With recent months bringing record rain, record heat and a sixth mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia has experienced a troubling start to the year. While unprecedented rainfall resulted in devastating floods along the east coast, other parts of the country have experienced the driest summer in decades.
These events have coincided with a La Niña atmospheric phenomenon, which developed in November and is typically associated with a wetter summer across eastern Australia. But the seemingly ceaseless extreme weather this year has left many Australians homeless, despondent and angry at the federal government’s wilful lack of climate action.
Between 23 and 28 February, an atmospheric river – like “a tsunami from the sky” – inundated parts of south-east Queensland with more than one metre of torrential rain. At least nine people were killed, and an estimated 15,000 homes in Brisbane, the state’s capital, were flooded. In just six days, almost 80% of the city’s average annual rainfall had fallen.
The system then moved south, laying waste to towns in northern New South Wales. The low-lying city of Lismore faced its worst flooding in modern recorded history, inundating houses and gutting the central business district. Distressing footage surfaced of residents who had become stranded on their rooftops by the rapidly rising waters.
Once the flood waters had receded, residents of northern NSW returned to their ravaged homes and volunteers pitched in to remove mountains of waste. A national emergency was only declared a week later, ahead of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, visiting Lismore to survey the damage. The town’s locals, with whom he did not meet, were unimpressed.
Farther south on the same day – 9 March – flash flooding in parts of Sydney inundated bridges and roads. The city experienced its wettest start to the year on record, and heavy rains turn its famous harbour brown.
Just as clean-up efforts were in full swing, a second extreme weather system developed just weeks later, walloping northern NSW for the second time in a month.
At the end of March, Lismore went under again; many residents had nothing more left to lose. Heavy rain flooded the main street in the backpacker town of Byron Bay, stunning locals. “I cannot remember sunshine. It has been raining steadily since spring,” wrote Travis Lipshus.
Dr Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, said it was typically difficult to pinpoint the effect of climate change on extreme rainfall. “Here in Australia we have very high variability from one year to the next, which means it’s hard to pull out a clear climate change signal,” he said.
“But for really short duration extreme rain events”– such as the second bout of damaging rain over northern NSW – “we can see a climate change effect”.
“The warmer the atmosphere gets, the more moisture it can hold,” said Dr Nina Ridder, a research associate at the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Centre. “Per degree of warming, it’s 7% more water.”
“In observations, we have already seen that extreme rainfall events have become more and more frequent over the past decade … also, the intensity has increased.”
Meanwhile, farther north, a different kind of mass devastation was unfolding. Corals on the Great Barrier Reef bleached en masse for the sixth time – and the first instance the event has occurred in a La Niña year. It was, a marine scientist told the Guardian, “a clear sign of the increasing intensity of climate change and ocean warming”.
“It’s certainly worrying that we’re seeing bleaching in a La Niña year, but unfortunately I think it’s really a sign of things to come,” King said. “We know that the marine heatwaves we’ve seen in the last few years on the Great Barrier Reef would be virtually impossible to occur without human-caused climate change, at the magnitude we’re seeing.”
“Unless we really keep global warming to very, very low levels, we’re going to lose most of our coral reefs globally,” he said.
Records have also fallen in parts of Australia where La Niña has had less of an effect. Western Australia had a sweltering summer, with temperatures in the state capital of Perth exceeding 40C nine times. In January, the remote town of Onslow registered a temperature of 50.7C, equalling the highest ever reliably recorded in Australia. In the south, the island state of Tasmania had its driest summer in 40 years, where total rainfall was 43% below the long-term average.
“Climate change is increasing the risks of heatwaves, bushfires, and high intensity rainfall,” said Neil Plummer, a consultant at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub.
The risk of these extreme events in future, Plummer said, will “depend upon the extent countries, including Australia, reduce their carbon emissions and deforestation practices”.
Despite the urgent call to scale up climate action, the Morrison government plans to reduce annual climate spending if returned to power after the next federal election, which is due in May. It has also pushed to soften the wording of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to say that the Great Barrier Reef is not yet in crisis.
The Coalition government’s actions are particularly jarring in light of the extremes – bushfires, drought and mice plagues – that many Australians have experienced in recent years, to which 2022’s devastation is but the most recent addition. Many now feel, as the incoming NSW Greens politician Sue Higginson puts it: “This is an emergency – a climate emergency.”
