ALL eyes have been on Australia in recent weeks as a blistering heatwave triggered huge wildfires. The result has been a slew of amazing stories, including a and meteorologists .
But Australia鈥檚 fires are just the most dramatic of a cluster of ongoing extreme weather events, including droughts in the US and Brazil and a lethal cold snap in Asia (see 鈥�Drought, fire, ice: world is gripped by extreme weather鈥�).
聯Australia鈥檚 fires are just the most dramatic of a cluster of ongoing extreme weather events聰
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Lumping extreme weather events under a single umbrella can be misleading. Al Gore got into trouble when his film An Inconvenient Truth stitched together footage of numerous hurricanes and presented them as 鈥渆vidence鈥� of climate change.
But in this case it seems there really is a bigger picture. 快猫短视频s have warned for years that extreme weather would become more common, and now it is. What鈥檚 more, although single events can rarely be confidently attributed to climate change, clusters probably can.
Many expected that such weather disasters would be what finally spurs governments into action. Perhaps surprisingly, there are signs that this is happening. A 鈥� a collective of environmentally concerned parliamentarians, of which Gore was a founder 鈥� says that politicians are doing more to combat climate change than they are given credit for (see 鈥�Progress on climate change action at national level鈥�). It is a reminder that the impotent United Nations negotiations are not the only game in town.
But don鈥檛 expect too much. Even if we began seriously cutting emissions, it would make little difference in the short term. A new study on stopping the impacts of climate change shows that rapid emissions cuts now would have only a small effect by 2050. The big dividends only emerge around 2100 ().
This effectively means that emissions cuts cannot help us or our children. That is not an argument for giving up, but it doesn鈥檛 inspire confidence that emissions reductions will ever be made a priority.
The spate of extreme weather, then, is a snapshot of the not-too-distant future. Soon, this will be the new normal. We call events like the Australian heatwave 鈥渆xtreme weather鈥�, but within the next few decades they will simply be 鈥渨eather鈥�.
