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Climate scientists use the same statistical techniques to determine global warming's influence in extreme climate events as public health researchers use to investigate the health impacts of smoking and asbestos exposure. The last 31 years have been hotter than average, culminating in a recent increase in the frequency and severity of extreme climate events. The future will serve up more extremes. Public health parallels raise the question, who is responsible for future damages from climate change?
As early as February 2016, climate scientists were making evidence-based predictions that 2016 would become the hottest year in the observational record. Their predictions played out with dire consequences. An aerial survey of the Great Barrier Reef in April 2016 estimated that over 90% of the coral had experienced bleaching. A rapid-response scientific analysis determined that the catastrophic die-back event would not have been possible without climate change increasing sea surface temperatures that are strongly associated with bleaching.
For Australia, this was just one element of a period of persistent heat. Following the comparatively cool and wet years of 2010 and 2011, when Australia was under the influence of a La Niña episode, an unprecedented period of heat began. During this extreme period, hundreds of Australian temperature records were broken.
In 2013 alone, Australia experienced its hottest day, week, month, season and year on record. The Bureau of Meteorology added additional colours to a January weather forecast to accommodate the never before recorded extreme temperatures expected for the following days. Some of these records were broken again in 2014, and again in 2015. The unprecedented heat has not yet abated.
This catalogue of record-breaking temperatures constitutes far more than a note in the margin of Australia's climate history. These years of excess heat have been accompanied by severe impacts that relentlessly affected Australian communities and our natural environment. 2013 began with bushfires across Tasmania's southeast, which were followed by unseasonably early bushfires in the Blue Mountains in Spring 2013. Heatwaves in January 2014 shut down play at the Australian Open, while literally thousands of fires were reported in a 24-hour period. As heatwaves impacted human health and our built environment, unequalled marine heatwaves impacted coastal ecosystems.
Recent Australian extremes are one part of a longer trend of unusual...