DRY, damaging extreme El Niño weather events will be twice as common in a warming world.
Australia
is set to suffer at least twice as many extreme El Niño weather events
by 2050, even if international efforts to limiting the rise in global
mean temperature to 1.5° Celsius are successful.
That’s
the unhappy news from new CSIRO research, published today in Nature
Climate Change, which projected the the number of extreme El Niño events
would grow from four every 100 years to 10 events every 100 years.
The
2015 Paris climate agreement set a warming reduction target for 195
United Nations signatory countries (except the US, which withdrew this
year). It aimed to curb carbon emissions to a level where the rise in
mean global temperature are restricted to 1.5°C.
But
even if efforts to stabilise warming are successful, and the
temperature is stabilised at 1.5°C above the current average, extreme El
Niños will continue to grow in frequency, reaching 14 every 100 years
by 2150.
