As well as California, there has just been rampant wildfires in Greece and extreme temperatures across Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal with the likelihood that the 48C European temperature record will now be broken. Here in Australia extreme drought conditions exist across 99 per cent of New South Wales and  66 per cent of Queensland. As a consequence our annual cost of emergency services plus drought relief for farmers is at an all-time high with this trend expected to continue. 

As Professor Diffenbaugh says, “green-house gas emissions are fuelling steadily increasing global temperatures” so we too must prepare for the likelihood of destructive bushfires over the forthcoming summer period and be accepting of other severe weather conditions in the future.

 Increased atmospheric and surface temperatures generally result in diminishing sub-soil moisture which impacts on crop yields. For any given region, rainfall trend graphs can be readily prepared based on historical rainfall data. The trends should be of particular concern as we know further increases in our green-house gas emissions will inevitably worsen this predicament, yet the government continues to argue the case for extending the life of our coal-fired power stations and even building new ones!  Such a plan is contrary to the best advice of climate scientists.

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A senior (USA) meteorologist Rob Marciano, said the onset of wildfires in California was coincident with temperatures well above 44C, and “in cases like this, there’s an undeniable link to climate change resulting from global warming”.

So what of our future? One can only conclude that if we continue to increase our green house gas emissions primarily through prolonged use of coal-fired power stations we must accept more droughts, more flash flooding, more severe bushfires, all at great financial cost to taxpayers. Addressing man-made global warming surely must be aimed at the cause of the problem itself, and that is clearly our persistent reliance on fossil fuels. The physics of global warming is clear. Keep burning more fossil fuels and our lives in the coming years will be made even more difficult.                                                                

A bipartisan solution to our predicament is long overdue which must include phasing out of the burning of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.   Yet this is doubtful as our federal government cannot even internally act-as-one on their planned National Energy Guarantee Scheme (NEG).  Mr Rattenbury (ACT Climate-change minister) justifiably claims the scheme provides diminished incentive for investment in new renewable energy power sources and would cut emissions by only 2 per cent over the next 10 years which is insufficient to satisfy our emission reduction commitments under the Paris agreement.

So sadly our future climate remains of grave concern as our federal government continues to project a lack of understanding of the long-term consequences of global warming.  Is this perhaps another case of “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”?      

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