Australia’s Climate Change Issue Under Attack—Perfectly Inaccurate or Perfect Timing

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It's been less than a week since the controversial headlines of Australia's lackluster impression on the United Nations' Climate Change Summit held in New York City, and already research is pouring in with evidence that is leaving many Australians stunned. Most of all, shock besets the Australian government, whose Prime Minister Tony Abbott decided to forego the formal UN proceedings of last week sending Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop in his stead, causing quite an uproar about the island nation's stances on the issues.

This past Monday morning, Sept. 29, two dozen research articles published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society pointed towards climate change attributed to greenhouse gas emissions for not only Australia's but the worlds' blazing summers of 2013 and 2014. A culmination of research conducted by five independent international groups of meteorological researchers, the two dozen papers unanimously came to the conclusion that the heat waves seen in recent months could not have naturally occurred without the extenuating circumstances caused by the long-term climatic warming trends attributed to fossil fuel emissions.

Though all five research groups worked independently from one another, on several different projects that all came to nearly the same end results,  many are questioning whether the numbers were flubbed for convenience sake, or whether the publishing of all 24 papers was merely a timely coincidence given the events that transpired less than a week before.

"If we don't have evidence, I don't think that we should hint darkly all the time that human influence must be to blame somehow" Oxford researcher whose group conducted research on European rains, Myles R. Allen says.

Though the data and the weather reports are hard to ignore.

Analyzing extreme heat phenomena in 2013 across Australia, Europe, China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula, the researchers discovered a staggering number of events much like last January's scorching 111 degree Fahrenheit spike in Australia that led to the Australian Open tennis tournament being postponed due to extreme conditions. And that wasn't all.

In spite of the contentious and difficult variants involved, the research teams all utilized computer modeling to simulate climate changes that would occur in the absence of fossil fuel emissions. And after comparing them to actual measurements taken in recent months, all five research groups from varying universities worldwide came to the same consensus: the warming climate trends are primarily attributed to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.

Though individually each paper could potentially pose many flaws and signs of error related to the tenuous modeling systems involved, Martin P. Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the results in these scenarios were all strengthened by the unanimity of the findings of all papers. Written by veteran researchers worldwide, all with different hypotheses in mind, the end results were something that the Australian government and other nations will undoubtedly have to consider in future planning.  

Hoerling says "The evidence is these papers is very strong."