Australia Weather News

Wildfires in winter. Extreme storms and flooding rains in summer.

The impact of climate change is being felt around the world as lengthening fire seasons and extreme weather events cause billions of dollars in damage.

Disaster experts say the deadly winter fires in California are another warning for Australians to reassess climate risks, where we live and how we deal with emergencies in the future.

In California, a number of people have been killed, more than 180,000 evacuated, and it's feared as many as 10,000 structures destroyed in just a few days.

Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, said Californian authorities had already considered up-ending their approach.

"They've floated the concept of forgetting about fire seasons at all, and just say 'We burn all year now'," he said.

"[Once] California's big fires were all before November, and definitely not after November because the winter rains would set in. They just haven't had any."

Mr Mullins said that experience was being mirrored in Australia.

"In New South Wales the legislation says the bushfire danger period is October 1st to March 31st, we regularly now get fires from August."

The Bureau of Meteorology's latest State of the Climate report found there had been an increase in extreme fire weather, and the length of the fire season, across the country since the 1950s.

It found that had led to larger and more frequent fires, particularly in the country's south.

And it's not only the season being stretched that is presenting a problem, but the more frequent extreme fire behaviour that comes with it.

"You get pyro convective storms, that means the smoke plume from the fire pushes up into the stratosphere and forms storm clouds," Mr Mullins said.

Pyro cumulus clouds formed during the mega blazes of Australia's Black Summer bushfires, which claimed at least 34 lives and destroyed more than 3,000 buildings.

"You can't fight fires that are burning under those conditions, you just have to seek shelter," he said.

So what should Australia do to better prepare in the wake of the Los Angeles inferno?

Boosting Australia's large air tanker fleet to fight fires

Mr Mullins said Australia needed to urgently increase its own "sovereign" firefighting aircraft capability.

There are more than 170 aircraft in the national fleet, but just six are large air tankers.

All but one of those, the NSW Rural Fire Service's 737, is leased from North America during their winter months.

"With overlapping fire seasons, they may not be available now," Mr Mullins said.

He suggested one solution would be taking advantage of the Defence Force's outgoing fleet of a dozen C-130 Hercules aircraft.

"Why don't we keep half a dozen and repurpose them as aerial tankers, so then we would have a sovereign capability here?"

The National Aerial Firefighting Centre is currently reviewing how the fleet works, taking into account the growing impact of overlapping fire seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Reducing emissions

Mr Mullins said the answer to addressing worsening disasters was not treating the symptoms, but the root cause.

"It's a bit like having a bath overflowing, bailing out the bath, and getting more buckets when you just have to turn off the tap.

"And the tap, in this respect, is the burning of fossil fuels."

He also said Australia needed a greater emphasis on helping communities prepare for disasters that affect them locally.

But some disaster experts say Australia should go much further and invest in new technologies to combat emergencies.

Roslyn Prinsley, head of the Australian National University's Disaster Solutions, said the country needed to embrace new ways of approaching disaster management.

"Climate change is outpacing our ability to adapt," Dr Prinsley said.

"Even if we were fortunate enough to be able to turn off that tap of greenhouse gas emissions today, the impacts will increase due to all of the emissions that we've already accumulated."

'Radical' approach to natural disasters

Dr Prinsley is working on several novel methods to reduce the risk of certain disasters.

One includes using satellites and artificial intelligence to send drones to extinguish fires as soon as they appear.

Another includes using aerosols to reduce the intensity of cyclones — which a US startup is working to bring to market.

"We know cyclones are going to increase their wind speeds [due to climate change], and worse still, they're going to travel southwards," she said.

"We're used to having cyclones in Cairns and Darwin, can you imagine what happens when they hit Brisbane, where no buildings are ready for cyclone damage?"

She is also researching how to make water catchment areas more "spongey" — through methods like revegetation — to cap the severity of major floods.

Dr Prinsley said more money needed to be invested in "transformational" solutions to these more frequent events.

The World Meteorological Organization found that the number of disasters had increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.

It attributed that increase to climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting.

"We're just really behind the eight ball in thinking about these types of issues," Dr Prinsley said.

She pointed to Deloitte Access Economics' prediction that — even if the country achieves net zero — the cumulative cost of natural disasters could reach $2.1 trillion across the next 40 years.

"When we think about how we think about future other risks, like wars, we're just not looking at extreme weather events in the same way."