Will Steffen: Penrith swelters while Florida freezes: climate disruption is to blame

Will Steffen writes that Penrith swelters while Florida freezes: climate disruption is to blame.

Terms like "global warming" and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is "climate disruption", which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.

"Climate disruption" was often used by Professor John Holdren, science adviser to former US president Barack Obama, to emphasise that a 1 or 2 degree increase in global average temperature does not simply translate into modest, uniform warming but rather triggers surprisingly sharp changes in extreme weather and disrupts longer-term weather and climate patterns.

The world's ecosystems and critical human systems, such as agriculture, are adapted to the relatively stable climatic conditions of the past 12,000 years. These include not only temperature, but also the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and the oceans that move heat and moisture around the planet and deliver the seasonal and geographical patterns of rainfall, heat and storms that we consider normal. These normal patterns are increasingly being disrupted by what is often termed "climate change".

Emphasis Mine

If people think migration is bad now, wait until whole populations start moving in reaction to permanent changes in climate. In history, people have always moved away from areas that became drier to those that became wetter. Rainfall dictates where people live. This should be obvious to Australians.

Syria is probably the best current example of how a state is failing because of climate disruption. The prolonged drought caused an internal migration which the government failed to address adequately. This caused a social crisis that escalated in a brutal civil war.

Australia should not be worried about a few hundred migrants in boats. Australians should be worried about 120 million Indonesians who face the choice between dying in the soon-to-be-too-hot islands, or moving south to cooler climes.

By the time it is obvious that action should be taken, it would be too late to restore normalcy quickly. The cost of reversing the emission grows daily. The future cost of doing nothing is high; the future cost of fixing the problem will be even higher.