Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change

series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred re cently across Australia.

and extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems? natural resilience."

hingness, except excess heat, so no one really cares just yet.

The history of weather in Australia is just over 200 years old with the early settlements starting in 1788. How on earth can they say what is normal for AU with only 200 years of records and about 100 years of good

records? Wetter than usual in the north for the past 100 years? Relative

to what, the previous 100 years?

Your amazingly valiant 1st nations folks barely could survive and never were able to stay at the crop growing level, constantly being driven back to subsistence level survival whenever the climate went from bad to

worse. You have had 200 years of reasonably nice weather since the end of the LIA, what is happening now is perhaps more likely the norm than you hope...any research published on climate in Australia prior to 1500AD ?

All the Chicken Littles are coming out.

John

Is it normal that the fish population has fallen dramatically, same with sea birds. Our bees are almost nonexistent.

I've seen this happen over the last 40 years.

Is it normal for these changes to happen over a 40 year period? I'm no ecologist but I suspect it's not normal or a natural progression.

Perhaps you need to look a little wider.

The doomsday industry is trapped in a requirement to predict exponentially-scarier stuff, to keep their funding constant.

series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred recen tly across Australia.

nd extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems? natural res ilience."

ingness, except excess heat, so no one really cares just yet.

TBH it's hard to know what's true and what's made up, unless you are deep into the community.

I saw some report that in all science there are more exclamatory adjectives than ever before... a clamor to be noticed.

George H.

Animal populations are chaotic. Some of the early chaos theory work dealt with weather and animal populations.

One thing that's new is the vast increase in observers and sensors lately. It's easy to see anomalies and set records when you have 50x more sensors than 100 years ago.

You compare atmospheric content samples from deep ice cores that go back several million years and compare with what's happening in the geologic/fossil record in the place you're interested in, it records a lot of interesting stuff beyond just old bones, enough to give a pretty accurate quantitative and qualitative reconstruction of what the place in that time period would've looked and felt like could you visit it.

If the average atmospheric gas content is X ppm of this, Y of that, etc. in 1 million BC and the climate in the place you're interested in is like Z in 1 million BC then it stands to reason that if X and Y occur again it will look a lot like Z again.

That's an assumption of course but you always have to make some assumptions to do any kind of science. It doesn't necessarily have to play out that way. Maybe it's all run by magic, maybe God did it, who knows.

Basically the answer is yes, Nature herself kept a record.

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It's never been hard to set records. I think I wrote about this before. I n any given location there are 365 opportunities each year to set a record for high and low temperatures, rain fall in a variety of categories (per ho ur, day week, etc), wind speed, etc. There are only roughly 200 years of r ecords. So what are the odds that you *won't* set some sort of record in a year at any given location?

Weather records happen...

Rick C.

Geological and fossil records, tree rings, and lots of other kinds of records that aren't exactly 'historic' in nature.

No, the children's tale of the talking chicken doesn't have the same credibility as climate change in this context.

A single record temperature in isolation is meaningless; it's the number of occurrences of them that matter. Comparing the number of record occurrences this year, A, now when you have B sensors to measure them, to the amount C(t) in the past when you had B - D(t) sensors, to estimate to some confidence interval of whether the actual number increased in a situation where you hypothetically had B sensors for the entire time period to measure with, is not an apples to oranges comparison it's a statistical problem that's been solved for 100 years probably.

Nah. Too many people are wearing Zaphod Beeblebrox's sunglasses.

(40 years ago?! Aargh!)

series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred rece ntly across Australia.

and extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems? natural re silience."

hingness, except excess heat, so no one really cares just yet.

Australia has always had an erratic climate - which is Jahred Diamond's exp lanation of why agriculture never got going in Australia.

Australia is particularly sensitive to the el Nino/la Nina alternation in t he Pacific, but there are other things going on.

Goyder mapped it in 1865, but good rains that year prompted farmers to set up farms to the northe of that line. The farms were abandoned a few years l ater, when much less rain fell in subsequent years.

Precisely which of the ocean currents around Australia move aroubd to give multi-decadal changes in climate isn't yet known, but they do make life dif ficult for farmers.

series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred recen tly across Australia.

nd extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems? natural res ilience."

ingness, except excess heat, so no one really cares just yet.

Twaddle. Over-dramatic predictions are more likely to get into the popular press, but the popular press has got nothing to do with which grants get fu nded.

The popular press does mine the peer-reviewed literature for attention gett ing stories, and anthropogenic global warming does generate them, but the p opular press doesn't get to choose which grants get funded.

All the studies that say "nothing much is going to happen in this particula r area" don't get any attention from the popular press, nor from John Larki n's favourite denialist websites.

Well, essentially all the wildlife in Australia is trying to kill you anyway.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Science is in a mess generally, especially fields that rely on statistics. For a real eye-opener, have a squint at this:

Well researched and thoroughly documented. It would be horrifying if I hadn't been watching it happen by way of the papers I get sent to review.

As Rutherford famously said, "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

How much money do you think there is in telling people things they _don't_ want to hear?

Nobody ever lost a buck telling people things they do want to hear. If it's all about money that's probably the option I'd pick.

Almost made me spill my coffee. It's a sin to waste coffee.

a series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred rec ently across Australia.

and extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems? natural r esilience."

thingness, except excess heat, so no one really cares just yet.

I don't follow. I would love for AGW to be wrong. I'd love to see hard re search that proves we can continue to do all the same things we've been doi ng for 200 years with no impact. No one *wants* AGW, that's why so many ar e concerned about it. So the idea that we *want* to be told AGW is happeni ng is pure BS.

Rick C.

I'm guessing that even though this sounds catastrophic, the situation is still just about recoverable - if only we pay loads more tax right away? Thought so. ;->