An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released overnight states that global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of dangerous and costly weather disasters.
In the past, the IPCC, founded in 1988 by the UN, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming.
The latest report is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes which recently have cost on average about $77 billion a year in damage.
Government climate commissioner Will Steffen says it's one of the most important papers released in the past decade.
"It's showing us, for the first time, that we can see the fingerprints of the human-driven warming in some of the extreme events that we've seen," Professor Steffen told reporters via a phone hook-up from London where he is attending a sustainability conference.
"This is an early warning sign that if we don't get this underlying warming trend under control there's going to be a lot more heatwaves, droughts and intense rainfall events." Read the full report here.
Source: Julian Drape, The Sydney Morning Herald.
