Expert warns of link between warming climate and extreme weather

ABC News (Australia): A senior lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Newcastle says there is a link between a warming climate and extreme weather events. Dr Liam Phelan addressed a gathering in Newcastle yesterday as part of National Climate Action Day.

He says while recent bushfires across NSW and the typhoon in the Philippines are not solely caused by climate change, the occurrence of such events is more likely with warming conditions. Dr Phelan says all extreme weather events are affected by climate change in some way.

"The link between climate change and extreme weather events is intuitive enough, if you're playing cards and you're dealt a bad hand well that's just chance right, anybody can get a bad hand but if you're play cards and the deck is stacked against you than you've got a much greater chance of getting a bad hand," he said.

"And when that happens over and over and over again then you start to ask questions about why that's so."..

Smoke over Sydney during a 1994 fire, shot by Daduschu, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license