Heatwaves and fires sweeping across the northern hemisphere are a frightening portent of what’s in store for Australia.
. The situation in northern Australia is made far worse by humidity. The combination of extreme heat and humidity is potentially deadly because humidity reduces the body’s ability to cool itself.Photograph: The Australia Institute
If we continue increasing emissions, Gen Xers living in western Sydney are likely to experience up to a tripling of extreme heat days from current levels before they shuffle off the mortal coil, and millennials almost a fourfold increase. And that’s if actual temperatures don’t continue outstripping the projections.Photograph: The Australia Institute
There is good news in these projections, however . The CSIRO projections model the increase in extreme temperature days under various emissions scenarios. The red shaded areas in the graphs show the results of continuing our current emissions trajectory. Make no mistake, if we keep expanding fossil fuel production, as we are doing in Australia, we will stay on this trajectory and, as mentioned above, actual temperatures are outstripping the worst-case projections.
But the green shaded areas show the projections if emissions are reduced in line with the Paris target of 1.5 degrees. In all cases the increase is far less and flattens out and eventually falls over coming decades. Cutting emissions works. We can choose a livable future for ourselves and our children.Unfortunately, Australia is doubling down on expanding gas and coal projects that each help to lock us into the worst-case scenario.
Although we have a target to reduce our domestic emissions by about 300m tonnes by 2030, Australia is the world’s largest coal and liquefied natural gas exporter, and Australian coal and gas is current adding about 1.5bn tonnes of emissions to atmosphere with
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