How is climate change affecting Australia?

Question

I am doing an essay on climate change and i need to know what companies are suffering the most.

And who is making a good profit form it.

Also just any info on climate change in Aussie?

Answer 1

People have  stopping using petrol and electricity also dumping their wide-screen tvs, heating & air con, very few still use 4w drives or hot water in the home.

Answer 2

Australia is being hit fairly hard by climate change; the worst effect is the lack of rainfall with ground water reservoirs disappearing, rivers drying up, farmland becoming unusable, bush becoming desert, water tables getting lower, subsidence and bush fires.

There is also an increase in the number and severity of storms.

Other, less drastic and less obvious are an increase in insect and disease ranges and further stress on species that are already at risk.

Here are some links re Australia and Climate Change (with a focus on economic and business ramifications):

http://www.wwf.org.au/publications/acg_s... http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/...

http://www.bca.com.au/Content.aspx?Conte...

http://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/cps/rde/x...

http://www.kpmg.com.au/Default.aspx?TabI...

http://www.environment.gov.au/

http://www.australia.gov.au/Climate_Chan...

http://www.climatechange.gov.au/science/...

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/

Edit to Ben O:

Hey! Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just passing on what the others say.. :)

Besides, you seem to have some facts wrong - you say: "None of those links claim that climate change has already had adverse effects"

Allow me to quote from some of those links:

"Australian temperatures have, on average, risen by about 1°C with an increase in the frequency of heatwaves"

"increased frequency of hot days"

"declining total rainfall in metropolitan and agricultural regions"

"Increasing severity of drought and bushfires"

"Rising sea levels"

"a 50% drop in water supply to the reservoirs supplying Perth"

"near-record low water levels in storages in much of south-eastern Australia"

"observed changes in vegetation, wetlands, terrestrial vertebrates, marine birds and coral reefs are consistent with regional warming trends"

If you click further you get even more info, for example, http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/c... shows that rainfall in the populated coastal regions has decreased and temperatures have increased - for a country experiencing drought and record fires, I would say this is "adverse"!

Do I really need to continue...?

As one of those links points out:

"Never has there been a greater need for inspiring leadership to protect and defend our future against the rising threat of climate change."

"We know that our world’s temperature is now rising unusually fast."

"The choice is before us: Do we sit and wait for climate change to get worse, or do we help prevent the worst-case scenarios of climate change from occurring?"

A wise man would take action before disaster hits.

I'd rather be the sort who boards up my windows and packs the family off to the relatives inland than the sort who sits on his porch waiting for the hurricane to hit...

Sure, they'll be a few times when I look embarrassed because the storm wasn't so big and then they'll be that one time when me and my family are alive and the guy on the porch?

They couldn't even find his pipe...

I'd rather be occasionally inconvenienced and embarrassed than dead.

P.S. I don't get my information from Al Gore - I've never seen his film or read any of his stuff. Nope, I got the "storms" thing from the guys paying for it - IAG (again, see links already given): "Increases in the frequency of intense cyclones"

Are you sure you looked at the links before jumping into denial mode?

Answer 3

Having worked in construction in Australia, the Greenstar system of acrediting buildings is taking off, the main user of Greenstar accreditation is government buildings.  The problem with this system is that it is developed by a comittee which is funded by donations from private companies.  The trouble is that the guidlines aren't aimed towards energy efficiency, but increasing the profits of companies that donate to Greenstar.  Some of the criteria that Greenstar use are only concerned with how much money was spent on a particular innitiave, not on the energy saving (if any).  

Greenstar used to publish their criteria, but they've taken them down off their website - perhaps they are too open to criticism.  

A lot of renewable energy project have so little return on investment that the government has to underwrite almost the entire cost of the project.  Typically a $10,000 solar power installation generates about $100 per year of electricity.  There is no way a project like that makes sense financially, so the government has to underwrite almost the entire cost.  When something is free (ie government paying for it) the installer doesn't care about how cost effective it is.  Instead of saying lets find more uses for solar in remote areas where it's too expensive to run mains cables, the government decides to only use solar power in the suburbs so people can see it and see they are doing something.  Who cares how much it costs, it's a 100% write off anyway.

Adam C - still writing like an activist.  

None of those links claim that climate change has already had adverse effects.  The IPCC has somewhat speculatively claimed that we have most likely had 0.2 degrees of warming - that's not enough to notice.  Australia has always had droughts fires and floods - it's that kind of country.

Did you get the 'more storms' claim from Al Gore?  He made that claim in his movie, but he had to retract it because the number and severity of storms is the same as it always was.  That claim was dreamed up and never questioned, it doesn't come from any scientific data.