UN Officials Speak Out On Climate Change As Australian Drought Deepens

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/09/3381361/as-australian-drought-deepens-un-officials-speak-out/

By Joanna M. Foster on March 9, 2014

Speaking ahead of next month’s IPCC publication on the effects of climate change on the world’s food supplies, human health, cities and rural areas, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN’s climate science panel told the Guardian that the extreme weather seen around the globe this winter is only going to get worse.

“Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the last. Extreme events are on the increase. Even if what we have just had [this winter] was not caused by anthropogenic climate change, events of this nature are increasing both in intensity and frequency,” said Rajendra Pachauri,”Two types of extreme events are going to occur more frequently – extreme precipitation and heatwaves. It is important for societies to deal with climate change if we want to avoid the impacts.”

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“If you take them individually you can say maybe it’s a fluke. The problem is it’s not a fluke and you can’t take them individually,” she said. “What it’s doing is giving us a pattern of abnormality that’s becoming the norm. These very strange extreme weather events are going to continue in their frequency and their severity … It’s not that climate change is going to be here in the future, we are experiencing climate change.”