Blog about UN Climate Change Conference in Bali 3-14 December 2007 and other related issues

Saturday, December 8, 2007

New focus on climate change

The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology will unveil a new Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Canberra today.

The partnership brings together researchers from around the country to study all aspects of Australian climate and weather, including bushfires, tropical cyclones, severe weather events and climate change.

The Centre's foundation director Dr Chris Mitchell said the challenges facing Australia were massive and could only be addressed through collaboration.

"For example, one of the areas of research is to continue to monitor the state of the atmosphere," he said.

"And unless we have a good understanding of how those concentrations of greenhouse gases are changing and whether or not the policy interventions we make globally are making a difference in the atmosphere we don't have the feedback loop in place.

"We're obviously going to be looking at climate change, a whole number of issues, one of them is, we've been suffering from water shortages driven by a reduction in rainfall.

"How much of this is due to climate change, how much of it is just the normal run of climate variability? We need to do some science to really understand that."

source: ABC News

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