Australian Dept. of Climate Change report: Faster Change & More Serious Risks by Will Steffen

Dorothy Cutting, Director, West Coast Climate Equity, sent the link to this 60-page pdf file, which is a report by the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, entitled:

Climate Change 2009:
Faster Change & More Serious Risks
by Will Steffen

This is what she had to say:

"This is a stunning report. How unnerving it is to see climate data from a different perspective; there are so many slides so new to me. A picture being well worth what it is, I’m stalled on the shocking image of projected temperature anomalies in France, the Ukraine and the Sahel. I’ve seen the numbers, of course, but this slide gives this data so much more impact."

Page 5, Figure 1c shows sea level rise.

Page 6, Figure 2a shows rising CO2 correlated with decreasing sea ice.

Lots of figures showing increasing temperatures and droughts.

Figure 23 shows the projected summer temperatures for various geographic locations, like Europe and the Ukraine -- not pleasant reading at all.

From page 32:

"Some of the most striking advances in climate change science over the past three to four years have been made by taking a systems perspective, in which interactions among components of the climate system and feedback processes that highlight potentially important second-order effects have been elucidated.
An example is research on the links between climate change and the Hadley Circulation, and the
implications of these links for storm tracks, regional precipitation patterns, and modes of natural variability such as the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (Frierson et al. 2007; Lu et al. 2008; Seidel et al. 2008). Much of this new work points in the same direction – that as the 21st century progresses, system-level effects will increasingly amplify rather than dampen the human
perturbation of the climate system."

Page 33, Figure 37 shows the Northern Hemisphere and geographic concentrations of permafrost -- yikes!

Anyway, my words cannot describe all of the very well-portrayed information in the many figures. The report is highly readable -- just takes a bit to download, but well worth it.

This report tells it all, very clearly.