Climate change in the future
Observations of our past and current climate are essential for validation of the climate models we use to project future climate, and critical in our understanding of climate variability and drivers of climate change.
One of the key challenges of climate change science is determining which changes are due to naturally occurring climate variability and which ones are as a result of human activity.
To make this distinction, scientists undertake detection and attribution studies.
Detection demonstrates that the climate has changed in a statistically significant way, but doesn't offer any reasons for the change. Attribution establishes the most likely cause of the detected change.
Detection and attribution studies of Australian climate indicate that:
- Warming of climate is unequivocal.
- The widespread warming is very likely to be due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
- A drop in rainfall in south-west Western Australia is likely due to a combination of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, natural climate variability, and land use change.
- The increased summer rainfall in north-west Australia may be due to increased aerosol particles in the atmosphere resulting from human activity, especially in Asia.
- There is growing evidence that lower rainfall and reduced runoff in south-east of Australia is linked to global warmng and cannot be explained by natural variation alone.
The Australian Government is building a Clean Energy Future through a comprehensive plan to dramatically cut pollution, introduce a carbon price, invest billions of dollars in renewable energy, transform the energy sector away from high polluting sources such as brown coal, and store millions of tonnes of carbon in the land through better land management.