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ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM
Dangerous Climate Change: Is it inevitable?
Friday, 9 May 2008

Water/drying and climate change
by Professor Neville Nicholls

Neville Nicholls spent 35 years at the Bureau of Meteorology developing systems to forecast climate variations and their impacts, and researching our changing climate. In 2006 he moved to Monash University where he is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment of Climate Change published last year. In 2005 Neville was awarded the Fitzroy Prize of the UK Royal Meteorological Society, for ‘distinguished work in applied meteorology’. He is vice-president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Much of southern Australia has been in drought for a decade or more. At the same time, the northwest has been receiving very good rains. Is this recent pattern of rainfall a permanent climate change, and is it due to anthropogenic influences on the climate system? The attribution of changes in precipitation to natural or anthropogenic causes is challenging because of the highly variable nature of rainfall, especially in Australia, and because climate models are less successful at simulating precipitation variations than they are at simulating temperature changes. Despite their limitations, climate models are being used, along with conceptual understanding of drought processes, in attempts to attribute these apparent changes in rainfall, and to project future changes. Recent relevant Australian attribution studies will be summarised, within a conceptual framework of the potential causes of droughts and extended wet periods. The likelihood of future, major dislocations of Australian precipitation will be discussed. The research that is still required to answer all these questions more comprehensively will be outlined. Finally, the question of whether foreseeable changes in drought and rainfall over Australia can be considered ‘dangerous climate change’ will be explored.