Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness -- the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived in Australia.
Climate scientists say Australia -- beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves -- epitomizes the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast.
With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.
"Australia is the harbinger of change," said paleontologist Tim Flannery, Australia's most vocal climate change activist. "The problems for us are going to be greater. The cost to Australia from climate change is going to be greater than for any developed country. We are already starting to see it. It's tearing apart the life-support system that gives us this world."
Deadly fires
Many here believe Australia already has a death toll directly connected to climate change: the 173 people who died in February during the nation's worst-ever wildfires, and 200 more who died from heat the week before. A three-person royal commission has convened to decide, among other things, whether global warming contributed to massive bush fires that destroyed entire towns and killed a quarter of Victoria state's koalas, kangaroos, birds and other wildlife.
The commission's proceedings mark the first time anywhere that climate change could be put on trial. And it will take place in a nation that still gets 80% of its energy from burning coal, the globe's largest single source of greenhouse gases.
Even before the flames, 200 Melbourne residents died in a heat wave that buckled the steel skeleton on a newly constructed 400-foot Ferris wheel and warped train tracks like spaghetti. Cities experienced four days of temperatures at 110 degrees or higher with little humidity, and 100-mph winds. In areas where fires hit, temperatures reached 120.
On the hottest day, more than 4,000 gray-headed flying foxes dropped dead out of trees in one Melbourne park.
"Something is happening in Australia," firefighter Dan Condon of the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade wrote in an open letter. "Global warming is no longer some future event that we don't have to worry about for decades. What we have seen in the past two weeks moves Australia's exposure to global warming to emergency status."
The possibility that a high-profile royal commission may find a nexus between climate change and the loss of human life is significant for many scientists here.
"That will be an important moment in its own right," said Chris Cocklin, a climate change researcher at James Cook University in Townsville, in Queensland state, and lead author on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Drought and flood
Most of the country is in the grip of the worst drought in more than a century. Every capital in Australia's eight states and territories is operating under considerable water restrictions. In urban areas, "bucketing" has become a common practice -- placing pails in showers and using the gray water on lawns or gardens. In some cities, such as Brisbane, residents drink recycled water, a process nicknamed "toilet to tap."
In rural areas, the lucky tap their own wells, provided they still function. Others survive on rainwater or what they can scrounge or buy.
Meanwhile, the tropical north's rainy season, known as the Big Wet, is longer and wetter than ever. Warming tropical waters in the Coral Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria spawn ever more powerful cyclones, while rainfall and heat records are broken every year.
The coastal city of Darwin, in the Northern Territory, swelters through 20 to 30 days of temperatures above 95 degrees, with high tropical humidity. Government scientists project that by 2070, Darwin will experience such conditions as many as 300 days a year.
Communities on the Cape York Peninsula accustomed to being flooded for days are commonly cut off for weeks. Throughout February, the Queensland government airdropped supplies to citizens, who had to wait to reemerge when the water recedes in the Southern Hemisphere's autumn, in late March or early April.
Australians in the south would see water as heaven-sent; in the north, it's a curse. In March, a young girl playing by a rain-swollen river was carried off by a crocodile, the second child lost to crocs in a month.
The region is beset with twin epidemics of malaria and a dangerous form of hemorrhagic dengue fever, from mosquitoes that breed in the standing water. Such diseases are expected to become more common in the tropics with climate change.
Reef withering and wildlife extinction
The north's two largest tourism draws, the Great Barrier Reef and the Tropical Rainforest Reserve are withering under climate extremes. Higher ocean temperatures are bleaching expanses of coral and affecting fish and plant species. A report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that the Great Barrier Reef will be "functionally extinct" by 2050.
Scientists paint a bleak picture of wildlife competing for space on peaks in the country's alpine region. Williams (Director of the Center for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change in Townsville) and other biologists predict as much as 50% animal extinction in the region by the end of the century.
Chief among the candidates for extinction is the rare white lemuroid ringtail possum, a singular species that Flannery, the paleontologist, describes as "our panda." The pale creatures live high in trees in the 4,000 square miles of moist forest in northeast Queensland. They can't tolerate, even for hours, temperatures above 86 degrees. Williams' research found that the possum was gone in one of the animal's two historical ranges, and in the other it "has declined dramatically, to the point where you can barely detect it."
Scientists are frustrated that such dramatic anecdotal and empirical evidence hasn't sparked equally dramatic action from Australia's government. They suspect the inaction can be partly explained by examining the nation's relationship with coal. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and relies on it for 80% of its electricity. That helps make Australia and its 21 million people the world's highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases in the industrialized world.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says climate change is high on his agenda, but many here are disappointed by his pledge to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by only 5% by 2020.
Scientists and policymakers now agree that even drastic cuts won't halt climate changes already underway. In response, some Australians are considering whether outback settlements should be abandoned. Can we learn something form Australia’s climate change?
If world community not takes climate change as a serious issue then in near future we will see more countries facing Australia like situation.
Thanks
Zaki Ahmad
