Sydney given 'doomsday' climate change warning. 31/01/2007. ABC News Online

Sydney given 'doomsday' climate change warning.


The CSIRO has issued Sydney with a dire warning about the impact of climate change on its future.
A report commissioned by the New South Wales Government predicts large temperature rises and a decrease in rainfall of up to 40 per cent over the next 70 years.
The study forecasts the city's average temperature will rise by up to 1.6 degrees by 2030 and 4.8 degrees by 2070.
New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma has not held back in stressing the significance of the findings.
"[It is] alarming - it's a doomsday prediction but it's something that cannot be ignored," he said.
The report's author, Ben Preston, says it is probably too late to prevent temperature rises in the coming decades.
"Although there's a promise that large-scale reductions in future of greenhouse gas emissions on an international basis will forestall and avoid large scale warming by the end of the century, we've already committed ourselves to additional warming and downstream climate change consequences," he said.
Biodiversity
Jane Castle from the Total Environment Centre environmental lobby group agrees Sydney's temperature will rise over the next 25 years but believes change is possible beyond that.
"Rises above this level are up to us now and up to governments," she said.
"While there definitely will be temperature increases and impacts arising from that, it can be a lot worse."
In the meantime, she says it will be a struggle to protect forests and animal species in the Sydney basin.
"In terms of biodiversity, there may be things we can do but really that is quite limited, apart from sheltering as much as we can of the threatened species," she said.
"But climate change is a universal effect and it's going to be hitting the natural environment just as hard as the urban environment."
Heat deaths
The report warns climate change will also have a significant impact on the health of the city's human residents.
Professor Tony McMichael from the Australian National University's National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health says more deaths from heat stress can be expected.
"Heatwaves will become much more frequent, rather more intense, and they'll be impinging on an ageing population," he said.
"So we'd expect the number of deaths and hospitalisations to increase rather dramatically by the middle of this century.
"It's not an exact science, of course, because other things will change between now and then - housing design, people's behaviour and so on - but assuming relative constancy of those conditions, for an increase of two or three degrees centigrade, we'd expect the total number of deaths each summer in a city like Sydney to increase by a factor of three, four, five, depending on just how much the temperature is rising."
Professor McMichael says it is time to start preparing for such a trend by introducing measures including better early warning systems for heatwaves and improved monitoring of vulnerable people, such as the elderly.
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