Australians and the insurance industry should gear up as international scientists suggest that the nation may be in for more frequent drought-inducing weather events – even if the world manages to pull off the improbable feat of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
A recently released model has forecast an increasing number of extreme El Niño events well beyond any climate stabilisation.
From the current five events per century, the risk of extreme El Niño events is expected to increase to 10 per century by 2050, and to about 14 events per century by 2150 – this under the unlikely – if not impossible – scenario that global warming peaks at 1.5C by that year,
The Guardian reported.
Dr. Guojian Wang, CSIRO research and lead report author, said the risk of extreme El Niño events would not decrease even if the climate stabilised.
“This result is unexpected and shows that future generations will experience greater climate risks associated with extreme El Niño events than seen at 1.5C warming,” he said.
Extreme El Niño events occur when the usual El Niño Pacific rainfall centre is pushed eastwards towards South America, sometimes by up to 16,000km, resulting in massive changes in the climate, Dr Wenju Cai, director of the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research and report co-author, explained.
“This pulls rainfall away from Australia, bringing conditions that have commonly resulted in intense droughts across the nation,” Cai said in
The Guardian report.
“During such events, other countries like India, Ecuador, and China have experienced extreme events, with serious socioeconomic consequences.”
To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the global Paris climate change agreement set a limit to global warming to below 2C, as well as an aspirational target of 1.5C, in response to a demand from the most vulnerable countries, including the low-lying islands found in the Pacific.
Dr Scott Power, head of climate research at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the latest modelling was very bad news for the majority of small island states in the Pacific that had a limited capacity to cope with major floods and droughts.
“To make matters worse, our recent study published... indicates that the risk of major disruptions to Pacific rainfall has already increased. And unfortunately, these El Niño-related impacts will add to the other challenges of climate change, such as rising sea levels, ocean acidification and increasing temperature extremes,” Power said in
The Guardian report.
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