Highlights
Australia has endured two of its deadliest summers on record, blamed in part on global warming.
Since 2006, Australia has suffered a string of disasters that have costs hundreds of lives, caused losses in the billions disrupted the crucial agriculture and mining sectors.
In March 2006, Cyclone Larry tore through the northern Queensland town of Innisfail, causing an estimated A$1.5 billion in damage to the area.
A combination of drought and a record-breaking heatwave February 2009 triggered the nation’s deadliest fires around the southern city of Melbourne that killed 173 people and A$1 billion in insurance losses. Severe storms in Perth and Melbourne last year also caused losses of about A$1 billion.
Floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria since December have killed 35 people and become the nation’s costliest natural disaster, swamping 30,000 homes and crippling Queensland’s coal industry.
Australians were already paying for weather extremes through food price inflation and higher insurance premiums.
“The insurance industry knows the damage bill from these events is already on the rise,” said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“So we can’t just continue to mop-up without thinking about how fossil fuel emissions are changing our climate,” he added.
The source article Cyclone may be tipping point in Australia climate policy debate was published February 2, 2011 by Reuters via Scientific American .
