Australia faces hotter summers and milder winters, more bushfires, heat stress and crop damage as global warming makes itself felt over the next 30 years, according to CSIRO scientists and a leading reinsurer.

Speaking at the Australasian Institute of Chartered Loss Adjusters (AICLA) annual conference in Hobart last week, environmental scientists John Church and Kevin Hennessy said Australia will also experience drier conditions, more severe rainstorms, more droughts and greater sea surge events.

“We will have to learn to live with the impacts of global warming,” Dr Church told the conference. “We can’t halt greenhouse now, and climate change will persist for many centuries.”

Blaming emissions of various gases for the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Dr Hennessy said temperatures will rise by up to 2 degrees over the next 27 years, and the south of Australia will become drier. Snow cover will decline up to 66% over the same period, forcing savage ecological change on alpine forests. 

Using sophisticated computer modelling, the CSIRO has established global warming impacts in Australia as a fact rather than a theory. The present rate of global warming is “unprecedented in 10,000 years, and it’s not likely to have occurred for 20 million years”, Dr Church said.

Bruce Thomas, Swiss Re’s Head of Divisional Underwriting, said highly populated areas of Australia like the Sydney Basin and Brisbane could be badly affected by the impacts of global warming. He said present projections suggest severe hailstorms and/or floods in the Sydney area causing $10 billion damage are possible, “although this will be within the industry’s and the reinsurers’ capacity”.

Pointing to the continuing development of housing along the coastal fringes of Northern NSW and Queensland, he asked: “Should governments be allowing developers to build in cyclone-prone areas of the coast? I hope the day doesn’t come where we have to be selective about the areas we cover.”