TRANSCRIPT
2023 was a year of extremes, drought, flooding and wildfires.
The temperature of marine ecosystems rose and the sea ice retreated.
According to a report by the European climate agency Copernicus, the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
That's dangerously close to the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within to avoid the most severe effects of warming.
CNN Meteorologist Clyde Myers says this is unprecedented:
"We have never been this warm, and I know that I've seen this number out there. We haven't been this warm for 125,000 years. We don't even know if that's even true. It could have been 250,000 years. It could have been 375,000 years in an inter-glacial period. Now, where there are very few glaciers across the globe, temperatures hot in the us, temperatures hot, and what we know even in the middle part of Africa, still very, very hot."
Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service Dr Samantha Burgess, the lead author of the report, says she expects these conditions will continue into 2024.
And she says last year was record breaking on several fronts:
“The other remarkable thing about 2023 was that it was the first time on record that every day within a year had exceeded one degrees above that pre-industrial average, and close to 50% of days were more than 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, with two days in November, which were for the first time more than two degrees warmer than that pre-industrial average.”
The effects of the heat are becoming obvious internationally.
Last year, SBS travelled to Italy and spoke to Luca Mercalli, one of the country's leading climatologists.
For 30 years, he’s been measuring the ice levels of glaciers in Italy's mountainous regions.
In 2022, four metres of ice thickness was lost in one summer.
In 2023, another two and a half metres were lost.
That’s six and a half metres of ice in just two years.
“The ice had completely disappeared, exposing rocks that perhaps hadn't seen the sun for 6,000 years. It was also exciting to put your foot for the first time on these rocks which had been under the ice for thousands of years. But this also gives us an indication of the severity and speed of global warming.”
Experts estimate 10 per cent of all the ice in the Alps has disappeared in those two years.
Australians have already been given a snapshot of what the country will look like four decades from now, with last year's release of the sixth Intergenerational Report.
The impact of climate change was a key feature and it made for grim reading.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the report was a reminder that there is no time to waste when it comes to action on climate change.
"We can't be complacent about the future. And where that complacency could be the most damaging is when it comes to climate change. You know we've tried complacency on climate change and it's meant that we've wasted a lot of time."
If the world warms by more than two degrees, the damage to Australia's labour productivity could be up to 423-billion-dollars.
Labour intensive industries could be forced to stop work in the heat of the day.
And Dr Burgess says the kind of extreme weather events that we've experienced in recent years will become commonplace.
“So we know there's a direct correlation between average global temperatures and the number and frequency and intensity of extreme events. So we saw that in 2023, we had heat waves around the world, marine heatwaves, droughts, flooding events, wildfires. And with a warmer climate, those extreme events become more frequent and they become more intense.”
She says the impact of rising temperatures on the world's oceans has potentially major consequences:
“They also impact the chemistry of the ocean and the biology of the ocean as well. So a warmer ocean leads to more evaporation, which leads to a moister atmosphere, a wetter atmosphere, which leads to stronger storm events. It changes the chemistry of the ocean. So we get oxygen minimum zones, we get less nutrients being able to be carried in the surface ocean, which leads to mortality so fish deaths, uh, which impact tourism, aquaculture. And it also changes the location and the dynamics of marine ecosystems.”
Dr Simon Bradshaw is the Research Director of the Climate Council of Australia.
He told SBS last year that there are very few countries as vulnerable to the climate crisis as Australia.
"We are seeing the damage play out with the heartbreaking damage to our Great Barrier Reef and communities especially in remote Australia facing deadly heat waves. So there is a whole lot at stake for us. And we're also in a position to do a tremendous amount of good because whereas in the past we've been a major fossil fuel producer still are a major fossil fuel producer. We are also sitting on some of the world's best renewable energy potential. And we can be driving fossil fuels out of our own energy system. And we can also be exporting clean energy and clean products to the rest of the world and thereby playing a really positive role in the world's response to the climate crisis."
