Climate change in Australia is raising average temperatures down under, and researchers have shown that humans are to blame.
Australia experienced its hottest year in history in 2013, accompanied by severe heat waves and droughts.
Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science carried out a series of studies examining the record-high temperatures. They found the changes were due to human influence and not the natural environment.
"We often talk about the fingerprint of human-caused climate change when we look at extreme weather patterns," said David Karoly of the University of Melbourne and ARCCSS.
When examining Australia's hottest year, however, we see instead the handprint of human influence, Karoly suggests.
In 2013, Australia experienced its warmest spring on record, as well as its hottest summer. Along the way, records were also set for the hottest day and month.
Researchers examined records revealing warming occurred all over the continent, increasing the risk of extreme heat-related conditions. They found global warming more than doubled the risk of heat waves and tripled the chance of heatwave events. Extreme high temperatures became five times more likely than normal, risk of drought climbed seven times, and excessively warm springs were 30 times more common.
Global warming made the chance of such a record-setting year 2000 times more likely than if there were no human influence on the environment, the study revealed.
Sophie Lewis, a researcher at the Australian National University, believes that in investigating anthropogenic climate change, humans are not merely the "prime suspect" but the culprit.
As temperatures around Australia continue to rise, animals native to tropical regions are beginning to move into once temperate areas of the country. Weather patterns that brought regular rains to agricultural areas of the nation have now started to move south, away from the fields Australians depend on for food.
"If we continue to put carbon into our atmosphere at the currently accelerating rate, years like 2013 will quickly be considered normal and the impacts of future extremes will be well beyond anything modern society has experienced," said Sarah Perkins, a researcher at the University of New South Wales.
Five papers detailing investigations into the role of anthropogenic warming were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).
