Worst Great Barrier Reef bleaching event to ‘become commonplace’

Last year during the 2016 Federal election I felt great despair about the Great Barrier Reef. It was clear that Politicians were offering token funding to the Great Barrier Reef already facing extinction. It is already a climate emergency.

The Great Barrier Reef is not going to survive our experiment with global warming. Even if we could magically keep average global temperatures to below two degrees Celsius, it will be very much diminished, such is the great inertias involved in the climate system which we have irrevocably changed.

Reflecting on Hurricane Katrina 10 years on

I wrote this in response to a facebook discussion on whether Hurricane Katrina can be attributed to climate change. It is an argument I put together with limited time and research, but still valuable to answer the question..

Climate change, fractional attribution of risk and the Russian Heat Wave

Climate scientists using statistical modeling have estimated an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible for the July 2010 Russian heatwave.

The paper by Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research - Increase of extreme events in a warming world - was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 25, 2011 notes:

"For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80% probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming."