Australian Heat Waves Likely Caused by Greenhouse Gases—A Climate Change Story

While Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott received harsh criticism for sitting out last week's Climate Summit held by the United Nations in New York City, and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop withstood a barrage of slandering comments over Australia's less than ambitious goals for climate change before 2020, new research released this Monday Sept. 29 reveals that the island nation's recent scorching summers are likely a direct outcome related to greenhouse gas emissions.

Publishing two dozen papers this past Monday in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, five independent groups of researchers analyzed extreme weather phenomena seen across the world in 2013 and much of 2014. And low-and-behold all five research groups unanimously came to the conclusion that the heat waves seen in recent years could not have occurred without the long-term climatic warming caused by fossil fuel emissions.

"When we look at the heat across the whole of Australia and the whole 12 months of 2013, we can say that this was virtually impossible without climate change" co-author to the studies and leader of one of the research groups, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne says.

Though most Tennis enthusiasts would easily believe the researchers, after witnessing that the 2014 Australian Open tennis tournament was postponed late last January after temperatures soared upwards of 111 degrees Fahrenheit, the results were still quite staggering to the general public and the island nation's leaders as well.

Utilizing computer modeling to simulate climate changes that would occur in the absence of fossil fuel emissions, and comparing them to actual measurements taken in recent months, all five research teams from varying universities worldwide came to the same consensus after diligent analyses.

While the news comes less than a week after the UN Summit, where Australia came under harsh fire for its current stance on issues regarding climate change, the research is likely to come under harsh debate amongst local researchers and politicians alike as they face even warmer summers to come. Though Bishop last week reconfirmed that Australia, who is only responsible for a total of 1.5 percent of the entire world's greenhouse gas emissions, would be aiming for a 5 percent overall reduction in emissions by 2020, we can likely expect to see larger action be taken in the weeks to come in light of this new research.

As Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the Australian government considers inaction versus change in the nation's emissions policy, it is hard to think that United Nation's newest Messenger of Peace, Leonardo DiCaprio's recent words could not be resonating in their ears.

"The Chief of the US Navy's Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat" DiCaprio said. "You can either make history, or be vilified by it."