page_title: Climate change in Australia
section_title: Extreme weather events
hierarchical_section_title: Climate change in Australia / Future effects of climate change on Australia / Projected effects by Major Event / Extreme weather events
caption_attribution_description: English: Heatmap showing how hot or cold each month is in Australia compared to the 1960-1990 average for that month. data from Australian Government bureau of meteorology http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/#tabs=Tracker&amp;tracker=timeseries&amp;tQ=graph%3Dtmean%26area%3Daus%26season%3Dallmonths%26ave_yr%3D0 My ggplot2 rstats code to recreate this is at https://gist.github.com/cavedave/266485943bbd2b9cb8ee8654a9d2ffa3
context_page_description: Climate change in Australia has been a critical issue since the beginning of the 21st century. Australia is becoming hotter, and more prone to extreme heat, bushfires, droughts, floods and longer fire seasons because of climate change.
  Since the beginning of the 20th century Australia has experienced an increase of nearly 1 °C in average annual temperatures, with warming occurring at twice the rate over the past 50 years than in the previous 50 years. Recent climate events such as extremely high temperatures and widespread drought have focused government and public attention on the impacts of climate change in Australia. Rainfall in southwestern Australia has decreased by 10–20% since the 1970s, while southeastern Australia has also experienced a moderate decline since the 1990s. Rainfall is expected to become heavier and more infrequent, as well as more common in summer rather than in winter. Water sources in the southeastern areas of Australia have depleted due to increasing population in urban areas coupled with persistent prolonged drought.
context_section_description: Globally, the World Meteorological Organization has claimed that extreme weather events are on the rise as a result of human interference in the climate system, and climate models indicate the potential for increases in extremes of temperature, precipitation, droughts, storms, and floods. The CSIRO predicts that a temperature rise of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius on the Australian continent could incur some of the following extreme weather occurrences, in addition to standard patterns:
  Wind speeds of tropical cyclones could intensify by 5 to 10%.
  Tropical cyclone rainfall could increase by 20–30%.
  In 100 years, strong tides would increase by 12–16% along eastern Victoria's coast.
  The forest fire danger indices in New South Wales and Western Australia would grow by 10% and the forest fire danger indices in south, central and north-east Australia would increase by more than 10%.
caption: Heatmap of Australia's land temperature anomalies since 1910
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