Want to hear a scary statistic? You have just lived through the hottest year on record. If you’re under 40, you’ve never lived in a year with global temperatures at or below the 20th century average.
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It might not sound scary on the face of it. But what it means is you’ve never known life without climate change.
Previously, when we talked about climate change, we talked about “future” impacts. It was part of the reason that people found it so hard to engage with the issue – it seemed like a problem to be tackled for another time, for another generation.
Not anymore – climate change impacts are very much in the here and now.
Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record globally have occurred this century.
In 2016, Australians witnessed the battering of our natural heritage by climate change.
The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst coral bleaching event in history; ancient World Heritage forests in Tasmania which had never burned before were razed by bushfires; and extreme heat drove an unprecedented mangrove dieback in the Northern Territory.
Many other heat records were broken in 2016, with Australia experiencing its fourth-warmest year ever, including the hottest March and autumn on record.
Ocean temperatures around Australia were the hottest ever recorded.
The 2016-17 summer had only just begun before Sydneysiders spent their hottest December night in record-keeping history, tossing and turning in what was the first of many more extreme heat events for the season. There was no cold turkey on offer in Adelaide either as the city sweltered through its hottest Christmas in 70 years, while temperatures soared to almost 40°C in some parts of Victoria over the festive period. The high day and night-time temperatures resulted in heatwave conditions in much of NSW, southern Queensland, central and eastern Victoria and northern Tasmania.
As the bells brought in the new year, the world’s leading meteorological agencies were crunching the numbers to later hand 2016 the unenviable title of hottest year on record, the third consecutive year the record has been broken.
More importantly, the record hot years of 2014, 2015 and 2016 are part of a deeply troubling long-term warming trend that is marching on unabated. We cannot afford this dangerous trend to continue.
Of course, we also must turn our attention to surviving the intensifying Australian summers with increased support for emergency services and local authorities, but it is essential that we put a stop to the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving up global heat.
Australia must drastically reduce its emissions from coal, oil and gas to play our role in halting the escalating impacts from extreme heat.
We are on the frontline of the impacts of climate change; we need to be on the frontline of the solutions rather than being the global laggard that we are today.
We are rapidly closing the window of opportunity to limit global warming to 2°C as agreed in Paris just over a year ago.
With Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rising for a second consecutive year, it’s high time we not only followed through on what we promised in Paris, but increased our emission reduction targets to the level required to do our fair part in stablising the global climate.
Professor Will Steffen is a climate expert with the Climate Council.