the scale bushfires. (Torsten Blackwood / AFP / Getty Images) 

By Shar Adams Australia is exhibiting climate change weather patterns that were not predicted to manifest till 2020, says one of the country’s most prominent climate change scientists. Professor Ian Lowe, AO, an award-winning scientist and author of a number of books on climate change, said that when he wrote his first book, Living in the Greenhouse, in 1989, he summarised what scientists were saying would occur in 2020 if climate change was not addressed. This included predictions that average temperatures would increase; it would get drier in southern and eastern Australia, and wetter in northern Australia; there would be more frequent extremes like floods, cyclones, extended dry spells, heat waves and severe bushfires; and vector-borne diseases like dengue fever would spread. Speaking at a forum organised by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), of which he is president, Professor Lowe said: “I don’t have to remind you that in February this year, we had extreme heatwaves in South Australia and Victoria, devastating bushfires in Victoria, cyclonic weather on our northern coasts, severe flooding in Queensland and northern NSW, and a dengue outbreak in [north Queensland’s] Cairns that was up to 350 cases [at the time of speaking],” he said. Professor Lowe went on to say that not one of the events could be described as “unarguably” a result of climate change, but the overall pattern is what had been predicted. “Perhaps we can be concerned that that was what the science was saying 20 years ago would be occurring by the 2020s and we are already seeing it in 2009,” he said. …

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