#Extreme events

Salamo Fulivai reads the nightly news in Tonga but when Tropical Cylcone Gita arrived it was more than a story. Fortunately, forewarned is forearmed. Just months earlier Salamo had been part of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction training.

As work gathers pace for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next climate predictions, scientists sense a groundswell of change to try and meet the Paris Agreement.

Out of the ashes of the Tathra bushfire, and stories of heartbreaking loss and survival, a picture is emerging of how research is helping to save properties and improve bushfire outcomes.

Australians go through more than 6,000 petajoules of energy every year to keep everything from their phones to their factories running. It’s a nice number for pub trivia, but if you’re a policy maker, researcher, or investor in our nation’s future energy demands, you’ll need something better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation. CSIRO’s Energy Use Data Model could soon come in handy.

A lot has been learned about fire behaviour from the bushfires that have lashed the Australian continent in the past. But to really refine fire behaviour knowledge, researchers need to put their hypotheses to the test through carefully orchestrated large-scale field experiments.

The science of thunderstorm asthma is relatively unknown, what is least understood is the interaction between pollen and thunderstorms.

"It doesn’t matter how many fire hoses you have, you can’t be everywhere at once." So how do you plan ahead for all the decisions you might need to take in the midst of catastrophe? That includes when and where to take shelter.

Like it or not, climate change has introduced new levels of unpredictability into the business of producing and transporting goods to market.

The frequency of extreme El Niño events is projected to increase for a further century after global mean temperature is stabilised at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.